#218 – Why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that's probably good (Hugh White on The 80,000 Hours Podcast)

We just published an interview: Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that's probably good. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch NATO, seize Greenland, and abandon Taiwan — seems hell-bent on shattering that comfort.

But according to Hugh White — one of the world’s leading strategic thinkers, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, and author of Hard New World: Our Post American Future — Trump isn’t destroying American hegemony. He’s simply revealing that it’s already gone.

“Trump has very little trouble accepting other great powers as co-equals,” Hugh explains. And that happens to align perfectly with a strategic reality the foreign policy establishment desperately wants to ignore: fundamental shifts in global power have made the costs of maintaining a US-led hegemony prohibitively high.

Even under Biden, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the US sent weapons but explicitly ruled out direct involvement. Ukraine matters far more to Russia than America, and this “asymmetry of resolve” makes Putin’s nuclear threats credible where America’s counterthreats simply aren’t.

Hugh’s gloomy prediction: “Europeans will end up conceding to Russia whatever they can’t convince the Russians they’re willing to fight a nuclear war to deny them.”

The Pacific tells the same story. Despite Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and Biden’s tough talk about “winning the competition for the 21st century,” actual US military capabilities there have barely budged while China’s have soared, along with its economy — which is now bigger than the US’s, as measured in purchasing power. Containing China and defending Taiwan would require America to spend 8% of GDP on defence (versus 3.5% today) — and convince Beijing it’s willing to accept Los Angeles being vaporised. Unlike during the Cold War, no president — Trump or otherwise — can make that case to voters.

So what’s next? Hugh’s prognoses are stark:

• Taiwan is in an impossible situation and we’re doing them a disservice pretending otherwise.
• South Korea, Japan, and one of the EU or Poland will have to go nuclear to defend themselves.
• Trump might actually follow through and annex Panama and Greenland — but probably not Canada.
• Australia can defend itself from China but needs an entirely different military to do it.

Our new “multipolar” future, split between American, Chinese, Russian, Indian, and European spheres of influence, is a “darker world” than the golden age of US dominance. But Hugh’s message is blunt: for better or worse, 35 years of American hegemony are over. The challenge now is managing the transition peacefully, and creating a stable multipolar order more like Europe’s relatively peaceful 19th century than the chaotic bloodbath Europe suffered in the 17th — which, if replicated today, would be a nuclear bloodbath.

In today’s conversation, Hugh and Rob explore why even AI supremacy might not restore US dominance (spoiler: China still has nukes), why Japan can defend itself but Taiwan can’t, and why a new president won’t be able to reverse the big picture.

This episode was originally recorded on May 30, 2025.

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

Highlights

America has been all talk, no action when it comes to China and Russia

Hugh White: I think the historians looking back will say that 2010 was the point at which China started overtly to challenge America’s position as the leading power in East Asia. What’s happened is that as China’s challenges have picked up, become more intense, the United States faced a choice: it could either push back decisively and really work hard to preserve America’s position, or it could acquiesce in China’s bid to push it out.

Now, what America has in fact done is talk about pushing back, and it’s done so quite consistently. … But if you look at what America actually did, the answer is just about nothing. There’s a few dimensions to this — diplomatic, economic, and military — but I’ll just focus on the military.

If you go back to the last time the United States and China had serious military confrontation in Asia, which was in 1996, America’s military position in Asia vis-à-vis China was just overwhelmingly strong, particularly at sea. China was hardly a maritime power at all, and East Asia is very much a maritime theatre. So if war had broken out in March of 1996, which it could have, America just would have won in a week.

From that time on, China’s air and maritime capability started growing like that — powered by, of course, an extraordinary economic rise, extraordinary development in technological capabilities, major reorganisations of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army], and a very tight focus by the Chinese on developing exactly the capabilities they needed to counter America’s position in the Western Pacific.

And the fact is that America’s let that happen. … Now, if America had responded to the growth in China’s maritime and air capabilities by building up its own maritime and air capabilities — which would have required spending huge sums of money and so on — then that’s what an effective American response would look like.

But the fact is it hasn’t done that. It’s allowed its military position to decline. And one of the reasons for that is that US political leaders have not been prepared to go out and bluntly tell Americans that in order to preserve their position in East Asia and the Western Pacific, they must be willing to fight a war with China, and they must be able to convince the Chinese that they’re willing to fight a war with China.

