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Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Hugh White (strategist)
14 min read
The article extensively discusses Hugh White's views on Australian foreign policy, his book 'How to Defend Australia', and his perspective on Australia-China-US relations. Understanding his background as a defense strategist and former senior official provides essential context.
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A. J. P. Taylor
12 min read
The article mentions Hugh White calling AJP Taylor 'edgy' and references 'The Origins of the Second World War'. Taylor was a controversial British historian whose revisionist views on WWII causation sparked major debates about historical methodology.
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Janet Malcolm
12 min read
The article quotes extensively from Janet Malcolm's 'The Journalist and the Murderer' and praises her writing. Understanding her career as a journalist and writer who examined the ethics of journalism adds depth to the quoted passage.
“[H]e would call me on the telephone while soaking like a cowboy in the bath”
— Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy
Podcasts / Substacks
Crosby AI: Have spent most of my time lately thinking about AI transformation in the real economy. Really admire what Crosby are up to. This pod was great — on the broken incentives in current service models, the opportunity to refashion business models and entire industries, on the huge opportunity ahead.
Bending Spoons: Hugely inspirational story. Building a new format national champion from first principles.
Palmer Luckey: No surprises, but there is only one Palmer Luckey.
Google’s TPU behemoth: Google is all the rage, but is it still massively undervalued? If it has an Nvidia inside it waiting to get out…
Joe Walker interviews Hugh White: A wonderful format. I enjoyed Hugh White calling AJP Taylor “edgy” — I’m also a big fan of The Origins of the Second World War. I would have asked White about Pat Buchanan’s perspective as a follow-up. Meta narrative about how conservative history can be as a field and as subject to social pressures as any other endeavour.
Hugh White is a national treasure. I loved his book How to Defend Australia, which is essential reading. I bought a bunch of books off the back of his recommendations. He himself is such an Australian intelligentsia archetype — smart, measured, godless, left-of-centre. He is cautious about invoking the Great Man theory of history — then accepts that the decisions that matter really do end up being made in a room with a few key individuals.
White is scathing of our current crop of leaders, portraying them as totally uninterested in grappling with Australian strategic questions. He basically observes they’re unread and uncurious. Memories of WWII have faded, and these leaders are the children of a post-Cold War world. They know not the sting of stark choices, only the machinations of the news cycle and domestic politicking.
White calling for Australia to tell Washington that it will not go to war with China over Taiwan is undoubtedly brave.
It’s interesting that White would inject agency into Australian foreign policy (we did not and need not blindly follow our senior allies, Britain and now America), but rejects agency on Australian identity and demographics. He claims Australia ‘becoming more Asian’ is inevitable:
That’s going to require us
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