Marie-Louise Ayres:

Yuma, and good evening everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight for this special event. My name is Marie-Louise Ayres and I'm the Director General of the National Library for one more day, and I'm so pleased that one of my last formal roles, this is my last formal role here actually, is to introduce my friend and one of the library's really generous supporters, John Seymour.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather this evening and from which we do our work on behalf of the nation, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I pay my respects to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations peoples. Now, tonight, John will discuss all things naval, but we should also remember that, of course, Australia's First Nations people were our first seafarers, exploring along and a bit beyond our shores and making powerful and lasting connections of their own, especially up around the connections up from the Yolngu people up north.

Now, John's new book, 'Australia's Naval Alliance's Lessons of History', explores Australia's past experience of Naval Alliance failure and what lessons we might draw for the big strategic questions that face us today. Now, as you're aware, this is a topic that has become even more relevant in the last month or so, as Australia has once again been asked or even expected to provide naval support to allies in a conflict that maybe was not of our making. The circumstances surrounding this and the decisions made to agree or not will no doubt have ongoing repercussions for our nation for years to come and will continue to be explored and debated over the years ahead. So here we are. We're ahead of the game. We actually booked this one in quite a long time before anything started happening over there in the Strait of Hormuz. The circumstances, of course, really are very appropriate therefore for us to have this conversation.

Now, John's had a really long career teaching courses in criminal law and justice, criminology, and child welfare fair law at the Australian National University, retiring as a reader in law in 1998. In retirement, he developed his long-term interest in naval history, and he's currently an honorary professor at the ANU. John, together with Heather Seymour, have also generously contributed to the library via their sponsorship of the Seymour Biography Lecture Series, which ran here at the library from 2010 to 2023, and provided eminent life writers with the opportunity to explore the business and craft a biography, autobiography, and memoir. In fact, we published a book of the collected essays just a couple of years ago. John's joined tonight by Hugh White, AO, Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic Defence Studies Centre at the ANU. A longtime defence analyst, God, I hope that's not my new phone tinging.

It could be. So if you haven't turned your phone off yet, please do so, and I'll do it the minute I get back to my chair. A longtime defence analyst, Hugh has authored works on Australian Strategic and Defence Policy, Asia Pacific Security Issues and Global Strategic Affairs, and in fact, it would be impossible to read anywhere in the world of Australian current affairs and letters on strategic issues without encountering Hugh's work. So needless to say, we're in for thought-provoking and educational treat. Please join me in welcoming John and Hugh to the stage.

John Seymour:

Good evening. I would like to begin by thanking the staff of the National Library for planning and organising this event and in particular, I want to say how much I appreciate the fact that Marie-Louise has agreed to preside one day before she retires. It's very good of her, and I thank her for her kindness. Now, you may be wondering what you've let yourself in for. I'm a retired law teacher, and I've developed an amateur interest in Australia's naval history. All I can offer to explain my presence here tonight is that I have very belatedly discovered that history is more captivating than the law.

Before I share the results of my historical research, I will also, as Marie-Louise has indicated, be talking about the contemporary topic of AUKUS. And for those of who are unfamiliar with this acronym, AUKUS is a trilateral defence partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Australia's decision to join the alliance is among the most consequential defence commitments Australia has ever undertaken. And I believe, again, as Marie-Louise has indicated, that it's important that we understand the history of earlier naval alliances and the lessons that can be learned from those alliances. This history is a tale of dilemmas and difficulties. History does not repeat itself, but as the tide recedes, patterns emerge. Australia has long depended on alliances with powerful nations for naval defence. Initially, it was accepted that the Royal Navy, the largest Navy in the world, would safeguard all parts of the empire.

Stirrings of nationalism challenged this. Australia, it was said should display self-reliance and acquire its own warships. The British admiralty viewed these colonial aspirations with disdain. It was self-evident, said the admiralty, that the seas are won and that therefore what was needed was a single homogeneous imperial navy.

In 1907, however, the admiralty unexpectedly announced that its commitment to a single navy had been abandoned. Two years later, Britain undertook to establish what it called the Eastern Fleet of Empire, consisting of naval ships and dominion ships in the fleet units. Australia's fleet unit, as many of you will know, was headed by HMS Australia, arriving insidery in 1913.

