“Chinese War Games” with Sam Roggeveen

G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a doozy for you of a dangerous idea. Let's say that you are a medium-sized country, medium-sized power. And a gigantic superpower that could wipe the floor with you begins to bully you, cajole you, coerce you, intimidate you. Your natural reaction is to push back and bully them a little bit so they bully you a little more.

and you bully them back. But you know that at the end of that long chain of escalation, they will win. What do you do? How do you stand up for yourself? at the same time as making it clear that you're not going to be pushed around. This is a scenario that could apply to Canada's current situation with regard to the United States as much as with regard to Australia's situation vis-a-vis China. Last Friday

A Virgin Australia pilot was flying the heavily trafficked route between Australia and New Zealand and noticed some flashes in the water underneath him. And he called it in. and began to divert away from what seemed to be live firing taking place in the seas between Australia and New Zealand. Several flights had to divert.

because of these mid-air warnings over what turned out to be massive Chinese warships, at least one of them was a massive Chinese warship accompanied by others, conducting live fire. training sessions directly underneath one of the busiest flight paths between Australia and New Zealand. This is the first time.

that the Chinese have ever sent naval assets this far south down the Australian coast. It's the first time they've conducted live fire exercises so close to Australia, inside our exclusive economic zone. And it has a lot of Australians scratching our heads. Why would you send warships 13,000 kilometres from your home base immediately off the coast of the largest city in Australia?

into a busy flight corridor that links the only two Western democracies in the region to shoot at things just off the coastline. Imagine if China sent warships just off the coast of Florida to conduct live training exercises that forced flights between Miami and New York City to divert. There would be hell to pay because America... can make hell to pay, and Australia can't. So what do you do?

In a world of Ukraine, of Putin, of Trump and threats against Canada, I wanted to sit down with somebody who studies this for a living, who understands geopolitical strategy and who can help us to understand what the 21st century might look like and how we should be behaving regarding the United States.

its allies, and the rise of China. Sam Roggeveen is just the man. He's an Australian foreign policy analyst. He's the director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program, and he previously worked in intelligence for the Australian government. His book... is called The Echidna Strategy. That's about how Australia should develop an independent security strategy. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. The one and only Sam Roggeveen.

I like all the material. I like the fleshy humanness of just listening to the conversation. Once you're taking all that out, you might as well just read a transcript. That's right. Exactly. Yes. And if you've ever read a transcript of a podcast. It's not good. It's gobbledygook. So your origin story, I'm just going to imagine you as being like a James Bond-esque super spy, might not be that glamorous in The Australian.

intelligence services, but you tell me. Definitely not. I hate to let you down, but no. So the word spy is typically attached to people who... are undercover and go overseas and extract information from foreign officials. I didn't do that. That is a profession and I dealt with some of those people, but I never did that. Can we call you a spook? Yeah, I guess so. So look, there are various categories of intelligence, right? There is spying, which in the trade is known as human intelligence.

There's also SIGINT, signals intelligence. That's where you listen in on people's phone calls and on their electronic transmissions. There's also IMINT, which is imagery intelligence, and that's satellite photos. And now, in more recent years, a separate category has been created and it's now...

hugely important, OSINT, open source intelligence, getting much bigger for obvious reasons, right? Because of the explosion of information that's taking over our whole world. Open source intelligence, meaning you sift through the deluge of information that's... On the web or? Right. That's not protected. That's not secret. Yeah. And so there are.

Groups of people whose job it is to sift through all that stuff. Those are people called all source analysts. And that's what I did. That was my job. I was an all source analyst. So I sat at a job. I read this fire hose of material that came my way.

and I tried to make sense of it for the government. So I write reports for ministers. And what's the top of the funnel at the firehose? How does that get collected? What is the difference between my order on Uber Eats as a piece of public information, assuming that it is, I don't know if it is. and something that could be relevant.

Well, the main thing that all source analysts look at is classified sources. So the open source stuff tends to come last. Traditionally, that's something that needs to change. How is that different from signals intelligence then? it's classified. How is what different? How is the analysis of classified information different from signals intelligence? Well, so signals intelligence alone is known as raw intelligence. So you might get a transcript of a telephone call that you listen to.

So the job of the all-source analyst is to read that transcript and say, well, what does this mean? What was that minister who we were listening in to or that army general who we were listening in to? talking to some counterpart, what do they mean when they say X, Y, and Z? How do I interpret this for the government? And by the way, what are all these other sources telling me? Do they accord with what I just read about this phone transcript or are they contradictory? What does it all mean?

And most of those sources derive from our own assets or are they shared from other allies? So it's shared among the Five Eyes. So that's a huge asset that Australia has as part of the Five Eyes intelligence community along with the United States. Canada, the UK, and New Zealand. Obviously, the United States is the biggest contributor of raw intelligence to that, but all five countries participate, and all of them in their various patches.

contribute intelligence to the feed and share. And is that feed a thing that actually exists in cyberspace in the sense that everything goes into it and you can just take out what you want or do you need to submit a request for a specific thing from one of the five eyes? members in order to get your eyes on it? Well, my experience is pretty old, but I don't think it's changed that much. There's basically an internet, a web that's shared amongst them. Not everything gets shared.

Some stuff is sensitive that only gets shared by two, you know, one or two of the partners. Sometimes it's kept within one country, uh, Australian eyes only for instance. Yeah. And when you're poring over something that, you know, suppose that there's a transcript of a phone conversation that a minister for a foreign government had, you know, with someone else, would it be fair to say that senior cabinet level ministers in most of the major countries are being spied on constantly?

by all of us? I don't think it's fair to say that they were all being spied on, but they're certainly all assuming that they're being spied on. I mean, it's a hard thing to do. It's a constant battle between offense and defense. It's also worth saying that actually the...

You know, the value of all this intelligence is pretty limited. So the phone call, the salacious kind of stuff that you might imagine, that can be useful in the short term. Actually, Bob Carr, former Australian foreign minister, had a great term for this. it espionage erotica. And it has its uses. You've got the mistress talking to the Japanese cabinet minister or something, right? Yeah. Look, it has its uses. So, for instance, if I...

If I was still an analyst and I had to produce a briefing for a minister who's going off to negotiate with a foreign counterpart, then a week later, let's say, then that intelligence material about, say, phone calls that they've been making a week earlier, extremely useful, could turn the negotiation in Australia's favour. But the... Big picture issues, the kind that I'm guessing we'll get into later about China is rising. America is in relative decline. What's happening to NATO?

My long experience in the intelligence community tells me that secret intelligence... has only a marginal difference to the kind of conclusions that you draw. So for those people listening who spend their time just looking at, you know, the unclassified world, the open source world.

Don't assume that you're at a huge disadvantage. And is that largely because the kinds of, I mean, there are a few possible explanations for that that occur to me. One would be that in general, countries sort of make clear what their...

strategy is anyway. So there isn't a huge amount of behind the scenes conniving that you could glean from secret conversations that you can't glean from their outward actions and their policy pronouncements and their behavior anyway. The other would be that even if there is a big difference between what they

say they want to do and what they actually want to do, the kinds of conversations that they would be having would be had in person and in hyper-secure manners that we can't get access to. Yeah, I think that's all correct. I'd add one other factor, which is that the countries involved probably don't know themselves. So there's a classic... Somewhat more terrifying than either of the two options. Well, maybe, but we're talking about trying to understand the world.

In five years' time or ten years' time, there's an American political scientist named Philip Tetlock who wrote a really... groundbreaking book on this several years ago called Expert Political Judgment. And he followed political experts of various kinds around for literally decades at a time. And he would come back to them year after year and ask them to make predictions about field of expertise.

And to sort of crudely abridge that mammoth piece of research, what he found was that political experts are no better at making predictions about their area of expertise than a chimpanzee throwing a dart at a book. I mean, prediction is incredibly difficult when you're talking about five and 10-year trends. Now, you can apply certain analytical techniques to improve your chances of success, and intelligence agencies increasingly do that.

Beyond five years, the rates of return on those kind of techniques and the rates of success. it becomes pretty low. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, it says something about our psychology and our need for certainty and for predictability and for security. that this is true across so many different spheres that, you know, meteorology beyond about five days is a coin toss. Managed funds and financial experts rarely outperform the market. You know, you can look at...

Field after field after field where we're just not a lot better than random. Yeah. Meteorology is an interesting example because in the intelligence studies field, and this is a whole field of research, right, in the intelligence world. There's a classic distinction made between puzzles and mysteries.

So meteorology, I would class as a puzzle, but let me put it in another term that's sort of more in my field of geopolitics. So if you ask the question, how many nuclear weapons does North Korea have? That's a puzzle. in which is to say that we don't know the answer but it has an answer yeah right and we could find out if we try hard enough

But if you ask the question, what does North Korea intend to do with its nuclear weapons? That's not a puzzle. That's a mystery. I see. The answer's not out there. Yeah. So intelligence agencies tend to focus on puzzles. Right. The big issues, the- the things that ultimately matter most to us as a nation and as a world.

Those are mysteries. At the risk of going on a total tangent, do you have feelings about whether or not artificial intelligence is going to get any good at solving mysteries? And I only say that because you've worked with... sophisticated computers that are trying to crunch a lot of information and sort what information is relevant from what information isn't. And I frequently think about...

computational power, just grunt force power increasing at the exponential rate that it is, right? Such that you're getting artifacts such as ChatGPT that can communicate with us in ways that seem indistinguishable from sentience, sort of, right? Even just using... using grunt power such that questions like the one that you posed as a puzzle, how many nuclear warheads does North Korea have?