So whilst there’s been lots of talk about America defending its leadership, it hasn’t been prepared to either do what was really necessary, or explain to the American people why it was really necessary. And there’s a very big contrast there with the Cold War: what America did in the Cold War when it decided to contain the Soviet Union was to engineer a massive growth in American military capability, and spend a great deal of time and a great deal of eloquence explaining to the American people why that was so.

Now, you look at what’s happened in Europe: the same story unfolds, although in a different sequencing, because Russia is not the kind of rival that China is. But what we saw when, for example, Russia moved into Crimea in 2014, and began moving into some of the oblasts that it’s now claiming, is that America said, you know, “Tut tut, you mustn’t do that” — but it did not bring Ukraine into NATO back then; it did nothing to substantially reinforce US military forces in Europe.

Along with other NATO countries, it posted tiny little token forces to forward positions in the Baltic states and in Poland. But the very tiny scale of those deployments almost demonstrated not that America was serious, but that it wasn’t serious. If you confront Russian aggression in the years after 2014 by deploying battalions of thousands or fewer soldiers here and there, rather than divisions and armies, then you’re really telling Russia, in fact, what we now know to be the case: that the United States was not prepared to go to Russia to defend Ukraine. And if it wasn’t prepared to go to Russia to defend Ukraine, my argument is it couldn’t defend the US-led order in Europe. And that was true even before Donald Trump appeared.

How Trump has significantly brought forward the inevitable

Hugh White: I do think the Trump phenomenon, Trump’s revolution in American politics, is extremely important. But for the reasons I’ve explained, I don’t think they’re the principal driver of the fundamental shift in America’s role in the world, and hence of the global order. I think what drives that are these much bigger shifts in the distribution of wealth and power, and the revival of ambition for great power status among countries like Russia and China.

But Trump is still very important, because of Trump’s own America-first isolationism. I think that is what it is. Going all the way back to his views of US allies in the 1980s, during the Cold War, Trump has always had a strong isolationist streak. He’s always believed that the rest of the world doesn’t matter that much to the United States.

And that’s reinforced, I think, by two characteristics of his personality. Now, one’s got to be very careful making strategic judgements on the basis of assessments of people’s personality — particularly when one’s not a psychologist at all — but it does seem to me two things about Trump’s personality are very important in this.

The first is that he doesn’t like dependents, he doesn’t like allies. He doesn’t like people who rely on him. He doesn’t like weak people. But he does quite like strong people. So there’s this strange thing that he likes Putin and Xi more than he likes his allies.

And we might wonder what that means about him psychologically, but the fact is that what it does mean is that Trump is much more willing than any previous American leader to, on the one hand, accept other great powers as co-equals with the United States — I think he has very little trouble with that indeed — and on the other hand, to reject the idea that America should take responsibility for defending a whole lot of what he would see as mendicant allies who can’t be bothered defending themselves.

So I think because of these peculiarities of his personality, his attitudes actually, by coincidence, so to speak, fit the strategic imperatives that America faces at the moment. That’s the first point.

The second point is: stepping back from Trump’s particular personality, what Trump thinks does seem to fit with what most Americans think. You know, there is a split here. I described before the way in which American policy elites — you know, people inside the Beltway — were thrilled, really, to find themselves as the new Rome, to find themselves leading the world. And completely understandably, I might say. I should say they sold that to the American people on the idea that it was going to be cheap and easy, as we discussed.

But even in grand historical terms, the relatively small, cheap wars of Iraq and Afghanistan convinced a lot of Americans outside the Beltway that this was not cheap and easy. And if you think that was too much, imagine what a war with China or Russia would be like.

So I think what we’ve seen, and it’s part of a broader collapse in political consensus in the United States about the direction of the country, is that the idea that America should function as the global leader — which remains amongst what you might call the orthodox political classes in Washington as an uncontestable truth — is both to Donald Trump and to the vast majority of American voters highly contestable — indeed, unsustainable.

You know, when Trump first rode down the elevators and into American politics in 2016, one of the reasons why the American political establishment on both sides of the aisle didn’t take him seriously was precisely because of his isolationism. There was a strong view that American voters would simply not vote for a candidate who did not take seriously the importance of American global leadership. And it turned out they were wrong, and they were wrong repeatedly.

