Two new podcasts on America and Australian Foreign Policy

I have released two new podcasts on the crises in America and the challenges of a multipolar world for Australia.

Episode 61 – Will America Break? deals with the crises in America. Three spectres are haunting America – the ghosts of the American Mind, the American State, and the American Empire. Faced with intertwined crises of culture, governing and international dominance, the 20th century’s Uncle Sam has not aged well, and become the 21st century’s Bad Granpa Joe. Will America break? That is the question on this episode of The Burning Archive.

Episode 62 – What is Australia’s role in a Multipolar World? discusses the challenges for Ausatralia’s unthinking alliance with America posed by the rise of both China and India as regional hegemons. As the multipolar world takes shape and tensions over Taiwan rise, it is timely to ask, what should be Australia’s role in the emerging multipolar world? Are we, as Hugh White suggests in his recent Quarterly Essay, sleepwalking to war with China? Have we given up on framing our own foreign and defence policy to service the will of that “indispensable nation”, America. What will it take to develop a new vision of Australian foreign policy suited to history, geopolitics today, and our real place in the world, not in the Atlantic Alliance but on the coasts of Eurasia?

I highly recommend Hugh White, Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America (Black Ink, 2022), and also his essay “War with China: what can history teach us” in Lessons from History, eds. Holbrook et al (NewSouth, 2022),