A question like how many raindrops were falling from the sky on the day of JFK's assassination is a much harder puzzle, but it's still a puzzle. It actually has a genuine answer. Will computational grunt power only ever get us to that class of question, or is it also going to open up fields of understanding that we can't yet predict on the mysteries of... geopolitics well uh

I'll confess at the start that I'm only beginning the process of trying to understand what the implications of artificial intelligence for our world. My preliminary answer would be to say that it... it won't help. It ultimately, well, I would say that it can help reduce the rate of failure.

But I'm reluctant to go much further than that. Given that the rate of failure is currently chimpanzees throwing things at a dartboard, I'll take what I can get. Okay, let's talk about China then, unless you want to finish that thought. No, no, please. Let's get onto terra firma here. So they've just come further south towards Australia, the Chinese Navy, than ever before. They're conducting live fire exercises and patrolling.

essentially within Australia's exclusive economic zone and disrupting our flight paths between Australia and New Zealand. The government's answer to this is to say, don't worry about it. No Australian lives were ever under threat. They weren't shooting at anybody. I think the average punter's sense is that that's the wrong question. The actual, the correct question is like, what the fuck are you doing, China? Yeah. Well, let's first ground this in...

a little bit of context about what exactly the Chinese have done in these live fire exercises. It's tempting to imagine the worst. After all, the Chinese have sent... a destroyer, a frigate, and a replenishment ship. And the destroyer is known as the Type 55 class, which is the most advanced. of its kind in their Navy and one of the most advanced ships to operate in any Navy. So this is their best kit that they're sending.

to us, and combined with the frigate that they've sent, it has somewhere in the order of 200 missiles of various kinds on board, right? it's not using any of those missiles in these drills, in these live fire exercises. So when you hear the word live fire, you're tempted to imagine the worst, but really what they're doing is floating some targets on... at sea, just off where the ships are, and they're aiming their guns at it.

and they're deflating the target with their guns. That's essentially what they're doing. So the guns on board these ships are the lowest, the smallest class of weapons they have on board, the least powerful thing. Yes, right. So this is powerful enough that a pilot at 34...

thousand feet can see flares on the surface of the ocean. And would absolutely ruin their day and the passengers on board if it were to hit them. So, yes. Not to mention the fact that all of those missiles can easily take out Sydney and Melbourne from where that...

ship is located, were they to choose to press that button? No. No, that's not the case. Those missiles can't reach Sydney from Tasman Sea? So, it's not clear at the moment even if those ships are carrying... weapons, missiles that can attack land targets at all. Peter Harchub wrote that those missiles on that ship can reach Sydney and Melbourne. Well, he knows more than I do. I'm not sure he does know for sure. Well, we don't know that they were loaded, but the point is it's a big...

to be a ship that has big guns on it. And those missiles can surely have a range of 1,000 to 2,000 kilometers. Well, again, it depends on what they have on board. So there are certainly plans to arm those ships with missiles that can attack land targets. Right. It's not clear at the moment whether...

that particular class of missile has entered service yet. I see. That's literally a different piece of equipment, isn't it, to shoot at a plane than it is to shoot at a... Oh, yeah, absolutely. Shooting at a plane and shooting at a land target is a very, very different thing. And it's not clear that the... Certainly not this...

The frigate is purely armed with air defense weapons. The destroyer may be armed with land attack weapons, but mostly it would carry weapons to shoot down aircraft and to sink ships. Okay. Got it. I mean, I think Harcher's point was simply... It's certainly a curious provocation to sail 13,000 kilometres away from your home base in order to sit directly off the coast using a piece of equipment that may or may not be.

fitted precisely for the purpose of, but nonetheless clearly has the capacity to spontaneously take out one of your cities or do significant damage to it and not to announce that to the Australian government.

And apparently not to get a message to the Australian Defence Force that you're about to do that. I mean, isn't it just a way of saying, we can do this, and if we were doing something different than an innocent exercise, then we would be doing that as well, and there'd be nothing you could do about it? Keep in mind that last part that you said about the Chinese not informing Australia about it, that's contested. The Chinese contest that. So we should just put a caveat on that.

It's worth going back to the first part of your question about destroying Melbourne or Sydney. Let's assume for the moment that Peter Harcher is right, and they were armed with missiles that could attack land targets. I just want to clarify, I'm not claiming that Peter Harcher claimed that they were armed with missiles that could do that. He was saying that this is obviously a demonstration because that vessel is one that...

whose missiles would be capable of a range of 1,000 to 2,000 kilometres. Understood. So let's assume they were land attack weapons. Those weapons could not destroy... Melbourne or Sydney. No. They would not be nuclear armed. No, no, no. Yes, fair enough. And those were my words. I wouldn't want to be in a skyscraper in Sydney while I was under.

attack from a Chinese destroyer. But yes, you're right. It doesn't mean curtains to the 5 million people. No, indeed. So anyway, to get back to the main question, which is what on earth were they doing? What were they trying to do? So there is a temptation here and... It's reasonable and I don't want to resist it altogether, but a temptation to constantly read subtext and to forget the text.

But as Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. So we should look at the text first. And the text here is that they are training. They are practicing with new weapons that they have, but they're not terribly experienced at operating at long range. So from the Southern Fleet headquarters in China to off the coast of Sydney is well over 7,000 kilometres.

That's a long way for any navy to operate. The Americans can do it. There are a handful of other advanced navies that can do it. China has shown more capability to do this. They actually have a base in Djibouti on the west coast of... excuse me, on the east coast of Africa. And they frequently deploy on anti-piracy patrols off the east coast of Africa. So they have some experience with this, but certainly not with this new class of ship. And they just need to do it more because they've got...

They've got this equipment now. They need to know how to do this. So I think first and foremost, this is training. This is an activity that navies do to train their crews and to make themselves capable of using the equipment that they have got.

So that's not to discount the subtext because, I mean, obviously it's 7,000 kilometers, but they could have gone in a different direction, right? Well, exactly. I mean, that just doesn't pass the bullshit test to me to read the test. Like a cigar, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

is being violently masturbated with, then it is not just a cigar, right? And in this case, they are violently masturbating right in front of Australia and New Zealand. I mean, you know, get a compass or a protractor and draw the 13,000 kilometre radius from where...

wherever those boats are stationed, whatever Chinese port that is, there's a lot... of places they could be doing that exercise that are not directly underneath one of the most trafficked flight routes between the only two Western liberal democracies in the Asia Pacific. First of all, I immediately regret invoking Freud. Welcome to Uncomfortable Conversations, Sam. But you're absolutely right about the broader points. So they are making a statement.

I think that one temptation that we ought to avoid a little bit is to view this purely through Australian eyes. In my experience, China is much more centred on America than it is on Australia. So this may not be certainly not solely a message to Australia and may not even be a message to Australia at all. It's a message to America. And also a message to the region more broadly that the Pacific is not an American lake anymore. China aims to be a regional leader.

aims to eventually succeed the United States as the undisputed leader in the Asia-Pacific. You can't do that without having a large navy. And here is a signal that we are now challenging. America as far away as the east coast of New South Wales. Imagine if instead of coming here, if their focus is really America, if they'd gone to the Gulf of Mexico.

and perched in international waters somewhere between Puerto Rico and the United States, if such a thing exists. I don't know how close those things are, but between Venezuela and the United States, for example. What do you think... The Trump administration would have done. I think it would have caused a huge scandal and it...

There would have been major political and diplomatic repercussions for China. There would have been shows of force by the United States in East Asia. So it's a great point. They prefer to do this in a secondary. slightly standoffish way than a direct way. Would that kind of response from the United States be wise? Well, it would certainly... It seems to me impossible for the United States to...

do anything less that would be consistent with its own self-image, if you like. So the United States doesn't like being challenged so directly and they would feel the need to... to respond in that way. Why shouldn't we not like being challenged so directly? Because we're smaller.

And we don't have the capabilities to respond in the way that the Americans would. Well, we don't have the capabilities to go to war with China the way that the Americans would, but we presumably have the capabilities to respond the way the Americans would if what we're talking about is a symbolic... show of force by sending one of our naval vessels up near China and doing a similar thing. Yeah. So strategists talk a lot about escalation. And when a smaller power thinks about...

the kind of response that you're talking about, it needs to think beyond the immediate step of responding and think two or three steps ahead. Okay. So if we do that, if we respond in kind and send our ships north and maybe even conduct, you know, live fire exercises. Between Taiwan and the mainland. Yeah, to disrupt air traffic coming into China. Well, then what does China do next?

The Chinese in that kind of scenario have what strategists call escalation dominance. They can always step up and we can't. At a certain point, we have to stop. Yes, I see. Yeah. So then what is the correct posture? The correct posture, the argument that I've been making is what I call foreign policy stoicism. So this is the idea really that for a middle power up against a great power.

Escalating a dispute rarely pays off, but you can win, or maybe a better way to say it, you can not lose if you... never escalate, but never give in. So actually the Chinese have been launched, three years ago, launched a series of economic coercive measures against Australia. Just explain what those were. So there were various tariffs placed on Australian exports. Everything from coal, wine, barley was another one. And these were huge tariffs.

10 or 20%. I mean, they were sometimes 40% or something, weren't they? Basically enough to force Australia out of those markets and force the companies involved to seek new markets overseas. And at the time, and it still remains the case, China was the number one buyer of Australia. produce. The main thing I bought was iron ore, I think. And there was like a massive tariff put on and 40% of Australian exports went to China. So we were basically all in and it had...

major repercussions on the Australian economy? Well, depends on your definition of major. On export sectors, let's say. On those specific export sectors, certainly. Iron ore trade continued and other exports continued as well. But the interesting thing about that whole episode is that, first of all, the Australian economy...

by all accounts, by the economists that I work with who've studied this, responded brilliantly, which is to say our exporters found new markets immediately or very soon. So there was some pain. There were some losses in those specific... But in terms of Australia's economy broadly, it was a rounding error. It never really hurt us too much. So that was a testament to our economic resilience and our economic openness that allowed Australia to find new markets for its export goods.