I place great emphasis on the fact that — The New York Times has set this out for us very neatly — if you go back and look at the three elections in which Trump has stood, in over 50% of the counties across the United States, the vote for Trump has increased every time, three times in a row. This is a political phenomenon, and one of the things it shows you is that, as far as Americans are concerned, a president who doesn’t want to accept the burdens of American global leadership is fine by them.

So I think there’s two things going on here with Trump: his own personality fits, if you like, the strategic zeitgeist, but it also fits the changing dynamics of American public opinion on this question.

Westerners always underestimate what China can achieve

Hugh White: It’s worth bearing in mind that ever since China started the process of economic reform and opening which has produced this miracle — and it is a miracle: it is the largest, swiftest, most spectacular shift in the distribution of wealth and power between nations, and one might say also the largest increase in material human welfare in human history by miles — ever since that process began in 1979 with Deng Xiaoping’s declarations, we in the West have underestimated what China could achieve.

Now, that’s not to say that the Chinese won’t make all sorts of mistakes. Of course they will. But I think it would be the height of folly to base any strategic policy on the expectation that China will be less strong relative to the United States in future than it is today. And it will be more prudent to expect that it will be more strong relative to the United States than it is today.

That’s particularly true because there’s one specific aspect of China’s rise which we’re only now coming to terms with: that China has moved from being a technology taker to being the technology creator much faster than anyone expected. This is obviously an immensely complex issue, but the idea that China was just a dumb economy putting together stuff designed in California or stealing other people’s ideas: anyone who still thinks that has not been paying attention. This is one of the remarkable things China has done: it has expanded tertiary education faster and earlier in its industrial revolution process than any other country has done before. …

China is here to stay, as an exceptionally powerful country. We’re going to live in a world in which China is the most powerful country. We may well live in a world in which China is the most sophisticated country technologically. On present trends, the way in which research spending is trending in the United States and in other countries in the West compared to the way it’s trending in China, the Chinese will dominate key technologies in the future. So we’re going to have to learn to live with that.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Two other small things to add to that is: it is possible that the US will continue to rival China economically — say, if its economy does particularly well for whatever reason, or it allows in a lot of immigrants to boost its population — but it’s unlikely to pull away such that it’s substantially more powerful. And China, because it has a larger manufacturing share in its economy, that puts it in a very good position, I think, for just manufacturing the kinds of inputs that you need for hard military power.

And furthermore, you’re only saying that China is going to try to become a regional power. So it has a much easier task of just defending its local neighbourhood in order to accomplish its goals, on your telling. Whereas the US is trying to accomplish this much more difficult task of encroaching and maintaining its dominant position near China, which stacks the deck against that effort.

Hugh White: Yeah, both points are really important. I’m not enough of an economist to do more than venture this as an observation, but to the extent that China’s GDP is made up of people making things, whereas America’s GDP is made up of people doing financial deals or designing social media, I do think it gives China an advantage, at least in… You know, in the end, strategic rivalry, and particularly warfare, is a very physical thing. And I think China has a big advantage there.

But the second point you make is something I think is extremely important, and that is that the strategic competition between the US and China is profoundly asymmetrical — because the United States at least pretends to itself that it’s trying to preserve a global military predominance; all China is trying to do is to stop America achieving that predominance in its own backyard.

So it has the advantages of location: it’s operating from home bases rather than having to project power a long way; it’s got the advantage of focus: all its efforts focused right close to home, whereas America’s operating globally.

It’s also got a very big operational advantage, just as a result of the trends in military technology stretching back many decades. It’s a lot harder to project power by sea and air than it is to stop someone projecting power by sea and air. So the fact that America has to send forces into the Western Pacific and China just has to stop them doing that gives China a huge advantage. The balance between offence and defence in maritime warfare overwhelmingly favours the defensive, which is China’s position in a US–China conflict.

And lastly, of course, it just cares more. The balance of resolve favours China in East Asia the way it favours Russia in Ukraine.

Those four asymmetries together, all favouring China, mean that even if America could overcome China’s growing advantage in material power, it would still face an overwhelmingly uphill battle, and it has no imperative to do so.

We live in a multipolar world; we've got to make a multipolar world work

Hugh White: If you’re Japan in Asia, or Australia for that matter, or if you’re the European NATO countries in Europe, you’ve got to ask yourself not, “Do you like living under US leadership?” — of course for US allies today, sustained US leadership is by far and away the best outcome. But the question is not is that what you want? The question is: “Do you want it enough to be willing to bear the costs and risks of going to war or persuading the Chinese that you’re willing to go to war with them? Or persuading the Russians that you’re willing to go to war with them?”

