Quarterly Essay #86, Hugh White: Sleepwalk To War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America. (2022)
Thu, May 21, 2026./noise/books | LinkKindle. Somewhat inevitable after reading Sam Roggeveen's The Echidna Strategy (2023). White wrote in the lee of the ALP's election victory when just maybe it was possible to envisage a revision of AUKUS.
The essay mostly rehearses (what I take to be) White's standard position. The USA now has insufficient reason to dominate Asia as the emerging multipolar order will preclude a Eurasian hegemon. (He seems to lean on George Kennan to provide an argument for why this is critically important to the security of the USA.) China's economy has already eclipsed that of the USA on his preferred metric. Realpolitik therefore implies that the USA returns to the isolationism of the Nineteenth Century, entailing abandonment of Taiwan and treaty partners like Australia, Japan and South Korea to a regional order dominated by China. Australia may yet find it possible to live with that, given that there is no alternative. Corollary, AUKUS brings nothing Australia needs.
There's a far bit of repetition through the essay; I wish he had instead spilt a few words on why he thinks that from power comes the motivation (and not just possibility) to dominate. On some fronts the American Imperium is a counterexample to this, but perhaps schematically White means that if China can dominate the region or the world then it will, whether there's aspiration there or not. It may be an axiom of his type of analysis which smells of pessimism but is really an exploration of downside risk. (The responses to this essay in the succeeding issue clearly split between those who understand this and those who want or need a more optimistic or moral analysis or a prognosis of the most likely future.) I also wondered what his position on East Timor was as Australia's intervention did not appear to have any strategic upside to Australia (but we did it anyway) and it set back our engagement with inevitable superpower Indonesia.
On the nuclear war front, White sketches the "escalate to de-escalate" strategy that is apparently the USA's and Russia's. He suggests it might work sometimes. One instance of the idea would be to use a low-yield nuke in the expectation of calling the enemy's MAD bluff. This thinking may be fallacious between the major powers but I think this puts the lie to the nuclear umbrella in a kill-the-chicken-to-scare-the-monkey sort of way: Roggeveen's expectation that the substantial reputational damage to the aggressor will stay their hand probably doesn't apply to the regional or global hegemon, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by the USA. White therefore contends that Australia cannot just ignore nuclear threats.
Most of the responses in the succeeding Quarterly Essay did not get to grips with White's points. Emma Shortis observed that his analysis lacked historical nuance and local colour. Goodreads.
