Hugh White is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He studies Australian strategic and defence policy, and the regional and global security issues that most directly affect Australia. He has worked on Australian strategic, defence and foreign-policy issues for thirty years in a number of capacities inside and outside government, including the Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Department of Defence 1995–2000, an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and to Kim Beazley. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. His recent publications include How to Defend Australia (2019, Black Inc.) and Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing, published in Quarterly Essay39 (2010). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.
On 17 November 2011, President Barack Obama quoted Banjo Paterson to an audience of Australian and American military personnel at RAAF Base Darwin. He recited a question that Paterson posed about Australia in a poem he wrote to celebrate Federation in 1901: ‘Hath she the strength for the burden laid upon her, hath she the power to protect and guard her own?’ The question haunts us still. Obama ... (read more)
Beyond American failure in Iraq lies a second, deeper failure. America’s Iraq project was always intended by its proponents not just to fix Iraq and transform the Middle East, but also to demonstrate a new grand policy concept for the twenty-first century. This was the Bush Doctrine, enshrining the now-familiar ideas of the neo-conservatives: America’s power, especially its military power, is ... (read more)
Scott Morrison does not like to explain the decisions he makes on our behalf. Sometimes he just refuses to discuss them, as he did when, as immigration minister, he simply rejected any questions about how his boat-turnback policy was being implemented at sea. At other times he is a little subtler, as he has been this year while presiding over what will probably prove to be the most consequential s ... (read more)
It is easy to believe, in the glad confident morning of the new presidency, that not being George W. Bush will be enough: that to restore America’s place in the world, Barack Obama need only avoid the mistakes and repudiate the misdeeds of his discredited predecessor. If so, his task will be easy, and this book may help. But what if something more is needed?
America and the World, produced at s ... (read more)
Sometime around 1820, forty years after its Industrial Revolution began, Britain overtook China to become the world’s richest country. Sometime between now and 2020, forty years after China’s own Industrial Revolution was launched by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China is set to overtake the United States and regain its place at the top of the world’s economy.
... (read more)