And I think the answer is no, they don’t. For example, if you’re sitting in Japan, you don’t like the idea of living in an Asia in which America has departed and Japan has to look after its own security vis-à-vis China, because that’s much harder than what the Japanese have been used to. But is it harder than lining yourself up to go to fight with the United States a war against China — which, even with Japan’s help, the United States can’t win?

It’s worth bearing in mind, just pausing and asking: what counts as winning a war with China? We know what counted as winning a war with Japan in the Second World War: it meant occupying Tokyo and rebuilding the Japanese system of government from the ground up. We know what winning the war with Germany meant in the Second World War: it meant occupying Berlin, destroying the political structure of Germany, and actually rebuilding the German political system from the ground up.

Here’s a prediction: the United States will never occupy Beijing. It will not happen. So you’ve got to ask yourself — even with Japan, even with the whole of NATO — particularly given that China has nuclear weapons that can hit American cities, what can you do to China which counts as that kind of win?

I think the fact is that the logic that America’s position vis-à-vis China in Asia, or for that matter, vis-à-vis Russia in Europe, can be solved by all of those countries ganged together, it does not lower the cost and risk to the United States of doing what’s required enough to swing the balance between costs and benefits that we talked about right at the beginning back to the benefit side.

In the end, living in a multipolar world is not that bad. We need to learn to manage that multipolar world, and it is going to be harder than living in the unipolar world we used to hope that we had. But we don’t have that unipolar world, and there’s no good going to war with countries like Russia and China in the hope of getting it back. We live in a multipolar world. We’ve got to make a multipolar world work. And that means accepting, reluctantly, that countries like Russia and China are going to have a lot of influence over the way the world works. That’s the logic of power.

Trump is half-right that the US was being ripped off

Hugh White: If America has supported the security of its allies, because that’s been in America’s interest during the Cold War, it’s kept that going since then because it thought it wasn’t going to cost it anything.

Now it’s becoming clear that preserving its position, defending those allies — allies in Europe from Russia, allies in Asia from China — is going to cost it real money and real risk, then to the extent that allies continue to depend on the United States, they are ripping America off.

I mean, why should America defend Japan when Japan can defend itself? Why should they defend the Europeans when they can defend themselves?

And I don’t think there’s an argument that the countervailing benefit is that America gets these benefits from its allies — because it could get them anyway. Foreign students aren’t going to stop coming to the United States; brainy people aren’t going to stop going to work in Silicon Valley just because the United States has stopped functioning as an ally.

I think one of the points here is that one of the problems we have — we US allies, I mean — is that the alliance has dominated and framed our relationship with the United States for so long, we find it hard to imagine what it would be like to have a relationship with the United States that wasn’t based on an alliance. This is certainly true in Australia, but I think it’s also true in Europe and Japan. But the fact is we can have very big and important and beneficial bilateral relations with the United States when the United States is no longer our security guarantor.

Just to take a historical example from Australia’s experience: we used to depend on Britain for our security, and then Britain gave it up for reasons that are not unlike the reasons America’s giving it up. But we still maintained a very strong relationship with Britain — quite deep, quite complex, very mutually beneficial.

We US allies, as we contemplate living in a multipolar world in which the United States is no longer playing the role in our security that we’ve been used to, should be working hard to build the best possible post-alliance relationship with America we can. Again, I don’t think that’s that hard. I’m not that pessimistic. …

Rob Wiblin: So do you think it’s possible that the US might, in fact, in some ways, get along better with a country like Australia if it doesn’t perceive Australia as kind of mooching? And maybe Trump would respect a country that sort of broke away and said it was going to take responsibility?

Hugh White: I think that’s right. In the conversation in Australia, people have said, “What should we be saying to Trump?” My argument is we should be saying to them, “Don’t worry, mate, we’re not going to depend on you anymore. We’re going to do it ourselves.”

But I think Australia is a less interesting case in that context than, say, the Europeans or Japan, because we’re so far from any potential source of threat that people don’t take our dependence on the United States very seriously. I think that’s a misinterpretation of our strategic situation, but that’s certainly the way people… You know, it doesn’t cost America much to defend Australia. For example, until very recently at least, there have been no US forces based on Australian territory — whereas there are tens of thousands of US forces in Europe and tens of thousands of US forces in Japan.

