Kevin Rudd's The Avoidable War

Australia's 'Washington intellectual' on China

Greetings from a long-planned family vacation. I finished listening to The Avoidable War on the flight out of Australia and wrote this either in airport or ferry transit or waiting for wife. Such is life. Also check out this podcast I recorded with Michael Frazis on the new fund.

I read

Murtaza Hussain

’s review of Kevin Rudd’s new book and thought: I wonder what that bloke’s been up to since he ran the federal Australian Labor Party into the ground and precipitated a decade of Coalition rule.

From afar, Rudd’s been living his best life: a cushy gig as Australian Ambassador to the US, mincing about the Washington social circuit rubbing shoulders with Washington types, reading and writing as he pleases. Surely one of the best gigs in (post-)political life.

So I read his book on China and it’s so extremely Rudd. He’s always been a smart, earnest little wonk. That slightly smarmy, strongly opinionated, hard-working type who nevertheless seems to miss the grander picture and is always annoyed at being brushed aside.

A Washington intellectual from Down Under

Rudd’s view of the world is unerringly textbook. He writes exactly as you’d expect a Western politician to write history. There isn’t a grain of subversion. It’s all straight down the fairway Official History™. (Cf. Clinton Fernando’s excellent and highly ‘unofficial’ — if in many ways misguided — Sub-Imperial Power.)

T. Greer

recently wrote an excellent piece comparing Silicon Valley and Washington intellectuals:

If the Washington intellectual aims for authority and expertise, the Silicon Valley intellectual seeks novel or counter-intuitive insights. He claims to judge ideas on their utility; in practice I find he cares mostly for how interesting an idea seems at first glance. He likes concepts that force him to puzzle and ponder.

I’m no ‘Silicon Valley intellectual’, but I admit I’m extremely partial to the kind of insight-porn that Greer alludes to. (On China, one might take Peter Thiel’s sublimely cutting description of Chinese soft power projection: China is weirdly autistic.) Maybe I place too much of a premium on whether an insight is interesting over whether it is true. (I’m not entirely convinced there’s a trade-off — isn’t it interesting because it alludes to a hidden truth?). Rudd falls squarely into the ‘Washington intellectual’ camp. He is all about his little hill in Washington. He didn’t spend 3 years in China and 7 years in the US and some years as Australian Prime Minister to not gel those into the Wise-Impartial-Mandarin-Speaking-Bridge-Between-East-And-West hill.  

Rudd coiled over his Wise-Impartial-Mandarin-Speaking-Bridge-Between-East-And-West Washington hill…

He speaks Mandarin. He’s met Xi Jinping (several times), has got drunk with Chinese generals, he speaks Mandarin, lived in China for three years, oh and did I (he) mention he speaks Mandarin? And so he has a unique and privileged vantage point on the US / China conflict. You might even call him an honest interlocutor, an impartial bloke from Down Under who just loves America (but not Trump) and is a deep admirer of Chinese civilisation. But if you think this will provide some new way of considering the emerging conflict between a rising and an incumbent hegemon, you’ll be disappointed.

What China Wants

Rudd’s is an extremely conventional take on Chinese and American histories and geopolitics. He can chalk out the continuity between the current Chinese regime and whichever earlier imperial dynasties as a nice little flex. He will tell you the exact number of near-collisions between US and Chinese ships in 2021. Rudd’s book is a distillation of every The Economist and The New York Times piece on China of the last 2 decades. I’m not especially well informed on China, but I reckon if you put a gun to my head I’d come up with a very similar list to Rudd’s proprietary take on Chinese priorities, in order of importance:

1. The centrality of Xi and the party and the hard business of staying in power

2. Maintaining and securing national unity

3. Growing the Chinese economy

4. Environmental sustainability

5. Modernizing the military

6. Managing China’s neighbouring states

7. Securing China’s maritime periphery in East Asia and the west Pacific

8. Securing China’s western continental periphery

9. Increasing Chinese leverage across the developing world

10. Rewriting the global rules-based order

Rudd is very proud of his list — he claims he has shown it to Chinese officials who flatter him with their obfuscations. Sure, Rudd fills each item with greater resolution than could you or I, as well as some anecdotes (they’re not even anecdotes – he merely gives examples of access and name drops). But it’s exactly the history and perspective you would expect from a centre / centre-left Western official.

(Here is Greer’s The Five Fundamentals of Chinese Grand Strategy, which puts similar weight on the CCP’s economic focus, but is more singular about the role of technology and Taiwan. It’s not so inconsistent with Rudd’s framing, but I find this reduced focus more useful.)