On the political level, I'd say the most significant fact about that whole episode was that no Australian government, whether that was the previous Morrison government, which was right of centre, and then the left of centre Labour government. Neither of them ever proposed retaliating against China. There was one politician, there was one exception, that was Matt Canavan at the time, a nationals politician, who said, we need to put tariffs on iron ore.

to punish China for doing this to us. He's a bit of a right-wing populist figure in Australia. Indeed. No one else took this seriously. Instead, basically the approach that we took was to wait it out, a stoical approach. Okay, we're going to have to absorb some pain here.

We won't retaliate, but at the same time, we will not give in. So Australia never made any serious concessions in this period. And eventually, the Chinese, I think, concluded that this isn't working. And now that a new government's been elected, which happened a couple of years ago.

we can try a new approach. So relationships have warmed since then. And just to give people some background, there is suspicion, and you can correct me on what the truth is here, because you probably know it better than I do, that the tariffs were introduced in the first place.

by China for political, not economic reasons. And this may have had to do with COVID and a certain amount of bombast that the Australian government was swaggering around with in the early days of COVID, saying that we need to launch a full-scale investigation.

of the origins of the virus. There was a bit of sort of populist posturing by the then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, which went down very poorly in China. And there's some suspicion that the retaliation, that the tariffs were a retaliation for that. New government comes in, the tariffs go away. What were the concessions and so forth that China wanted to extract from Australia that Australia did not yield to?

Well, there was a famous document handed over to Australian journalists by the Chinese embassy called the 14 Points, which included some pretty draconian... requests, some frame them as demands of Australia, which even included, you know, getting the government to change the editorial lines of certain think tanks who were critical of China and all sorts of other measures, including some economic issues around... foreign investment by Chinese companies. Australia had also

banned Huawei from bidding on our 5G project, which had gone down very badly. So there were demands of that kind. Australia didn't give in on any of those substantive points. My frustration in recent times has been... Why haven't we used that methodology, that thinking in our defence policy? Adopt a stoical posture in our defence policy as well. Instead, what we've done is...

Ever since AUKUS was announced in 2021, and we can remind listeners about what AUKUS is, it's a very big deal in Australia. we have adopted an approach where we essentially take the fight to China. We're buying eight nuclear-powered submarines that are designed to sail off the Chinese coast and even put missiles onto the Chinese landmass.

So it's essentially an idea that Australia needs to have the ability to punish China rather than simply absorbing pain in the way we did during the economic coercion campaign. waiting China out through a policy of resilience and stoicism. Isn't implicit in that strategy an assumption that China will never be a belligerent? I don't think so. I think we can expect China to be assertive and even aggressive. More than assertive or aggressive.

Yeah, it strikes me that you certainly don't want to antagonize a great power if you worry that your antagonism towards them is going to trigger them. into starting a real fight with you. If, on the other hand, you live in a universe in which they're going to start a real fight with you either way... then you're antagonizing them as a price worth paying in order to make sure that you're as well defended as you can be. Well, first of all, it's very possible to defend yourself.

very well without having the ability to strike, to fire missiles on the Chinese mainland. Well, if you end up in a war with them, you probably want to be able to fire on their mainland. Actually, I don't think so. Then why are we getting them? Because we want the ability to hit the Chinese mainland. What use is that if it's no use in a war?

Look, it's of some use in a war. I just don't think it's a very essential capability, given that we're talking here about opportunity cost. The more you spend on that thing, the less you spend on something else. I see. I would much rather see Australia spend its defense dollar. on essentially making it impossible for any foreign power, but we're talking about China here, to operate safely in the air and maritime approaches near Australia. Right, I see. And that's why...

And that's why this latest episode with the Chinese warships is so important. The Prime Minister is absolutely right when he says the Chinese have done nothing illegal. We can't stop them doing what they're doing. We can't stop them operating in international waters and even doing gunnery practice. But what we can do is set the terms on which they come here. And when we have a defence force that is strong enough to, in the worst possible case, take care of any such flotilla.

if we need to, then the Chinese know that these kind of deployments are happening on our terms. And in effect, that happens in the opposite direction as well. Australia routinely sends ships into the South China Sea. We sometimes sail naval ships through the Taiwan Strait. But we do that knowing very, very clearly that if...

If war started an hour later, those ships would be sent to the bottom. Yes, right. And so what you're talking about, do we have, by the way, the capacity to take out a Chinese ship in the Tasman? I mean, suppose if we just wanted to... spontaneously go crazy and start a war? Yeah, I think we do. Yes, we need to improve those capabilities. And one thing where we're doing

at the moment is introducing a whole new class of stealthy anti-ship missiles, which would be very useful for that kind of contingency. Stationed on what? Mobile or on land? Yeah, no, fired from aircraft primarily, but also surface ships and submarines. Okay. And what is our current, because you mentioned, we should probably just pause on AUKUS for a second and maybe a way to get into AUKUS is just to give...

me and everyone, an understanding of what is the current defence capacity of Australia. I mean, you call us initially a small country, then you call us a medium-sized country. By some metrics, we're one of the most significant military powers in the Pacific. Then it depends who you...

where the Pacific begins and ends and who is in that club and who is out of that club. Where does Australia stand on the, you know, I suppose the rankings of the region? Yeah, well, typically Australia is thought of as a middle power. Um, so we are, gosh, you caught me on the hop. I don't know where we stand in the OECD, but we're one of the top 20, uh, I think 14th largest economy in the OECD. Yes. Uh, so, uh, Australia is a significant.

international economy, significant military player. Yeah, I think we're nearly one of the top 10 economies in the world. Could be. Because I remember we were- It was conceivable that someday we would be in the G7, depending on how quickly we could grow. But nonetheless, yes. But just in terms of our military equipment.

Is there a comparable country that you can think of? Presumably, we can get into a war with New Zealand, no problem, and they're toast. That may also apply to Indonesia. It may apply to, I don't know. Malaysia, it definitely doesn't apply to China. Does it apply to Japan? I don't know. Perhaps in terms of military weight, Canada is a good comparison.

One of the middle-sized European countries would be another one. We spend roughly the same as they do in terms of defense GDP. In our region, other than Singapore, we are far and away the most capable and sophisticated military in the Pacific. In Southeast Asia. Got it. Okay. Right. Only Singapore is comparable. That's interesting. Yeah. I didn't realize that Singapore invested so heavily.

Singapore invests very, very heavily. The problem is they have no strategic depth, which is to say it's a tiny place. And so it's very, very, very difficult to defend, you know, barely long enough for the airfields to... Yeah. for your expensive aircraft to take off from. So let's just go to AUKUS then. So the Australia, United Kingdom, United States, hence AUKUS, AUKUS, was a deal that was signed by the last... to the right government of Australia. To do what exactly? September 2021.

It was then Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister. Boris Johnson was the British Prime Minister and Joe Biden was the president. They all stood in front of cameras in their own capitals and said that... There was now a trilateral agreement that would, A, supply Australia with eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, stress nuclear power, not nuclear armed. We currently don't have nuclear-powered submarines? No.

We have diesel-powered or conventionally powered submarines. And there was a deal on the table for us to buy a whole new fleet of diesel-powered French submarines. Correct. We were going to buy 12 submarines and we cancelled. And we betrayed the French and cancelled that at the last minute. We cancelled it. We cancelled the program. Contracts have cancellation clauses. This one was particularly generous to the French. So they were very loud after that and made a lot of complaints.

River. They did very well out of that. That's true. I think the criticism there was that there was a sense that the Australian government could have been somewhat more delicate in informing them about what was happening instead of them finding out on the grapevine. Yeah, fine. A minor scene if you ask me. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the French in that regard. So AUKUS is an agreement.

as I said, firstly, to supply Australia with eight nuclear-powered submarines. And that really is the bulk of AUKUS. But there's a second part of AUKUS called Pillar 2, which is all about... three-way technology sharing on everything from AI, drone warfare. Gosh, there are so many other categories that I'm forgetting, but all sorts of hypersonics, other kinds of exotic military technologies. And that pillar too is essentially... The first phase of it, at least, is an attempt to...

put together what you might call a free trade agreement between those three countries. Typically, free trade agreements exclude military stuff because it's so sensitive. This is a free trade agreement that is all about military kit, advanced military kit. Does it include non-military? No, it's purely military. Yep.

Yeah, so there's talk of completely breaking down the bureaucratic barriers between those three countries so they can cooperate freely. And particularly in America, those barriers are very high. Yes, it's extremely hard to...

sell any defence-related equipment outside of the United States for obvious reasons, because they're paranoid about it falling into the hands of an adversary. So this would take away all of that red tape and basically just trust that Australia is good on its word and isn't going to share it with the Chinese or something. Yes, that's right.

Exactly. And was there a phase three? No, that's it. Just those two phases. Well, actually, it's worth mentioning a third. It's not usually referred to as a separate. part of the project or a separate phase, but it's worth mentioning, it's actually really important, which is that Australia, as part of AUKUS, has agreed to build...

what in the acronym crazy world of defense is called SURF-West, Submarine Rotational Force West. We are building facilities at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, just near Perth. so that up to four American nuclear-powered submarines can be stationed there. Not permanently, but what they call rotated. So it's essentially a base. Right. It's an American naval base.