And I actually think it would remove a structural irritant in those relations if the United States was not spending billions of dollars to provide security for those countries that they could provide for themselves. So I think your basic proposition is quite correct.

Europe is strong enough to take on Russia, except it lacks nuclear deterrence

Rob Wiblin: How do the Europeans credibly push back against Russian nuclear blackmail if Russia indicates that it’s willing to use tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in order to achieve its goals in those neighbouring countries and to bring them under its sort of hegemony?

Europe does have nuclear weapons — it has them in Britain and France — but does anyone really believe, do the Russians truly believe that the French or the British would accept a meaningful risk of a nuclear war in order to defend Estonia? No one really believes that. But how can you create that credible deterrent?

Hugh White: That is exactly right. It is a very serious question for the Europeans, and it’s a question they will have to answer.

My sort of gloomy prognosis is that the Europeans will end up conceding to Russia whatever they can’t convince the Russians they’re willing to fight a nuclear war to deny them. We’ve now established beyond a shadow of doubt that they’re not prepared to fight a nuclear war to deny Russia at least the four oblasts that Russia now claims, and I would suspect Ukraine as a whole.

That’s a very gloomy conclusion to draw for Ukraine. Is there any reason to expect that they think differently about, for example, the Baltic states? I don’t think so, actually. That’s a sad thing to say.

I think Poland actually is the critical one — because Poland’s the road to Germany, and Germany is the heart of Europe. But it’s a decision that will have to be taken. It’s not a new problem for Europe. Ever since Peter the Great brought Russia into Europe as a great power at the beginning of the 17th century, one of the great questions of European politics has been, how far west do you allow Russia to come?

And Russia has come a long way. In 1814, Russia was in Paris. From 1945 until 1991, it was in Berlin. For most of the 19th century, it was halfway across Poland. So at some point, the Europeans are going to have to decide, “This is the point at which we’re going to stop Russia.”

And in order to stop Russia, they have to be able to credibly threaten nuclear retaliation against Russia for Russia’s nuclear use. Now, we know this is not impossible. That’s what the United States did all through the Cold War. It stopped the Russians in the middle of Berlin and along the Iron Curtain line by credibly threatening to Russia that it would use nuclear weapons to stop them.

So the Europeans have got to do something of the same to contain Russia’s ambitions. And the question for the Europeans is just where is it going to draw that line? That’s a terribly painful, difficult question. I don’t think it’s going to be Ukraine. I just find it hard to imagine how I would argue, were I sitting in Brussels, that the Baltic states are worth fighting a nuclear war with Russia over. I do think I could make the argument for Poland.

But the question is not so much where they draw that line, but recognising that what’s required to draw that line is an absolute determination. And it needs not just nuclear weapons: you also need to have very substantial conventional forces there as well.

And of course, the other point is that if Europe doesn’t do that collectively, then countries will have to do it individually.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. You leave off in the essay saying this is the core challenge that Europe faces, and the question that they’re going to have to answer.

I guess my amateur answer to this question would be that probably there is no other way other than for either Germany or Poland to acquire nuclear weapons, and to have their finger on the button themselves, so that Russia would believe that Poland might use nuclear weapons if Poland was invaded. That is kind of credible, given their history, so that would work. And possibly Germany might as well.

Hugh White: I’m normally a pretty gloomy person, but let me be just uncharacteristically optimistic. I’m a great fan of what Europe has achieved since 1945. I think the EU is a remarkable achievement. So I don’t think we should underestimate the possibility that Europe might surprise us again, and create a cohesive European strategic identity which can credibly use nuclear weapons collectively to defend wherever it decides to define its frontiers.

I think that would be a better outcome than individual countries in Europe getting their own nuclear weapons. So I wouldn’t be prepared to rule that out as a possibility, but I agree it’s very hard.

Rob Wiblin: The core challenge there is that would require either Britain or France to accept that the final decision about whether to use their nuclear weapons might be made by either a foreigner or by some sort of pan-European Committee. And you know, France might not want to tolerate a nuclear war, but Poland and Germany are in favour. It’s going to happen. That’s a tall order.

Hugh White: It is a horrifically tall order. And the evidence we have so far — for example, in the comments that French President Macron has made about the application of the French nuclear deterrent to Ukraine — suggests that at least Macron is not up for it.

So I think the model that Britain and France retain control of their sovereign nuclear capabilities and somehow sublet them to a European collective process, I think you’re right: I don’t think that can work. What you would need would be a European political authority which controlled its own nuclear weapons.