CCP Strength and Fragility

Unintentionally, Rudd’s portrait of the CCP struck me as fragile. The CCP’s obsession with maintaining power and the subordination of its entire economic and social project to that end makes the CCP appear weak. Parties in the US come in and out of power but the regime of elites and their dispersion between geographies (DC, NYC, LA, SF, etc) and industries (finance, media, tech, oil, etc) seems a much more flexible and stable equilibrium. Not so China, where Xi has ended a decade of purging to concentrate power further in his hands. The economy and the fate of any man within it is entirely subject to his whim. That does not strike me as a recipe for growth, for technological innovation, for social enrichment, for long term political stability.¹

It’s very seductive to be dismissive of the Chinese project as alien as it is to what we have seen done in the West in the last century. China remains constrained geographically, abutted on all sides by hostile-enough states — Japan, India, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam. And yet its enormous new cities, infrastructure programs, and military capabilities have been on the ascendant. I was shocked to learn that Taiwan wargaming has not favoured the US.² Peter Zeihan has been wishcasting Chinese decline for at least a decade(s?). But I do suspect we tend to project wisdom and foresight on the mysterious and Eastern Chinese, especially considering the buffoonery that is on open display across liberal democratic governments every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if hyper-concentrated control in the hands of a powerful communist party that took its Marxist-Leninist doctrine seriously was exactly what it sounded like: madness doomed to fail.

Rudd’s Trump Derangement Syndrome

Xi has visited Latin America and the Caribbean five times. By contrast, President Trump only traveled to the region once during his entire presidency—and that was to participate in a G20 Summit in Buenos Aires.

— Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War

Rudd is at his most damning when it comes to Trump:

Most of the world would welcome [American reengagement with multilateral institutions], not least in the context of the trail of diplomatic wreckage still left behind by the Trump administration across human rights, sustainable development, nuclear security, trade, and climate. The damage to brand America in the eyes of the world has been extensive, as for four long years, the United States wrought havoc across the very multilateral institutions that it painstakingly created as the essential machinery of the postwar international order.

Yet Rudd is completely neutral in his description of Xi’s total control over his nation. Harsh words of breaking international norms are reserved for the US politician who didn’t rock up to some meetings in Latin America or whatever, and not for the dictator of a one-party state singularly focused on indefinite total rule. Perhaps he must hold back if he wants to retain his Sino-privileges. Or perhaps as a lifelong Sinophile Rudd can no longer see the water he swims in and is Sino-captured, finding the aberrative Trump more offensive to his sense of normal than decades of Chinese ethno-communist autocracy. 

Rudd goes into Trump’s China policies in some detail, but he doesn’t credit him with the biggest turn of all: the fundamental shift in America’s posture towards China. However rhetorically or tactically misguided Trump’s antics, surely Trump’s turn from China — continued under Biden — is the bedrock anti-China achievement of the last decade or more.

Rudd’s Proposal: Managed Strategic Competition

…they would likely carry out a global contest for hearts and minds—with Washington stressing the importance of democracy, open economies, and human rights and Beijing highlighting the advantages of authoritarian capitalism and what it calls the China development model.

Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War

Rudd’s grand proposal to mitigate great power conflict is what he calls “Managed Strategic Competition” (he neither capitalises this term nor puts it in quotations, but it sounds capitalised and in quotations in the audiobook so I will leave it capitalised in this piece). This is a term he coins, and this is only something he or someone deep within the bowels of academia would coin. It has the same total lack of charisma Prime Minister Rudd’s pronouncements were famous for (remember “detailed programmatic specificity”?). Listening to the audiobook makes this point comically obvious — try saying Managed Strategic Competition over and over. You won’t find any

Venkatesh Rao

-esque halluco-generative coinage (premium mediocre, cozytech). No, we are stuck with Managed Strategic Competition which is so banal a sequence of words it’s amazing one’s allowed to claim it, let alone would want to. (Rudd’s most colourful language is reserved for Trump invective: “Trump’s orgy of protectionism”.) Anyway, what Rudd proposes is a set of rules that would allow each of the US and China to compete for influence around the world in a “global contest for hearts and minds”, cognisant of each side’s “red lines”, to avoid accidentally triggering war or to at least de-escalate easier. This is fine, but seems a highly theoretical and weak railing against hegemonic conflict. There’s also something between naïve and repulsive about an agnostic ‘let the best team win’ approach to China. We have principles and the CCP’s brand of ethno-fascist totalitarianism should be repulsive to us and to Rudd, without blandishing over America’s many faults.

…the US during the Trump era withdrew from and then disempowered the very international system that was designed to provide an alternative way forward from the world of hard power spheres of influence.

Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War

That said, even Rudd’s framing of America’s and China’s respective global projections are naïve. For him “Washington stress[es] the importance of democracy, open economies, and human rights” while China emphasises an authoritarian capitalism. First, it’s not obvious at all that China is projecting an alternative ideological model, as opposed to just leveraging its economic heft as a bulwark against US power. Second, it seems Rudd believes unironically in the rules-based order as a genuine alternative to US hegemony rather than an exercise of it. (In addition to Fernandes’ book noted above I recommend Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy by Stephen Wertheim). Perhaps Rudd is simply rolling out the establishment line in his role as diplomatic functionary. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Rudd really is the autistic technocrat he sounds like. This would also explain his wrath being reserved exclusively for Trump, who was contemptuous towards multilateral institutions. Of course Rudd took that personally — Rudd is a creature and purveyor of such institutions, of endless meetings and acronyms. The charge of their irrelevance or of being entirely instrumental to US hegemony would undermine his self-conception as a wheeling dealing diplomat from Down Under. I imagine he does not consider himself the former Prime Minister of — in geopolitical terms — a US forward operating base, let alone a diplomat from one. That Trump saw Rudd’s favourite multilateral institutions for the Eunuch Moots™ they are and Rudd blustered at this diminution is thus entirely understandable.

Straussian Rudd?

It’s unclear just how sincerely one should read Rudd’s work. A Straussian take might be that he wants open competition because it’s one the US will win. The CCP is buying global influence with its economic heft, but has it even tried to export culture or ideology? Tiny South Korea surely exports 100x as much cultural energy with its K-Pop and TV shows than China. He only trashes Trump but not Xi because that is the acceptable posture on the world stage, and in particular with his Australian Labor Party and US Democrat and Chinese Communist Party constituents and friends. Does he truly believe that position? I’d guess yes — it would flatter his own expertise in the country and Sinophilia to flatter the current (and better part of a century) regime in the CCP. But maybe not. Maybe beneath the Trump flagellation and feigned CCP-neutrality he harbours a message to Western readers following decades of Chinese study.

Same ol’ Rudd

Rudd ends in a projection of his centre-left id:

Just as Xi’s political success depends on keeping China’s citizens content, the corollary for the United States of any such trade liberalization agenda must be expanding the tent of economic equality and opportunity for all Americans at home. Working families will not support any trade and investment liberalization agenda unless they see advantages for themselves through lower prices, good jobs, better wages, and radically improved universal education, health care, and environmental standards.

Why does he write like this? Has he been binging The West Wing? Perhaps it’s an old tick? “Working families” was a well-slopped term of his turbulent Australian political years that hasn’t been around for a decade. Is there anything else he’d like to project onto the will of the American people? Surprised he didn’t call for gun control and abortion rights.

Hussain is right about one thing: Rudd’s book is ultimately pessimistic. His portrait of Chinese ambition and US intransigence seems real enough, even if his diplomatic straitjacket proposal in Managed Strategic Competition seems weak and inadequate. One gets the sense Rudd wrote his book at the peak of the American declinist zeitgeist in 2020 – 2021 amidst American institutional derangements, violent disorder and chaos in the streets, discredited media and health organs, a chaotic end to American adventurism in the Middle East, and the abandonment of billions in American armaments. But since then: the war in Ukraine has brought Europe closer to America and revealed the lingering reality of hard power, and advances in AI seem to be an almost entirely American frontier with enormous promise. Perhaps many billions of Chinese investment in home-grown tech will pay off — or perhaps they will run into Chinese political suppression. The CCP has not yet been able to create its own Silicon Valley, at least in part because in China, thou shalt have no other god but the CCP.

P.S Rudd’s (extremely successful businesswoman) wife still holds the title for one of the top tweets ever. To think he’s had the Taiwan semiconductor solution under his nose this whole time…

1. More on Chinese rigidity. Does Chinese “analytic framework” strike you as “sophisticated” or… idiotic? I wish “good Marxist” readings of history and strategy on all my enemies:

But while China’s understanding of modern America may be imperfect, it is more disciplined and sophisticated than what we find today among Washington political elites in their understanding of what actually makes China tick. Not only do Chinese strategists rigorously keep up-to-date with Washington’s English-language policy debates (which Washington elites do not do in reverse), but they also use a consistent analytic framework to make sense of their strategic environment. In line with Marxist-Leninist dialectical analysis, Chinese leaders are trained to identify what is called thesis and antithesis, trend and countertrend, and action and reaction across politics, economics, society, technology, and international relations. This, in turn, is based on a deeper assessment of the unity of opposites, contradictions, and struggle as drivers of historical change. These formal assessments of China’s international operating environment are the product of multiple inputs from across the party, government departments, and official think tanks. As good Marxists, the Chinese leadership regard their conclusions—never reached lightly over a weekend but usually over several years—as revealing long-term trends that are “scientifically and objectively true,” to use the Marxist formulation. As such, once reached, such conclusions tend to guide strategy and policy for an extended period and are hard to shift.

2

…in desktop military war games conducted by Washington, Beijing, and Tokyo across a range of Taiwan scenarios, the United States has reportedly lost repeatedly (according to some reports, this includes on as many as nineteen successive occasions—and, in some cases, even when fighting with a range of its strongest regional allies).