There's a picture of HMS Australia, a very powerful battle cruiser, armed with eight 12-inch guns, for those of you who are technically interested, and I apologise. I still think in inches. HMS Australia was scuttled in 1924 under the Washington Disarmament Treaty. By 1912, the Admiralty had reneged on its agreement to establish an imperial fleet in our region. The looming war with Germany was causing anxiety, and Britain wished to concentrate its naval and dominion forces in home waters and the home in the North Sea.

The Commonwealth government was keenly disappointed by Britain's failure to honour its undertaking. This was the first of such disappointments that Australia would experience. It would not be the last. The rise of Japanese naval power resulted in increased concern about Australia's vulnerability. As early as 1908, the British foreign office had noted what it called Japan's expansionist tendencies. In 1913, the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board drew attention to the growth of the Japanese Navy.

The Royal Navy was no longer able to make a significant contribution to the defence of the Pacific, and the board stressed the need to ensure that the imperial fleet would be established. After the war in 1918, the spectre of an single imperial fleet was revived. In the words of the Abilty, a single Navy under the Admiralty's control was needed to protect the empire. A single Navy had no room for independent fleet units.

The prime ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa rejected the admiralties proposal. They wanted their own navies, but they did agree that it would be a good idea to get some advice on the future development of the empire's navies. Admiral Jellicoe ... Oh, he's up there, isn't he? The second and third pictures. Admiral Jellicoe was selected to provide this advice. He was the former, recently retired as the first sea lord. Jellicoe was sent on a mission to India, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, for which the admiralty very generously made the Battle Cruiser HMS New Zealand available to him.

His seventh month stay in Australia in 1919 was an occasion for repeated demonstrations of imperial further. Devotion to the British Empire was at its highest. Jellicoe was a celebrity, another Nelson, a Vicount, an admiral of the fleet, hero of the Battle of Jutland. He was the next best thing to royalty. At numerous functions in his seventh month stay, rule Britania was played amid cheers. Here's a picture of Jellicoe, a riot of Goldbraid on the second picture. The third picture is an indication of the enormous patriotic enthusiasm for his visit and their faith in the Royal Navy.

This picture was taken ... The third picture was taken in South Australia, and it shows hoards of people visiting the ship. Jellico is on the gangway. Behind him is Lady Jellicoe who did her bit with all the social functions which attended his visit. Lady Jellicoe certainly played her part. In Sydney, a couple of months later, there was a ball arranged for members of the ship's company of HMS New Zealand, and the press reported that Lady Jellicoe danced with the tars. So there. Okay. So that's Lady Jellicoe. Behind her is Admiral Creswell, who was one of the founders of the Royal Australian Navy.

Jellicoe tabled his report in 1919, and he emphasised the need to take account of the Japanese threat. He recommended the establishment of a far eastern seagoing fleet to be based at Singapore. For Jellicoe, Singapore was "undoubtedly the naval key to the far east." And I'm sure you can see where I'm going with that. The proposed fleet planned by Jellicoe included eight battleships, eight battle cruises, four aircraft carriers, numerous cruises, destroyers, and submarines.

Stephen Roscoe, Britain's leading naval historian in World War II, has described the far eastern fleet recommended by Jellicoe as "over ambitious to the point of grandiosity." Jellicoe's scheme, he said, "Bordered on fantasy." The 1920s and 1930s were marked by economic depression and cutbacks on naval expenditure. The future strength of the Royal Navy simply couldn't be guaranteed. Until well into the 1930s, defence spending in Australia was a low priority. Australia's scepticism about the Royal Navy's willingness and capacity to defend the Pacific grew.

Curtin, then the leader of the opposition in the Commonwealth Parliament, warned against dependence on Britain, on assistance from Britain, which might or might not be available. As early as 1921, the Admiralty had recognised that it could not maintain a British fleet in the Pacific comparable with the Japanese fleet. The Admiralty, therefore, was quick to distance itself from Jellicoe's proposed far eastern seagoing fleet. Instead, what the Admiralty did was fall back on promises to dispatch ships to the Singapore base in time of need.