Now, whether those weapons were provided by France and Britain because they already have the capability, that becomes, if you like, just a sort of technical question. But they would not be French or British nuclear weapons. They would have to be European nuclear weapons with a capital E. That would have to be, and I agree it’s an extraordinarily tall order.

I’ll just say that, if I was sitting in Europe at the moment, I’d much prefer that outcome to one in which the Poles decide they have to go their own way, and then the Finns go their own way, and the Swedes go their own way, and the Germans go their own way. That feels more difficult.

A multipolar world is bad, but better than the alternative: nuclear war

Rob Wiblin: Do you want to make the case that a more peaceful multipolarity, with multiple regional great powers that largely respect one another’s spheres of influence, that that is not so bad? And that we will reasonably choose not to go to war in order to avoid it, because in fact it is an acceptable outcome?

Hugh White: Well, I don’t want to be too Pollyanna-ish about this. The only claim I think I have to make is that it’s better than the alternative, which is escalating strategic rivalry between nuclear-armed great powers and a growing risk of nuclear war. So I’m setting the bar pretty low.

And it is a pretty bad future. It’s a future in which Ukraine, for example, seems likely to be subordinated to Russia. It’s a future in which Taiwan is likely to be subordinated to China. It’s a future in which countries like Japan, if they want to preserve their position in a Chinese-dominated region, are going to have to acquire their own nuclear weapons, I think. It is a world in which I think, amongst other things, nuclear proliferation is going to take off.

So it’s a darker world. It’s just not as dark as the world in which the United States, with or without a whole lot of allies, attempts to preserve the unipolar order by trying to contain those countries. Because I don’t think that’s a competition we can win.

And I think that’s what we’ve learned in Ukraine. The fact is that America and its allies — European allies, of course, but also allies like Australia — have been very clear and I think accurate in saying that what’s at stake in Ukraine is not just a terribly important issue for Ukrainians, but the future of the old global order. And yet we have not been willing to bear the costs and risks that would be required to defend Ukraine.

It became clear a long time ago that Ukraine couldn’t defeat Russia and push Russia out of Ukraine, even with military support from the West, from its allies, from its friends. What would have been required would have been allied forces fighting on Ukrainian territory, and that’s not something that anyone’s prepared to do — precisely because, to go back to what we talked about before, in the end, A, the war itself at the conventional level would be horrendously costly, but B, and I think in particular, in the end it would come down to a nuclear confrontation — and that was a nuclear confrontation that we couldn’t convincingly win.

So I think it is a very difficult world to live in. It’s just not as difficult as the alternative. Having said that, how difficult it is to live in depends a lot on how the process of transition is managed.

Multipolar orders can be quite stable. To look at the best example: the Concert of Europe in the 19th century that emerged after the Napoleonic wars, in which Europe’s five great powers had a very stable set of relationships. There were lots of crises and some quite big wars, but no one power tried to dominate Europe throughout the 19th century, from the defeat of Napoleon to the First World War. One of the reasons for that was that the countries in Europe didn’t just accept one another; they all agreed that none of them would try to dominate. And that it wasn’t just a balance of power; it was an actual sort of mutual understanding.

If the great powers of today’s multipolar order can learn to work with one another like that, then it might not be too bad. I think one of the mistakes we make at the moment is that instead of, as we are in the West, America and its allies focusing on trying to preserve the US-led unipolar order, what we should be doing is focusing on trying to manage the transition to a multipolar order, and design a multipolar order that works as well as possible — to put it one way: that looks as much like the multipolar order of Europe in the 19th century as possible, and as little like the multipolar order of Europe in the 17th century as possible.

Taiwan's position is essentially indefensible — and the rest of the world needs to be honest with them about that

Hugh White: You know, for small powers going up against great powers, what counts as a win is raising the costs and risks to the great power to the point that they don’t bother. And that’s a perfectly valid thing to do. But I think the problem for Taiwan is that no matter what it does, it can’t raise the costs and risks high enough in view of China’s imperative.

But the other point is, I’ve never thought that invasion was the most probable Chinese operational option. Taiwan is tailor made for blockade: it’s very easy for the Chinese to prevent any ship or aircraft approaching Taiwan and simply cut it off. Of course, it doesn’t cut it off. It simply says ships and aircraft can approach Taiwan from China. And I think it does put China in an overwhelmingly powerful position.