Just near Perth, off the west coast of Australia. Got it. Sorry, did you want to finish that thought? Well, separately, it's somewhat outside AUKUS. It's never branded as an AUKUS initiative, but there's also a deal for Australia to modernise. an air base in the Northern Territory, just south of Darwin, which will house American bombers, strategic bombers.

The important thing about those two things, the submarines and the American bombers, is that not since World War II has Australia hosted operational American forces. We've always hosted Americans for training and for exercising. But these two deals mean that if there's a war, the US will be using Australian bases to conduct missions. So if there's a war against China...

Planes, American bombers will be taking off from Northern Australia. American submarines will be operating from out of Western Australia and they'll go back there to rearm and refuel, et cetera, et cetera. In turn, that means there'll be targets. Got it. So the...

Selling point, let's talk about the upsides and downsides because this then gets us into the whole conversation about the United States and China and the future of global peace and security. So the upsides for Australia are pretty obvious for AUKUS. We can talk about the downsides in a second. We get a bunch of shiny...

submarines that are more sophisticated than we would have been able to design ourselves or get from elsewhere. And we weave ourselves more closely into an inescapable alliance with the United States that means that any future... US administrations who may be isolationist and who may not come to the defense of Australia if we get into our own trouble that does not otherwise involve the United States, will be inescapably pulled into defending Australia because all of a sudden it would...

constitute an attack on their own assets, not just those of an ally. The benefit for the United States is they get these bases, they don't have to rely on Guam. to station their things out, right? They suddenly have a presence in the South Pacific they wouldn't otherwise have. Benefits for the UK, what are they going to have? Money.

Purely commercial, I think. I mean, the Brits have talked about having a sort of semi-permanent submarine presence in Western Australia as well, but given the demands on... you know, Royal Navy forces in Europe, given the Ukraine-Russia war, that seems... Hard to imagine them being stationed there. Yeah. Downsides. So, downsides for the United States.

A what of AUKUS? I don't think there are any downsides for the United States, but I question some of the upsides that you've listed. What's wrong with those upsides? What do I got wrong? Well- I don't think AUKUS does tie the United States more closely to Australia. Oh, these are the upsides for Australia? Yeah. You don't question the upsides for America, that it's useful for them to have bases in Western Australia?

It has some benefits. Yeah, I think the motivation for the submarine base, for instance, in Western Australia is more to help Australia out, to familiarise us with the technology and to make sure that when our submarines come along, starting in 2032, that we're...

ready to operate them. Oh, I see what you're saying. Right. Yeah. Okay. Because suddenly we're going to be presented with a whole bunch of equipment that we've never used before. So now we can learn the ropes before they arrive. Yeah. Can we just pause on the question of whether or not this is actually going to happen? Yeah. So, 2032, you say, it's not around the corner. No. It's not 2026. It's quite a long way away. The US, as I understand it, has the right to walk away from this penalty free.

Yeah, so I'll start by saying that in my observation that... The scepticism about AUKUS in Australia, actually, this is worth saying to your American listeners, because I don't think Americans who are familiar with AUKUS would understand that there is opposition to this in Australia and there is scepticism about it.

And the skepticism comes in two forms. There are the strategic skeptics and there are the practical skeptics. Are you both? I'm both, yeah. But there's not total overlap between those two. The strategic skeptics are the people that say, this is a bad idea for Australia.

in defence policy and Australian defence strategy and we should be doing... Yeah, just show that for a moment because that's the big conversation. Let's just talk about the practical ones quickly. The pragmatic sceptics are the people that say...

Yeah, Australia should get nuclear-powered submarines. That's a great idea. But this project that you've devised, it's never going to happen. Right. Now, that first group, the strategic sceptics, I would say we're a minority in the Australian debate. That second group, the pragmatic sceptics, I'd say they are the over... majority in my observation of the people that follow Defence and who comment on Defence. In fact...

It's hard to find anyone who isn't paid to be optimistic about AUKUS that is optimistic about AUKUS. So there is deep skepticism. Just stick on the pragmatism for a second before we get to strategic questions. How do the wheels fall off? this thing if they do? Oh God, so many ways. I mean, Australia has never done anything of comparable complexity before. We have barely any nuclear expertise. The kind of regulatory and technical...

knowledge and infrastructure that's required in Australia is just vast. The sheer number of sailors required to operate these vessels is huge. That will present a barrier to Australia. Don't we just transfer them over from whatever they're currently working on?

Nuclear submarines are completely different. Yeah. I mean, that can be retrained, of course, but nuclear is a whole discipline. It's 2032 where you can recruit and train a lot of people in seven years. That's true. But, you know, look for- 30 odd years now, we've been mostly a sub 4% unemployment national economy. The Defence Force has always had trouble, has rarely met its...

recruitment targets, it's not going to get any easier for them. Right, I see. And then what about the questions about whether the things, because let's assume that you can train them up or let's assume that, you know. that America can, if it's peacetime America, can provide us with people who can at least do a portion of that training or overseeing, then what about the possibility of the submarines never being delivered in the first place? Yeah, so the big...

The unanswered question here is the capacity of American shipyards to produce enough submarines to meet both Australian demand and American, US Navy demand. So the Americans got their own plans for how big they want their submarine fleet to be by the middle of this century. they now need to produce all of those submarines plus three and maybe five Virginia-class submarines for Australia.

That's a big lift for the United States. It's not clear at the moment whether their shipyard capacity is going to increase enough to be able to do both. Do you know how big their sub-fleet currently is? I think it's in the order of... 60 attack submarines and 12 ballistic missile submarines. Those are the submarines that carry America's nuclear deterrent. Right. And do we know how many they want to build?

how many more they want to build by the middle of the century. They basically want to modernize. They want to roughly stay as is. So they're going to dip because old boats will be retired. Yeah. But then the plan is to bring it back up to, I think, around 66 by the middle of the century. Okay. I mean, it doesn't sound like it should be beyond the capability of the United States to build themselves a dozen and us a half dozen.

in a decade or two. You would think so, but when you consider the fact that they've also got to build a new class of ballistic missile submarines because their current ones are timing out, so they need to replace those.

The current shipyard capacity, there are, I think, only two shipyards in the United States that build submarines. So in order to build up capacity there, build up the workforce is going to require a lot more investment. And in fact, Australia has contributed financially to that investment.

Okay. So bottom line is they've got a lot of shit going on and all it would take would be for the Trump administration to wake up one morning and go, you know what, instead of having a dozen ballistic missiles with our nuclear deterrent, we should have a dozen and a half. And that wipes out.

Australia's entire allocation. Yes, something like that. It's important to stress that the final decision on transferring the first Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine won't come during the Trump administration. It'll come in the successor administration, whoever that is. However, a lot of smaller decisions have to be made in the lead up to that. That'll be like Donald Trump Jr. administration. The Vance or the Ivanka administration. President Ivanka, yeah.

However, a lot of smaller decisions have to be made. In the lead up to that, it's not a one-off decision. What are the shipyards building is the question. I mean, are they currently building our Virginia-class submarines or are they working on something else that they've got a backlog of?

that the Obama administration commissioned. Well, they're certainly devoted to submarines, but the big question, of course, is who for? Is it for the US or for us? And are our nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines the same, the identical submarines to those 60-odd?

that the US is cycling through? Yeah, in fact, the first one, and I think maybe even the second one, will actually be secondhand submarines. They will be boats that are in American service now and are going to be refurbished before they're transferred to Australia. Americans wipe the dog shit off the bottom of their shoe. They flick it our way for a little while until we can get rid of it after it's no good. Good to know. So the strategic controversy, essentially.

Sorry, Josh. One important point I wanted to make, even though that I was leading up to, I said that it won't be the Trump administration making this judgment, but there'll be lots of smaller decisions leading up to that that Trump will have to make. And I think one real danger point for AUKUS for... Australia, is if Trump has to make a decision, let's imagine...

it's put to him in the following terms. Mr. President, you need to sign this bit of paper in order to allow for the later transfer sale of one, two, three, maybe up to five submarines to Australia. And if you agree to this, then the United States Navy will have one, two, three, or maybe five fewer submarines. If the deal is presented to Trump in those terms, I find it very hard to imagine that he would agree to it.

So he could exercise that veto even then, even though it's not Trump making the final decision, he could slow it down or scupper it because it's simply... not in his worldview to supply submarines to an ally if it means America having fewer submarines. If he is not the person doing the deal and he is not the person in power when the deal is actually... finalized, why is his signature on anything? Well, his signature will be on all sorts of preliminary...

could be on all sorts of preliminary documents. So, you know, a thousand and one things need to happen before a submarine, nuclear power submarine can be transferred to Australia. And most of those decisions will be made well before 2032. They're already being made now. But hopefully most of them.

made without the office of the president even being aware of it. You would think so. You would think so. So I'm just... I mean, this is what Doge is all about. We're supposed to get rid of the red tape. We're red tape. You know, just let the Aussies have the subs. We don't need to keep signing pieces of paper. They did the deal.

Get the subs out the door. Come on, Elon. Let's see how far Elon gets in the world, in the sort of bison-tine world of American military exports. It's really difficult. So stoicism and, you know. sort of geopolitical agnosticism versus belligerence, poking the bear, not poking the bear. The concerns about AUKUS sort of bring us to bigger strategic questions about what medium-sized countries ought to do in an uncertain...

global environment. What's your worry? My worry is that we're depending ever more closely on an unreliable ally. And I base that worry not only on the last... first four weeks of the Trump administration, although that certainly helps to sharpen the dilemma a little bit. But I base that really on 30 plus years of evidence since the end of the Cold War, which is roughly when we can date China's emergence as an economic and military power.

modernization, the one that they're still going through and it's still growing, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. But it... Most analysts date the beginning of that modernization to the early 1990s when the Chinese witnessed the incredible feat of American arms in the first Gulf War when they pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And they saw a revolution in warfare. And they said to themselves, oh my God, we are not prepared for this.

