Having listened to this discussion twice over now, mostly while on the bicycle, I just wanted to follow up with a few comments.
The first is both comment and clarification: although Hugh White has spent the last quarter-century or so writing and speaking about the implications of a rising China for Australia, this discussion rarely addresses China directly, though brief analogies between historical events and contemporary circumstances are made with some regularity. Rather, the discussion is White's account of the works that have shaped his intellectual worldview. At one point White addresses this obvious China-shaped lacuna in the manner that would be expected of a realist: by pointing to the structural similarities shared between otherwise distinct nations, cultures and eras of history.
Of the books discussed, E.H. Carr's 'The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939' is the only one I've read. There's a line from Carr that has always remained with me, as he attempted to navigate a path between the contrasting dangers of supposed "objective" history on the one hand, and an unbound relativism or narrative imagination on the other. I'm probably paraphrasing a little here: "Just because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different aspects, does not mean that it therefore has an infinity of shapes, or no shape at all."
Having read bits and pieces of Kennan over the years (mostly from 'The Kennan Diaries'), I was surprised to hear in this discussion that Kennan devotes a considerable portion of 'American Diplomacy' to examining the course of American relations with Japan, including in relation to its conduct in China. Previously, my impression had been that Kennan's attention was largely devoted to Russia, the Soviet Union, and the European aspect of the Cold War.
Folks might enjoy
. I've paraphrased for brevity:
While I don't anticipate that more than a few people are really interested in a >4hr discussion, I think White's
are worth attending to, as he sweeps across and brings together a number of different strands of the perspective that he has articulated at greater length elsewhere: the growth in China's power that currently makes Australia so uncomfortable will be joined in future decades by the growth of India and Indonesia. That the United States will likely not continue to play the strategic role in Asia that it has in decades past. That adaptation to these circumstances will require Australians to re-evaluate how we conceive of ourselves and our nation. That Australia's political class appears incapable of seriously attending to these matters beyond the presumption of ongoing American supremacy, and that AUKUS is a leading exhibit of this failure of imagination.