So I agree an amphibious invasion would be very difficult. I think even with a maximal Taiwanese effort, it would be extremely difficult for the Taiwanese to defeat that, but it would still be a very costly operation — because, as you say, both the sea distances and the scale would be a very big deal. But I don’t think that’s what the Chinese need to do.

So I think Taiwan’s position is essentially indefensible. I think the challenge that poses for the rest of us is how honest we are with Taiwan about the chances of us giving them support. There’s quite a strong view in the US — and for that matter, in Australia and in other countries, including countries in Europe — that it would be improper to come out and say out loud now that we won’t help defend Taiwan, because that might provoke or encourage the Chinese. But the other side to that is that it’s very improper for us to encourage the Taiwanese to think that we’ll come to their aid if we won’t.

I personally think that it’s more important to be honest with the Taiwanese so the Taiwanese can manage their relations with China accordingly, rather than to encourage them to think that they’ll get support from us when they won’t.

Now, one thing you’d have to say about Donald Trump is that he’s been relatively unambiguous about his lack of support for Taiwan, and I don’t imagine the Taiwanese can be under much illusion about that.

Rob Wiblin: I think something that is unique about Taiwan, and might make it vitally important to the United States in a way that Ukraine certainly isn’t, is that about 70% to 90% of the best cutting-edge chips that are necessary for training and deploying AI models are manufactured in Taiwan.

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That has tempted some people in the US to say we actually have to defend Taiwan, if only for that single reason — because Taiwan is providing almost all of these chips to us, and now it’s not providing them to China. If this all fell under Chinese control… Although the plants would probably be destroyed, and wouldn’t be operative once China took over. But this does raise the benefits side of the column for the United States in trying to prevent a blockade by China. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Hugh White: I do. The first point to note is it tells you something about Taiwan that it’s achieved this position. I think one does just have to sort of pause and salute: what a remarkable achievement.

But two points. The first is the one you touched on: that the smart thing for the United States is not to defend Taiwan, but to make sure that they’ve destroyed the fabs. That’s a very grim and gloomy proposition, but it’s a lot easier to destroy the fabs than it would be to defend Taiwan.

The second point is that it would be an illusion to imagine that denying China access to the Taiwanese fabs makes a big difference to China’s long-term capacity to build this stuff for themselves. I mean, we’ve seen this in the last four years, eight years nearly now, as America has tried to cut off China’s access to US-designed chips. The Chinese have gone around the business, as everyone could have predicted they would, of expanding their own capability. I expect that trend to continue. So I think if you went to war with China to deny them the product of the Taiwanese chip industry, you’d be winning a very temporary victory.

And the third point is of course that you have to balance the benefits to America of denying China those chips temporarily, against the costs of fighting a war. And I’ll go back to something we’ve touched on before: this is not a war America can win as a conventional war. It’s therefore a war which is almost certain to result either in American defeat or a nuclear exchange — a nuclear exchange in which American cities could be lost.

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And I don’t think an American president sitting in the situation room at 3:00 in the morning being presented with the arguments pro and con for whether America should go to war with China to defend Taiwan in the event that the Chinese trying to implement a blockade, or an invasion for that matter, would really find themselves saying, “Oh yes, it’s the chips that really matter.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that it’s sufficient. And we can’t find some other way or some other workaround to try to manufacture them more domestically. Or destroy the fabs, as you say.

Hugh White: Exactly.

AGI may or may not overcome existing nuclear deterrence

Rob Wiblin: I think that’s one thing that is problematic about the idea of, “We’ll just rush up to producing AGI ourselves, and then dictate terms to China”: China will be observing this, and has nuclear weapons. And in such a situation, its nuclear blackmail could be credible — because you would be basically threatening to leave it in a permanently weakened state.

Hugh White: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Also, we have to recognise that all of that might happen, but it might not. Because we do have to make choices, and we have to make choices in the next few years.

The question is: can we make those choices on an expectation that unipolarity will be preserved by that kind of revolution? I don’t think we can. I think the evidence is too sketchy. And one’s got to strike a balance here: one doesn’t want to be a Luddite and say none of this is going to make any difference, but one also has to recognise that people tend to predict… The old market joke: they predict 10 out of the last two military revolutions.

Anyone who lived in this business in the 1990s will remember the talk about the revolution in military affairs: the application of that generation of information and communications technology was going to fundamentally revolutionise the way battlefields worked. Well, it didn’t. Until now — and actually really what’s revolutionised it has been batteries to power drones.

