Professor Hugh White gives this public lecture at The Australian National University entitled 'Abandon the Alliance? How China's rise will shape Australia's future'.
Professor Hugh White's recent Quarterly Essay, Power Shift: Australia's future between Washington and Beijing looks at Australia's strategic choices in the Asian Century. In this lecture he will explore the implications for Australia's US alliance. We can all see how China's rise will transform Australia's economy, but we find it harder to recognize the implications for Australia's political and strategic future. We take for granted the protection that America provides, and the role it plays in keeping Asia stable. But as China's power grows, Asia is being transformed, and America's role in Asia will have to change too. As that happens, the benefits to Australia of our alliance with the US will also change, and the costs and risks of the alliance will change too.
The old cost/benefit analysis which has underpinned our support for the alliance will need to be recalculated, and some of the answers might be surprising.
Professor Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific strategic issues, and global strategic affairs as they affect Australia. He has worked on these issues for almost thirty years, as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a personal adviser to Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, as a senior public servant, and as a policy scholar and academic. From 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence, and was the principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper. From 2001-2004 he was the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.