Stalinist style, army heavy military. They were not modernized at all. Lots of beautifully synchronized troops or marching in lockstep. All of that. And they just weren't ready for 21st century warfare. So they have... modernized at a rapid clip, at a speed and at a scale, probably goes beyond even what the Soviet Union did after the Second World War.

Again, let me just pause, but hold that thought. In the same way that I asked you to put Australia's military capacity into context of neighbors, and we got a good sense of that by saying that it's... It has equal status as the most formidable military in Southeast Asia. How does China's military capacity, particularly naval, compare to America's? Well, China already has a bigger navy than the United States, which is to say more ships.

America has a bigger navy in terms of tonnage, so American ships are mostly bigger, and that gap is still fairly wide in terms of tonnage. Is that because they're aircraft carriers who all sit around flying planes often? Yes, that's right. Whereas the Chinese Navy is still, although it's increasingly ocean going, what they call a blue water fleet, it does have a huge number of small coastal vessels that...

are essentially defensive ships to protect and monitor the Chinese coastline. Well, they say they're defensive, but don't they also use those to basically extend the edge of China's maritime boundary? ever further into international waters. Oh, there's that, certainly in the South China Sea. I thought you were going to say Taiwan. I mean, it's only less than 200 kilometers, right? So yes, that's certainly relevant there.

But what I was getting onto is that in that 30-year period of modernization, which has been incredibly dramatic, If you examine carefully what America's military presence in Asia looked like at the beginning of that modernization process in 1991 and what it looks like today, it's actually not that different.

The sheer number of troops, American troops in Asia is roughly the same as it was then. It still has one aircraft carrier based in Japan. It has slightly more submarines based in Asia than it used to. Still... you know, four fighter wings based in Korea, roughly the same number of ships based in Hawaii. So the response... of the United States has essentially been to stand pat. It hasn't drawn down its forces in Asia, but it hasn't increased them in the face of...

potentially the greatest modernization of any military since the Second World War. I'll just chime in and say there is, of course, an opportunity cost to deploying assets to the Pacific. theatre when you're also dealing with a period during which there was enormous strife in the Middle East that they had to focus on, right? I mean, you know, this is...

9-11 happened 25 years ago. There was Afghanistan, there was Iraq. They did have their eye on another ball. Of course, a lot of that was self-harm as well. Sure, absolutely. But I mean, you work with the assets you've got, the assets you'd wish you had and maybe if you were...

a fairy godmother sprinkling pixie dust, they would have expanded. I mean, they kept talking about it. They kept talking about expanding there. So the pivot to Asia, I mean, they started talking about this in the late 2000s. Every US president has talked about it. And ever since Trump. China has been formally designated as America's peer competitor and as an adversary in strategic terms. And yet the basic military...

posture in Asia hasn't changed. Even in 2011, Obama came to Australia and announced the pivot, what he called the pivot or the rebalances that later became called, which meant- Yeah, sorry. Which meant- War on terrorism, okay, that continues on in the background, but we see how the world economy and the strategic...

The strategic balance is shifting towards Asia. Therefore, America needs to shift as well. What happened after Obama's announcement? Really not very much. The big economic, the big trade deal that Obama tried to push. It was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but that became a hot potato during the Hillary Clinton campaign. There was a protectionist wave and that didn't really go anywhere. A few minor wins like a quadrilateral relationship.

between India and Japan and Australia and the United States that people keep talking up. But yes. I think the other thing that's worth mentioning is, as we were talking about US presidents, Even though in all of these sort of modern presidencies, George W. Bush and after, they've all talked about China in these terms as a major challenge to American leadership. None of them ever talk about that in America or to Americans.

So a comparable example would be 1947, President Truman stands before the joint session of Congress and a live radio audience around the United States and announces the containment doctrine. announces basically that the United States is now dedicating itself post-Second World War to opposing Soviet power around the world. This is going to be America's new mission.

China is already way bigger than the Soviet Union ever was. No comparable statement like that has ever come from a US president. When American presidents talk about Asia, they tend to do that when they're in Asia. Well, doesn't Trump bang on about China constantly? He did during his first election campaign. He talks about China. You see all the viral clips of him. China!

Yes, that's right. He talks about China as an economic competitor, and he's obsessed with bilateral trade balances, but he is not at all interested in the strategic balance between China and the United States. I mean, he's talked in really alarming terms, if you're Taiwanese, about the fate of Taiwan. He's generally very skeptical of alliances. He thinks America's allies are.

basically exploiting American taxpayers and getting their defense on the cheap from America. Not entirely untrue, even though I think he's going about it in an appalling fashion.

true that one reason why Western Europe has been able to have such cushy social safety nets for so long is because they haven't had to plow as much money into defence as they would otherwise have had to had there not been an American security guarantee. Well, actually, I think they could keep their cushy social safety nets.

nets and yet still defend themselves without America. Pay higher taxes for it. The dials have to be balanced somehow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're probably getting off the point here, but the Europeans spend their defense dollars terribly. Oh, did they? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Just dig on that for a moment. Just...

I mean, it's a market that's roughly the size of the United States in defence terms. And the overall sum that Europeans spend is less than the US, but still pretty healthy. I don't have the number to hand. Right, but there are more people in the European Union than there are in the...

United States. The economy is about the same size. They could invest what the US does. Except so many of these countries insist on maintaining their national defense industries. So the United States has one advanced fighter aircraft, for instance. The Europeans have three. I see. So it's all terribly inefficient. Yeah. So basically everyone has to do whatever the French do because the French are never going to do what anybody else wants them to do. So everyone in Europe should just...

Join whatever the French have got. Actually, nobody does. The French just go it alone. And then the British sign deals with... the Italians, for instance. The next generation of British fighter aircraft is going to be a project with Italy and Japan. Really? Yes. Why don't they do what the French are doing?

because they just can't agree on what they want, the mission of the aircraft, what it should look like, what it should be capable of doing. I mean, there's a long history of this in Europe. Right, okay. What should, just briefly... the priority of a European defence strategy be.

Well, I think it should be to consolidate. I mean, this is easy to say, incredibly difficult to do, but to build a European army and build European defence industries. Right. But should that be focused on... policing people smuggling flows across the mediterranean should it be focused on projecting power into the far east in case of war with china should it like what's the priority if you're a russia

Russia, in a word. Yeah, should be focused on deterring Russia. That's it. That's all that European nation should be focused on. Do you reckon they'll get their shit together? By the skin of their teeth. I mean, it kind of looks like in fits and starts it's happening. And we shouldn't forget that the Europeans collectively have an economy that's 10 times that of Russia. So they should be able to get their shit together. Yeah. They have no excuse.

Well, it's a collective action problem, isn't it? I mean, it's sort of a game theory thing of like, you know, the Russians can always play. Estonia off Portugal or something. But, of course, the whole point of NATO is to get around that collective action problem. Article 5 of NATO says an attack on one is an attack on all. So that problem should have been solved by now. Should have.

The problem about pieces of paper with writing on them is that everybody has to believe that the writing actually reflects what will happen in the real world. Yeah. And the current state of politics, especially in the United States, doesn't give one great faith that... That NATO means anything anymore. Yeah, I don't think the Europeans can now seriously believe that if Russia attacked Europe, that the United States would automatically...

come to Europe's defense. No. And I mean, it depends. There's a lot buried in that phrase, if Russia attacked Europe, right? I mean, if Russia sent its air force to bomb Paris, then Trump would feel aggrieved and outraged, and it'd all be on.

But there are more sophisticated... I think so. I think so. Yeah, because it'd be a snub and he doesn't like being disrespected. But there are ways of doing things that people who are playing three-dimensional chess can do. And, you know, we saw it. Putin's good at this. stuff. But it's worth extrapolating here. If we bring it back to the Pacific, if the Europeans are having these worries, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we in the same...

terms, think about whether the United States really would come to Australia's defence in the worst possible case. Okay. But I mean, then let me make the analogy that disfavours your strategic position, which would be that... The only reason why Europe finds itself in the situation that it's in is because many people, including Angela Merkel and other leaders at the time, didn't take seriously early acts of Russian aggression. They didn't take seriously Georgia and other indications.

that Putin was not appeasable, that there was nothing that they could do that was going to get his eyes off the prize. And he would just keep pushing as far as he could push. And ultimately, he has done so. Why isn't the analogy to the Pacific? region that you have to draw a line in the sand when China's firing shit in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. They will keep pushing and they're just going to end up engulfing as much as they can.

Unless we draw some serious lines in the sand first. You absolutely have to draw a line in the sand. But implicit in that thinking is that should worse come to worse, you'll win. Right? So you need to have the capabilities to win if it does come to a shooting match. And if you think that's not possible, then actually you probably need to move your line.

Right. I mean, are the Europeans convinced that they would win in any meaningful sense in a battle with Russia? I mean, what does winning look like when there's a nuclear exchange, you know? Isn't the point, even if there's no prospect of winning? we're not just going to get steamrolled? Oh, I mean, I think that's a continuum and I think not being steamrolled is actually a way to...

to deter an enemy, to stop them from attacking you in the first place. In fact, that's the kind of strategy I would advocate for Australia. I wrote a book called The Echidna Strategy. And for the American listeners, an echidna is a spiky anteater, an Australian native animal. Like a porcupine. Yeah, like a porcupine. And basically the premise there is that you win by not losing. An echidna, a porcupine, has no capacity to attack.

to be a threat to anyone. But if you mess with it, you're probably going to get hurt and you won't achieve your objective. Or at the very least, it'll be incredibly painful to achieve your objective because we try to make ourselves indigestible. Right. So that is a valid, I think, form of deterrence.