But there’s some factors here. For example, drones: because they rely on battery power, have limited payloads, and in the end they’re just carrying high explosive. And the fact is, high explosive is not very hard to beat. You just have to spend a bit of money on steel and concrete.

So you’re right about volume: that can make a difference if it’s realised and if it’s asymmetrical. If America were to achieve it and the Chinese weren’t, then it might have that effect.

But precisely as you say, in the process, the options for the Chinese to preempt seem to me to be very strong. And in the end, the imperatives for America to do this… Why should America, if it has this capacity, why should it exercise it in order to preserve a leadership in East Asia which it doesn’t need?

Rob Wiblin: Well, I think people are thinking even broader here: that they might want to maintain global hegemony indefinitely. That that’s somewhat the vision of where this might play out. But I guess you’re saying like, why risk so much for something where you can live a perfectly comfortable life without it?

Hugh White: Why would they want it? Why not just make the American health system work? You know, why is this America’s priority? I mean, apart from anything else, is America’s political system going to deliver this?

Rob Wiblin: In what sense?

Hugh White: This sort of stuff doesn’t happen without it being organised. And it’s not clear to me that it can be organised. It would require a massive, kind of a Manhattan Project–style focus, and I don’t see —

Rob Wiblin: Which people talk about. It has been discussed in congressional hearings, but I guess it hasn’t eventuated yet. And it’s a lot easier to talk about a Manhattan Project than to implement one.

Hugh White: Precisely. There is a real question about the capacity of the American political system today to deliver serious policy outcomes. What people cite is Operation Warp Speed. And it doesn’t count for nothing, but actually it’s a pretty modest achievement compared to what we’re talking about.

Of course, on the other hand, the United States, in its peculiar way, has produced the revolution we’ve seen so far. The conversation we’re having, if you like. The way in which the internet and all the things that flow from it have evolved since the 1990s is a phenomenon. So never say never.

But what we’re talking about here is not something broad and globalised and unstructured: it’s the application of these technologies to very specific national strategic purposes. That takes organisation and leadership — of which I don’t think the United States today is capable. Or put it this way: it doesn’t look like it’s capable.

And it would be interesting to contemplate what kinds of changes in the US political system would be necessary to produce that kind of capacity. You might not like the answer. What kind of leader in America could produce this kind of outcome?

Rob Wiblin: I mean, there’s a surprising bipartisan consensus on at least being willing to talk tough about China and interest in investing in technology.

Hugh White: Bipartisan consensus to talk tough about China? That’s easy. Have you seen any US political leader stand up and say, “In order to preserve our position vis-à-vis China, we need to be prepared to fight a nuclear war with China, which would involve nuclear attacks on American cities”? Until they say that, I won’t take them seriously.

Because that’s what they said in the Cold War. When Kennedy confronted Khrushchev over Berlin in 1961, he went on national television across all networks and said, “We will defend West Berlin, and if necessary, we’ll fight a nuclear war to do it. And this might mean nuclear attacks on American cities.” That’s leadership. No one in America talks like that about China today. And that’s why I don’t take them very seriously.

Rob Wiblin: Right. I guess it would be hard for them to get up and say that on TV, especially like, “We want to engage in a disarming first strike against China to disable their nuclear weapons.” Because people would say, “Why are you doing this? Why is this so necessary? This sounds awfully risky, doesn’t it? Can’t we just chill out?”

Hugh White: Going back to where we almost began this conversation: during the Cold War, there was a very clear answer as to why it was necessary for America to do that. Now, one can have an interesting debate today, and one could have an interesting debate then, about whether they were right.

But they had an answer — and it was an answer which persuaded the vast bulk of Americans, and which mobilised the Americans to spend in the ’50s 10% of GDP on defence, and right through the Cold War, 6% and 7% and 8% of GDP on defence, and to willingly, knowingly accept the appalling risk of a full-scale nuclear exchange which would devastate dozens and dozens of American cities.

And I think people talk about a new Cold War, but they’ve forgotten what the old Cold War really involved, and how it needed to be supported by very clear arguments in the American public. And that’s just not happened. So I’m entirely unpersuaded that there is anything in current US political leadership that recognises what would be necessary to mobilise not a rhetorical but a genuine strategic confrontation of China, and can explain why it’s worth doing. I don’t think it is.