The Admiralty admitted that two or three months might take before the ships actually arrived. British policymakers gave increasingly hollow assurances about the provision of the necessary capital ships. As late as 1937, the Admiralty said, "Singapore can hold out and a fleet will be available to cover Australia and New Zealand." In the Admiralty's words, "The dispatch of a fleet to the Far East remains the operation upon which the security of the eastern half of the empire depends." To quote Stephen Roscoe again, the admiralty's assurances quote "Came close to bordering, to crossing the borderline between outright deception, came close to crossing the borderline into outright deception."

The policymakers were guilty of wishful thinking and still retain sublime confidence in British sea powers. This, in Roscoe's view, revealed staggering misjudgment over the scale of the naval forces needed to protect British interest in the far east. While the late 1930s, Singapore was revealed quote "As a base without a fleet and without the prospect of one." And yet, Australian prime ministers continued to rely on the Admiralty's undertakings.

The dramatic events of 1941 and 1942 changed everything. HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse had been belatedly dispatched to the far east. They lacked air cover. Both ships were quickly sunk by Japanese aircraft in 1941. 800 lives were lost. In 1942, Singapore fell. The first picture on the left presents the human cost involved. This is Prince of Wales sinking. It was a perilous operation we are witnessing there. Alongside Prince of Wales is a destroyer and sailors were attempting to jump onto it to save themselves, and you know the high risk that would have. A lot of them would drown between the two ships. That's what the sinking of the Prince of Wales looked like.

For the naval historian, the date of the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse, 10 December, 1940, was the day the British Empire died. After that date, Australia could no longer look to the Royal Navy for protection. Australia had to concentrate on the threats in its own backyard and pivoted towards a short-term alliance with the United States. That's the background then.

So what I want to do in the second half of my talk is ask about the implications of all this and the lessons to be learned about AUKUS. What lessons and what reflections are prompted by the rough sketch I've offered?

In Curtin, Curtin, the leader of the opposition, whom I've already quoted, offered a warning about alliances in general. He said, "History teaches the disquieting lesson that covenants and treaties are adhered to only so long as their maintenance is in the interests of the contracting parties." All alliances are fragile, as I've demonstrated in my brief historical review.

Before a member depends on a defence alliance, it must be understood that the needs, capacities, and priorities of a partner will inevitably change. Alliances can encounter headwinds. Unexpected events will confound the best laid plans.

Australia's membership of AUKUS has been described as the adoption of a new role as "a sub-imperial power upholding a US-led imperial order." I repeat that. Seen as a sub-imperial power upholding a US-led imperial order. AUKUS will be dominated by the United States. Australia and the United Kingdom will be minor players at the service of a powerful ally. The priorities of such an ally are unlikely to be those of the weaker powers.

Australia's relationship, its new relationship, will be very different from that, developed as a member of the British Empire. A new form of dependence will arise, deeply embedding Australia in America's future defence strategy. The earlier mantra, the British Empire, right or wrong, might have to give place to the United States, right or wrong.

We need, I think, to speculate about the reliability of Australia's AUKUS partners. An alliance is an agreement to work together for shared goals. Its members should respect their partners and identify with them. Britain's engagement with the naval defence of the Pacific has been ephemeral. It has not proved to be a reliable partner. History reveals Australia's repeated disappointments in the face of Britain's failure to honour its undertakings.

In the future, it would be surprising to discover that Britain has suddenly changed its policy and will be able and willing to demonstrate new commitments to Australia's naval defence. History suggests that in a period of precarious finances, a retreat to a focus on the defence of home waters and cooperation with NATO might make more sense for Britain.

The United Kingdom's contribution to AUKUS is to design and develop a new class of nuclear submarines. The reality is that the British economy is weak and its ship building yards may lack the capacity to meet the obligations shouldered under the agreement. Concern about an alliance partner may also lead to doubts about the partnership with the United States. In view of the turbulence present involving and embracing the United States, engulfing the United States, we must ask, is America an ally whose values we share?

Remember 1919 and the crowds singing Rul Britania. 2026, compare and contrast. Questions can be raised about the dependability of the United States, although it must be recognised that in the closing stages of World War II, the United States, unlike Britain, proved to be a reliable ally. Australia owes a great debt to the United States for its massive contribution to the defeat of the Japanese Navy.