Look, I mean, one, sorry, do you want to finish that? Well, one way in which Australia is indigestible is it is literally geographically indigestible, right? It has, you know, all of the population centers are many thousands of kilometers away from the most. obvious access point to Australia, which is its northern coast, which is incredibly inhospitable, very hot and full of either implacable desert or marshlands and rainforests.

full of crocodiles so like it's literally if you were designing uh if you were working in an ai video game and you were designing a country to be hard to invade you could do worse than australia maybe you'd put sydney right in the middle but you know um it's we're pretty well we're pretty well set geographically. The problem that I have never found adequately answered by people who use that as a justification to be sanguine is we have about six weeks of fuel.

We have six months of pharmaceuticals, maybe 12. All you have to do is blockade us and we're fucked, aren't we? No. Okay. So what you're touching on is a source of real... uh debate among defense analysts um i have back and forth with people on Twitter all the time on this subject, and there are many learned articles written about this subject, but I'm really skeptical of the idea that Australia is particularly vulnerable to a blockade. First of all, geography helps us in

in a couple of ways. One is that, well, first of all, the sheer distance between us and China. Australia's single biggest defence asset is distance. Beijing's closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney. Wow.

So that protects us because the further away you are, the harder it is to project military power against a foreign country. Right, but there's only so many ways you can get to the bottom corner of... the asia pacific in other words in terms of the way that we can get stuff from abroad so they don't have to well you tell me i assume they don't have to be able to be stationed between australia and antarctica in order to nonetheless successfully make it really difficult for us to get diesel

Yeah, so they'd want to be stationed pretty much outside every major port in Australia, so every major capital city, in order to fully blockade Australia, stop imports coming in and exports going out. you'd need to blockade every port or you'd probably want to blockade every port.

That's incredibly resource intensive at that kind of distance. You know, you're constantly sending ships down and relieving other ships that need to go home and then they refuel and they come back again. You can't make an arc of a blockade, an umbrella across the top of Australia where you can detect... container ships that are coming towards Australia and fire warning shots across their bow. Still incredibly expensive. You can do it from the South China Sea, though.

Yeah, you can do that from the South China Sea, but how does that help you in the Indian Ocean, for instance? Or how does that help you stop trade from the United States to Australia? And also, how does that stop airborne trade? So if you're talking about medicines, for instance, which you mentioned, those come on planes. Yeah. So you can't stop that unless you're prepared to shoot down passenger aircraft and...

trade aircraft, which is quite an escalation. That's essentially a declaration of war if you're doing that. Yeah, we're sort of talking about wartime scenarios, aren't we? I mean, yeah.

Fair enough. If you're engaged in a hot war with the United States, you probably don't have enough ships to be able to encircle the northeast and northwest and northern coasts of Australia in order to prevent all the ships from... I mean, you basically have to put a ring from New Zealand up to Singapore and around to...

you know, the Indian Ocean between India and Western Australia. I don't want to be totally dismissive of the argument, though, because I think there is a case for building Australian onshore resilience so that we can... we can meet the kind of threats that you're talking about. So for instance, I think you alluded to this, Australia has very little oil refining capacity and we don't have much oil storage on Australian soil.

So we could do better there. But actually, I'll go you one better than improving our oil storage. Let's electrify the entire transport as quickly as possible. Of course. And we have abundance. We have abundant, not just fossil fuels, but sunshine and hydro and wind. I mean, it's like we have energy coming out the wazoo. It's crazy.

We're in this predicament, but it doesn't mean that it's not a predicament that we've gotten ourselves into. Okay, so let's assume that a blockade is implausible, but that we should... I take it that you would support a policy of aggressively... strengthening our local capacity on a whole range of different fronts. I mean, if only because COVID showed us just how quickly supply chains can get disrupted and how disorienting it is to walk into a supermarket and there's no spaghetti.

And there's no nappies. And that's in a situation in which everybody is willing to trade if they can. It's just that things have been disrupted too much. If everybody was suddenly intentionally trying to be punitive. or not everybody, if our number one trading partner was intentionally trying to be punitive and make it more difficult for Australia to get things, things could get pretty dark for a while, one would imagine.

First of all, I absolutely agree that it's necessary and urgent for Australia to improve its ability to withstand those kind of campaigns. But I also wouldn't overestimate how effective those kind of campaigns would be. You say that it would get pretty dark. And yeah, we all remember the toilet paper examples from COVID and so on. We got through it okay, didn't we, in the end? And the...

The historical examples- Australia didn't get through it okay by being self-reliant on Australia. Everyone got through it because all countries, China included, were scrambling to try to figure out how to get- Yeah. everything back on track. If you had one gigantic implacable opponent, it's not a foregone conclusion that you'd get through it as quickly. No, but...

What I would say is that I think the COVID episode adds to the evidence that we've seen throughout the 20th century through various wars when foreign nations tried to impose blockades. And when there were shortages, wartime shortages in the UK, for instance, the link between that and making a government change its mind about something is very difficult to establish. So, you know, creating shortages, creating... privation in a society and then using that to force a government to give in. Right.

that's very difficult to establish, right? Historically, there's not a lot of evidence that it works on that level. If anything, it often goes the other way. Exactly. It makes people dig in. That's the whole sort of we'll meet again spirit in the UK during the Blitz, you know? Yeah. brought them together and it increased support for the wartime government. Yes. Okay, so just tie in the strategic questions about AUKUS here then as well. The basic question being...

Let's try not to paint too large a target on our back and make ourselves an inevitable participant in any conflagration between China and the United States. Is that the argument? That's certainly part of it. The dark joke that I've heard go around about AUKUS is that... AUKUS is designed to solve the security problems created by AUKUS. So when we put American bases on Australian soil, you know, bombers in Northern Australia, submarines in Western Australia, we make ourselves a target.

If those bases are not there, it seems to me very difficult to imagine the circumstances in which China would ever attack Australia. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you tell me. Give me a plausible scenario. Oh, China tries to take Taiwan and the US decides that that's not going to happen and an international coalition joins the United States of which Australia is a part.

Yes. No, indeed. But so again, we're talking about a US related scenario, independent of the US, of the alliance. No, but I think that's a cheeky dodge because the reality is that I think nobody is so naive that they're saying that. orcus is necessary, because even in a universe in which the United States didn't exist, China would still be a hostile adversary. I think the most generous claim to the prior orcus person would be something along the lines of...

I think China's noticed what side we're on. I don't think we can just pretend that because we don't have this base or that base in Australia, this US base that is. that the Chinese are going to go, oh, I guess they're just like us. They're friendly. We're Western. We're liberal. We're majority white. They know the game. China's onto us.

We're going to be involved. The reality of Australia's participation in World War I and World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the Gulf War and the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War and the fight against ISIS. You know, there is no other country in the planet, including Canada and the United Kingdom, who have been as consistently at America's side as the United States. We know this.

The US knows this. China knows this. Everybody knows this. If there's a hot war between China and the United States, we're in it. If we're going to be in it, let's be fucking in it. There's the argument for AUKUS. Because trying to have a bob each way and dance across the lily pads and dodge the raindrops is not going to get us anywhere.

I agree with most of that. I would note that there's a lively debate in Australia, mostly conducted privately and even among politicians about, well, would we really participate in a war over Taiwan? Because it is different. I mean, it's not a war. of choice in the way that putting troops in Afghanistan was. I mean, this would be potentially the... the biggest war since World War II and maybe a lot larger if it involves nuclear weapons. But it would be that with or without our involvement.

That's true. And it would be framed at the time as a war of freedom and liberation, much like Ukraine. We don't have any skin in the game in Ukraine either, but we're still participating because we're standing up for a principle. Yeah, but where we began in this part of the conversation...

was about whether Australia would be a target. And I can't imagine even with Australia sending tanks to Ukraine, for instance, that we're a military target for Russia. I see what you're saying. So you're saying that we could participate in a multilateral action to liberate... Taiwan without necessarily the homeland being a target. Exactly. Yeah. So the reason to make the homeland a target is if China feels it needs to neutralize the bases.

from which attacks are happening. Right, and indeed may feel more at liberty to neutralise those bases than any other base because they're the least strategically important to the United States and would be regarded as the... the most acceptable loss probably to a U.S. administration in actual fact than to something on U.S. soil or maybe even in Japan or Korea. Of course, we should note one exception to this is that Australia, since the 19...

has had American communications facilities on Australian soil. This is at the Pine Gap facility? Pine Gap and Northwest Cape, which is a submarine communications facility in Western Australia. I tend to think those would be sacrosanct. They would not be attacked by China even in a war because those facilities form an important part of America's nuclear command and control network.

So hitting those bases would effectively be a signal that China intends to start a nuclear war. And that's probably a signal they wouldn't wish to send. Right. Is there a universe in which China takes out the AUKUS assets, the submarine base in Western Australia and so on, and... we shrug and pull an echidna and go well okay that's that uh

No, I don't think so. Well, as I think you said, in for a penny, in for a pound. Once we're in AUKUS, once we have the American bases on our soil, then yes, we would be all in with the United States on such a military campaign. the argument I've been making about the AUKUS nuclear submarine. So the government's very, this government and the previous government.

is at pains to always say, this is a sovereign capability, right? So the submarines are ours. They're not just American submarines that we're borrowing. The Americans don't have a veto over how we use them. They belong to us. And in sort of purely legal terms, they're absolutely right. Of course they're ours. And we can use them as we wish or not use them as we wish. But we are now embarked on one of the most intimate.

technical, regulatory, strategic, doctrinal partnerships with a foreign military that any country could ever imagine. It seems to me very difficult to imagine that you embark on a relationship like that that could last 40... potentially 50 years, and that somewhere along that pathway, when the senior partner in that relationship says, excuse me, we'd like you to use your submarines on our behalf, that suddenly Australia then says, sorry, we're out.

