Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts Senior Fellow Hal Brands Quoted in Bloomberg on China’s Influence in Asia

Senior Fellow Hal Brands Quoted in Bloomberg on China’s Influence in Asia

Senior Fellow Hal Brands Quoted in Bloomberg on China’s Influence in Asia


Bloomberg

White put these thoughts to paper and pixel with a much-debated essay in the Australian publication Quarterly Essay. “Without America” envisions a Situation Room scene where a fictitious U.S. president decides that, even with America’s superior conventional military, the risk of a confrontation with China just isn’t worth it. Even if the U.S. prevailed, all China would need to do would be to inflict a couple of glancing blows and it would, politically, have triumphed.

For context, White is no raging left-wing academic. He has worked for Bob Hawke, a former Australian prime minister, and Kim Beazley, Hawke’s defense minister. Both politicians were among the most pro-American figures in the Australian Labor Party. Beazley subsequently served as Australian ambassador to Washington from 2010 to 2016.

White’s opinions have not gone unchallenged — among others, frequent Bloomberg View contributor Hal Brands took a few shots. To give him a chance to clarify his predictions and present them to a broader global audience, we spent a few days recently interviewing him over email. Here is a lightly edited transcript:

Read the full article here.