The Alliance | If the US and China go to war, whose side are we on? Kevin Rudd answers
About this episode
Kevin Rudd discusses Australia's foreign policy in relation to the US and China, advocating for a broader security framework.
Fear of China and Japan has long defined Australia's foreign policy. Could there be a new way forward? In the third episode of The Alliance, Hamish McDonald and Geraldine Doogue put that question to Kevin Rudd: former prime minister, former foreign minister, and, until recently, Australia's ambassador to the United States. Rudd makes the case for what he calls "ANZUS Plus": not a straight bet on Washington, but a widening web of security arrangements layered on top of the US alliance rather than instead of it. He defends the joint facilities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia as genuinely different from US sovereign bases, arguing Australia retains the right to say no, as it did over Iraq. On China, Rudd draws on the doctorate he completed on Xi Jinping's worldview, arguing Xi has deliberately shifted Chinese politics further left on ideology, further left on economics, and further nationalist on foreign policy and warns against ever underestimating him. He also lays out the numbers behind the region's naval build-up: China's submarine fleet, its expanding surface fleet, and how the US calculates the "pacing challenge" against it. Plus, why Rudd calls Japan's…
People in this episode
Hosts: Hamish McDonald, Geraldine Doogue
Guest: Kevin Rudd
Topics covered
- Australia foreign policy
- US-China relations
- security arrangements
- naval build-up
- military strategy
- international diplomacy
Keywords
- Australia
- Kevin Rudd
- US-China relations
- ANZUS Plus
- naval build-up
- foreign policy
- military strategy
- Xi Jinping
- Japan
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Australia, United States, China, Japan, ANZUS
Places: Northern Territory, Western Australia
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