That seems to me very hard to believe. I don't know about the plausibility of that scenario, but I- will grant you that it's inconceivable that the Chinese would not perceive, the Chinese would regard that rightly, I think, as a distinction without a difference in the sense that to say that these are our sovereign...

Submarines is a bit like a McDonald's franchise saying these are our hamburgers, not McDonald's as hamburgers, because technically the name on the ownership slip of the franchisee is not McDonald's Corporation or, you know, a Catholic, a church that is.

embroiled in some kind of abuse scandal saying, you know, this doesn't go back to the Vatican. We're completely independent and the Vatican trying to wash its hands of it. We know these kinds of scenarios where there is a deep link and people try to absolve themselves of responsibility. because of some technicality. It would always be perceived as a technicality by any adversary. So the question for me, and I want to get on to Trump in a moment before we lose you. The question for me becomes...

How much of this is about faith and gut and trust and optimism and the vibe that you expect the next? hundred years to have and how much of this is a puzzle how much is a mystery and how much is a puzzle really because my Gut tells me that some people's guts are saying, leave no possibility for an emboldened China to... dominate the region and therefore do absolutely everything that we might need to do in order to bolster our defences against a China that may or may not be committed to...

wiping us out regardless of what we do. So appeasement is not an option and being all Churchillian about it. And then there are other people who in their guts just feel we're confecting this problem.

China obviously has a right to have more power in the region than it has historically had because it is a rising power and that is just what rising powers assert throughout time. So don't derange it and derail it by... being obstreperous allow it to expand its influence and manage that and work with it and it's fundamentally all going to be okay and to me those are two basically different

emotional outlooks about the mystery of the future rather than right or wrong descriptions of a puzzle. Well, the future is a mystery, but there's... A couple of things we can know with reasonable certainty. They say demographics is destiny. China is a huge country, 1.4 billion people, I think. Its economic growth is likely to continue. Who knows at what rate? But the chances of it collapsing economically are...

very small. We should assume that it won't collapse politically, that it will remain relatively coherent. So when you take those simple things into consideration, assume those to be true over the long term. then it's impossible to escape the conclusion that China is going to be a massive part of our future. This is a once-in-a-century shift of global power towards China.

It seems to me impossible to resist. Now, you use the word dominate in regard to China. I think even with the certainty of China's growth, further growth in mind, it is possible... to weave a path in between those two alternatives that you sketched. That is somewhere short of Chinese domination, but also well short of just simply giving in to China and assuming that...

that it will be dominant. I don't think it's possible to stop China being the leading power in Asia, but it is certainly possible to stop it from being the dominant. power in Asia. And that is really the mission, I think, for Australia among many countries in the region. China is surrounded by other great powers, even if we assume that the Trump trend continues and America...

fully withdraws from Asia, there are other great powers in the region that are going to have a big say and they're going to frustrate China's ambitions. Who? India, Japan, Russia. In Russia, absolutely. Perhaps in future, a unified Korea. If we are in a future of American withdrawal, for instance, then some of those countries are going to get nuclear weapons as well.

Japan and Korea will probably get nuclear weapons in that kind of a world. The interesting little ripple here for Australia is that the one bit of Asia that doesn't have a resident great power. is Southeast Asia. So that makes it a more natural outlet for Chinese ambition, I think, because it's a little bit more vulnerable. Right, right. So...

I've written quite a lot now on the urgent necessity for Australia to get closer to Indonesia because the only country in Southeast Asia that has the potential to become a great power and in economic terms is on track. to become one of the top five biggest economies in the world by the middle of the century, that's Indonesia. Yeah. It's got more people than any other country in Southeast Asia by far. It's the closest big country to Australia. Exactly. Yeah. Has the same-

geographic strategic interests that Australia does. Effectively, what both countries want is that China never dominates maritime Southeast Asia. So that's an ambition I think they can pursue together. That's interesting. So would you have, I mean, if you were an Australian diplomat, if you were foreign minister or something, what would you do? I'm just thinking about stitching together, say, Indonesia, the Philippines.

Maybe you include some South Pacific countries or maybe you don't, but some kind of almost Australian-led ASEAN counterweight. to Chinese influence in the region? What would you do? Well, it can't be Australian-led. It could be Australian-initiated, but given...

the trajectory that Indonesia is on, it has to be Indonesia led because they're going to be, they're going to be bigger. And this is a mindset shift that Australians need to make and get used to. Indonesia is going to be a great power and we are going to have a great power on our doorstep. And we, you know, we've never had. that before. That's a really important change and it's worth, just as an aside, it's worth saying that

As difficult as the China challenge is at the moment, it's very far away and that helps us a great deal. Australia has never had a great power on its doorstep. And if Indonesia was both wealthy and hostile to Australia, that would be a far worse security outcome for us than what we now face with regard to China. Certainly. Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's a long way from being wealthy enough to build its own military that can rival ours, isn't it?

It doesn't so much lack wealth. I mean, they only spend about 1% of GDP on defense. If they doubled that to what is a sort of... Western or OECD average of around 2%, that would be utterly transformative for Indonesia. Right, right. But what's really needed in Indonesia, economic growth's pretty steady 5%, so that's good. But what's lacking...

in Indonesia is state capacity. It's more than just defence, but the entire state apparatus in Indonesia is weak. It can't tax properly. It can't educate properly. It's quite a difficult place just geographically to rule. isn't it? It's an archipelago of thousands of islands. It's tricky to manage. Yeah, that's fascinating. You also wrote recently about what Donald Trump's

posture towards Canada and his remarks about Canada sort of tell us about American isolationism and the world order. What are you gleaning from it? Well, it's interesting, actually, just this morning, I read that he's made similar tariff threats now against the EU. He says that the EU was founded as an anti-American economic. What's that effect?

It was about steel tariffs between France and Germany, wasn't it, in the 1970s? It was that. But actually, just to bring us back to an earlier topic, the EU or the European coal and steel... community, as it was known at the beginning, was created so that France and Germany would never go to war again. Yeah. And it's worked. It's worked spectacularly well in that regard. And so for that reason alone, it's worth preserving. Yeah.

Look, on Trump and Canada, what I reflected on in my article is just how extraordinary it is that an American president could make the kind of threats that he did against. such a familiar country as Canada, like to Australians. It's the closest analogous country, you know, Western Commonwealth, a post-colonial society, English speaking. Um,

An American ally. Absolutely. I mean, a federation of different states and provinces, a largely inhospitable geography with its population clustered around along one central strip. In our case, it's the coast. In their case, it's the border. Absolutely. so similar. In so many ways, they're just like us. And here was Trump making really incredibly powerful threats against Canada. So powerful, in fact, that I would recommend to the listeners.

Go and read the statement that Prime Minister Trudeau made after Trump's announcement. It'll take you less than five minutes to read. Tell me that doesn't sound like a wartime address. Do you mean the one from the initial announcement? Or the reversal of that. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I watched that, actually. He says it does in French and English as well, back and forth. Absolutely. It's like, yeah, he's talking about all the times that, you know, the Canadians have helped Americans.

It is. It's extraordinary. The darkly ironic part of that address was that he invokes- shared wartime sacrifice in exactly the same way that Australian prime ministers routinely do. So even afterwards, we had a meeting between...

between Australian and American defence ministers in Washington. And Kevin Rudd sent out a tweet, who is now our ambassador, used to be our prime minister, now our ambassador in Washington. He sent out a tweet with exactly that kind of language about, you know, Australia and America. together for a hundred years in every war, shared sacrifice, et cetera, et cetera. We've heard this. It's so familiar, that language. But when you hear it put into the mouth of a prime minister,

of a fellow Commonwealth country who's just been economically assaulted by that same partner. I mean, that kind of language takes on remarkably, it's sort of darkly ironic tones. I understand. It struck me really deeply. Yeah, I mean, I understand that the Australian Prime Minister met by phone with President Trump last week, is that...?

Right? Or am I... Did I misread that? Oh, I'm not aware. Oh, okay. I was just wondering whether or not you had any instinct about whether or not Australia has the... I think it was about... tariffs, it may have been at a foreign minister level, but I thought it was between the leaders, about whether or not Australia is enough of a small target to be able to dodge the ire of the Trump administration. And, you know, Canada looms large because Canada's right there.

border and Trump's obsessed with fentanyl and whatever, but is there a way of playing the game such that we get exempted? Yeah, you're right. There was a phone call a couple of weeks ago in regard to steel and aluminium tariffs. And the message afterwards to the public was that Australia was well positioned to get an exemption. And that's because we have a trade deficit with the United States.

rather than a surplus. So, you know, that puts us in the good books. Oh, right. I see. As far as Trump is concerned. He's got a mental abacus, doesn't he? Yeah, it's like a five-year-old. It's mercantilism. It's like just this idea of how, you know, you have to... balance the books. Yeah. So, look, a droid and energetic diplomacy could take us a long way towards getting out of the line of fire here, but, you know.

just stand back and think about the position we're now in, that we even have to contemplate this kind of thing. So the Trump administration will either be seen by historians as a blip in history, or it will be seen as the beginning of an era. of sort of quasi-anti-democratic populist.

strong meaning type people and maybe the beginning of the end of the era that had prevailed for 80 years since the end of the Second World War and maybe the next 100 years will look unrecognizable. We just don't know yet. You wrote a book of which the subtitle alludes to hollow politics. The book's called Our Very Own Brexit. What are you saying? What are you reading in the tea leaves and what is a hollow politics?

Well, hollow politics is a reference to the slow, steady process since the Second World War in all Western democracies of politics slowly disengaging from the public. So of the political class pulling away from the public and the most... obvious sign of this is the fact that major centre-left and centre-right political parties in all Western democracies simultaneously have gone into decline, both in terms of their vote share, but also in terms of their membership.

And at the same time, all sorts of political associations in Western democracies have gone into decline. Unions, professional associations. Churches are in decline. They have a sort of political role as well. NGOs have gone from being mass organizations to being highly professionalized organizations. Essentially, politics...

during particularly the second half of the 20th century, ceased to be labor intensive and became capital intensive. You need money more than you need people. And that pulled the public away from politics.

And as a result, politics feels much more distant. In democracies, we get involved at election time, but otherwise we are not involved. And phenomena like Trump and like Brexit in the UK, I think are... can be best explained, not by the rise of extremist forces, there's a lot of worry about populism, I know, in Western Europe in particular, but mainly by the dissatisfaction that the public feels about the fact that politics is being taken away from them.

and has been dominated by a political elite that, you know, switches over by party, but otherwise stays roughly the same. Right. But what does it mean to say that it's taken away from them? Because the... The third way sort of consensus that arose in the 1990s after, you know, after the end of the Cold War was this kind of Blairite, Clintonian sort of like, you know, end of history.

Fukuyama, whoop-de-doo. We've sort of solved all the big problems, really. And whether you're sort of a little bit right or a little bit left, we kind of know the contours of what a country ought to look like to be prosperous and peaceful. And to a large extent... They were right about that. And then along comes, I suppose, globalization and automation and the decline of manufacturing and the hollowing out of steel towns in Appalachia or whatever you might have.

What should the political parties have been doing, other than the things that the populist right is now condemning them for not having done, that would have solved this? I'm not sure they could have done anything. So I think what's happened over the...

second half of the 20th century is a kind of mutual withdrawal. So the public drew back from politics because they stopped joining unions, they stopped joining political parties, they stopped going to church, et cetera, et cetera, all the things I talked about. For the political parties, when their memberships...

came under threat, there was really only one rational response. These are bureaucracies that want to survive. And so if you can't survive by mass membership, then you find other ways to survive. Do you mean that they've become policy instruments of corporations and donors? It's not quite that simple. Not that they're instruments of them, but like I said, they become very capital-intensive operations. So actually, a large membership base becomes an encumbrance.

rather than something useful. Unless you're Barack Obama and you raise tons of money from people who are donating $50 or $20. Yeah, that's true. It's a good exception to the rule that politics has become... Well, I mean, it's not an exception in the sense that it's become about money raising rather than about- Yes, I see. Yeah. But what I mean is that doesn't necessarily need to derange politics or decouple political policy from the interests of- the common folk.

Well, I guess you'd have to ask Trump voters about that. They would certainly argue that the direction of American politics since the era of globalization and of de-industrialization, whether that has furthered their... interests. Clearly, they feel it hasn't. Look, I think the larger point here is that that whole agenda, that neoliberal agenda...

has in many ways been pursued without ever asking the permission of the public. So the major parties in all of these Western democracies basically agree with the general direction to move in and that neoliberal economic policies and so on work very well. And they do work. They have worked very well in Australia. But they stopped asking us if it was okay to do that. And so the way I interpret Brexit, for instance, is that the Labor and the Tory parties were...

in rough terms basically agreed that the slow, steady process of integration with Europe was the right course to go on. But they never asked the public. And then there was this internal dispute within the Tory party about European integration, which David Cameron essentially said, well, I can't solve this. We'll need to put it to the public.

And when the public was finally asked, well, what do you think about integrating into Europe? They said, no, we withdraw our consent. And the book that I wrote that you referred to earlier was basically saying that... It's possible to draw an analogy with immigration in Australia. So immigration is a point of elite consensus in Australia. And I'm a great beneficiary. Personally, I'm a beneficiary of immigration in Australia. I'm a great supporter of it.

But I'm worried that neither of the major parties, while they pursue very... strong and quite aggressive immigration targets. We're one of the fastest growing countries in the world in population terms, thanks to our immigration program. And have been basically since.

World War II, really, right? I mean, more than half of the population has arrived since the Second World War. Since the Second World War, but especially since the Howard government. Yeah. So the 90s, basically, has been an enormous... Yeah. And it's been enormously beneficial for Australia. Yeah. But no one's ever asked permission. There's a kind of implicit...

implicit agreement between the two major parties. We'll maintain high immigration levels. We just won't talk about it. And the one time, the one notable occasion when that rule was broken was... I think it was in 2007 when Kevin Rudd was the new prime minister at that point. And he went on television and he said, I support a big Australia. And there was hell to pay.

No one knew exactly what he meant. Was he talking about 50 million or 100 million Australians? And it kind of reinforced the lesson that, okay, let's keep this immigration program going because economically, there's really no substitute for it. We have to do this to maintain our growth and to improve.

improve our productivity. We don't have to. We could be poorer and smaller. Yeah, we can choose to be poorer, but sure. But both major parties, yeah. I thought you were going to say that the first time that you got glimpses of the dam breaking was in the 1990s when Pauline Hanson came around.

For me, at least in my lifetime, that was the first time I noticed there being a national conversation about racism. Now, it was a clumsy and xenophobic... conversation, but nonetheless, it was a moment when that elite consensus was openly questioned and you saw that there was 10% of the population who just weren't on board with this.

at all. Yeah. Well, I think the lesson that John Howard, who was opposition leader at the time and later became one of our longest serving prime ministers, the lesson that he learned was that you don't. flirt with that kind of politics because he made some pretty incendiary comments in that period or, no, that was in the 1980s, of course, that he made some pretty incendiary comments about Asian migration and he got his fingers burnt. Okay. That predates my awareness. Yeah, yeah, it does.

of his reaction to Hanson, who was this right-wing populist anti-immigrant politician who was just a shopkeeper who went into politics. was that he essentially co-opted her policies really and just pushed the Conservative Party to be more at least rhetorically bombastic in its approach to immigration. And yet at the same time pursued a very aggressive immigration policy. I want to stress here, I wouldn't want anyone to come away thinking that I believe Australians have a deep-seated...

fear or hostility or concern about high immigration levels. Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that Australians are in favour of immigration. We are one of the most successful multicultural...

nations in the world, the most successful. We are better than any other country in the world at integrating new immigrants into our society. It is Australia's superpower. We do it better than anyone. What I'm concerned about... is the failure of the political class to ask permission of the public to conduct that immigration program.

And the public might, if they're ever asked, might withdraw permission simply in a fit of pique that they were never asked. Not because they hate immigration, not because they're xenophobic, but because there is now such a gap between the political class and the public that...

they want to just poke them in the eye. It sounds like you're saying we need to have more uncomfortable conversations about things that are currently taboo. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that just to add one final button to that immigration point. I think one of the reasons why support for immigration has remained so robust in Australia, hopefully, is that we have had something of a Faustian pact with ourselves about how brutally we're going to deal with illegal immigration.

I think it was Arthur Caldwell, the first immigration minister, who said that the price that you pay to win over the Australian, to get the support of this white country for large-scale immigration, is going to be that they feel they have total control over. Over who? They may not have any say in how many come, but we know exactly who's coming and why. And so, you can allow teenagers to rot in Nauru and sew their lips together, and that's the price that you pay for us having.

500,000 people come in in a single year. And if you follow the immigration debate in the UK and in the US, I think you can read a similar subtext. It's about the ability to control the borders. Yeah, interesting. Are you thinking about the 21st century if we're sitting here? once my, you know, primary school age kids are our age, does the world, do we get over this? Like, do we restabilise?

I mean, in the historical terms, we're not particularly unstable. Are you referring to the geopolitics of the world? It feels like we've got a tremor. It feels like there's a tremor. And I don't know if it's going to turn into an earthquake or if it's just going to stabilize. Yeah. I mean, the... So the skill here is to not give in to the parochialism of the present, as it's sometimes called. The other term that you could use is availability bias. So there's a tendency that we all have.

That when we're trying to assess a situation, we look at the most obvious evidence first, the stuff that's closest to hand. So if you'd ask someone now, is the world in turmoil? Well, where does their mind turn? It turns to the Trump administration. It turns to the war in Ukraine. It turns to threats of tariffs against Canada, for instance. Chinese warships off the coast of Sydney, and then you turn your mind back to the questioner and you say, well, hell yes, the world is in turmoil.

In comparison to six months ago. Right. Yeah. But not in comparison to 1944. Exactly. Yes. That's the point I'm trying to make. So, I mean, I try to apply what I'd call the time machine test here. So imagine a time machine standing in the corner of your room. and it can only take you back. Can't take you forward, only back. How many of us would get in the time machine and go back any time at all?

Maybe to the 1980s, but any time before that, especially if you're a woman, if you're black, if you're Asian in Australia, would you go back any time? No, life's never been better. And certainly if you couldn't dictate what year you were going to go to.

Right. If you just have to get in and you just take your chances. Yeah. Louis CK had that great bit where he said, you know, I could press the button and go to any time. And as soon as I opened the door on the time machine, there's someone there saying, please. Sir, your table's waiting for you. Exactly. As a white man. As a white straight man. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Lovely to talk to you. Thanks so much for enlightening us. Thanks for coming by. Thanks, Josh.