Nevertheless, it must be asked: how strong will America's commitment to the Naval security of the Fire East proved to be? Can Australia be confident that the USA will continue to be a reliable ally?

In the United States, as all of you will know, our AUKUS is at present being reviewed to determine whether America's membership accords with the America First policy. Is this policy consistent with engagement with other nations to pursue collective defence in regions far from America? The United States might simply be unable to provide Australia with promised nuclear submarines, as it simply doesn't count manufacture enough for itself at present.

The study of naval history teaches the importance of recognising changes in naval technology. In 1919, Jellicoe noted the need to take account of what he called advances in naval science, such as the development of airpower and submarines. Yet, he remained a battleship man, as was seen in the composition of his proposed far eastern seagoing fleet, and his view was widely shared. The Admiralty continued to identify battleships as the key to naval power. Yet, in 1941, as I have explained, the vulnerability of those ships was demonstrated. The aircraft carrier was the new capital ships. Today's weapons may also be superseded, though knowledgeable supporters of nuclear submarines will assert that they will prove to be Australia's most powerful naval deterrent. Indeed, they can be seen as the capital ship of today. Yet, remember the success of Ukraine's drones in sinking units of the Russian black fleet. What are the implications of that?

The Royal Australian Navy is already experimenting with blue bottle drones and a large autonomous uncrude undersea vehicle called the Ghost Shark. Beware developments in technology.

Australia's commitment to the AUKUS Alliance will represent a massive undertaking. Its scale and complexity must be appreciated. Three to five virginia-class submarines are to be purchased from the United States. Five British designed astute-class submarines are to be built in South Australia. Their construction will begin in 2030 and will necessitate the extension of the Osborne Naval shipyard. In February this year, the Prime Minister made a 3.9 billion down payment towards this shipyard. The final cost will be 30 billion.

The operation of this yard will require the recruitment of a large and highly skilled workforce. Specialist submariners will be needed to crew the nuclear submarines. The RAN (Royal Australian Navy) will be expected to operate two different types of boats. Remember Steven Roscoe? He described the Jellicoe's proposal as "over ambitious to the point of grandiosity, bordering on fantasy." Might the same be said of Australia's commitment to AUKUS?

Wishful thinking. What could possibly go wrong?

The cost of Australia's contribution has been estimated at 368 billion, and this manifestly is no more than a guesstimate. It seems certain to blow out. In the past, financial concerns have restricted naval expenditure, as I've explained, both in Britain and Australia. The Commonwealth government might at some time have to confront demands to direct expenditure towards health, education, social welfare, rather than to the purchase of costly warships. Will the commitment under AUKUS be sustainable over the long term?

Finally, the obvious question. Is membership of AUKUS in Australia's best interests? Will Australia be safer in the alliance than out of it? As I've shown in the early years after Federation, it was simply accepted that the Royal Australian Navy's primary role was to contribute to the collective security of the British Empire as a unit of an imperial fleet. The rise of Japan presented a new challenge.

Concern about the willingness and capacity of the Royal Navy effectively to protect Australian interests grew. The Royal Navy quite simply lacked the resources to operate effectively in home waters, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, as well as in the far east. Should the RAN (Royal Australian Navy) continue to be seen as a unit of an Imperial Navy designed to pursue collective defence, or should Australia assert its independence in naval matters and develop its own capabilities? Should Australia concentrate on its own needs and prioritise local and regional defence?

Now, these questions might be seen as oversimplifications because the one major press release about when the AUKUS was released was that the AUKUS Alliance would promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable. It can be justified that way as a response to a perception that China poses a threat in the Indo-Pacific. This suggests that it is in Australia's best interest once again to contribute to a combined naval force committed to collective defence.

I just recently discovered that an agreement not yet in force was signed by the ministers of defence of the United Kingdom and Australian governments last year in Geelong. This echoed the belief in collective security. It stressed the importance of the principle that shared action taken in partnership can benefit all. A feature of the text of this agreement is that it says, "This agreement shall remain in force until 31 December 2075. That might be yet another over ambitious commitment. Membership of a Defence Alliance raises the spectre of participation in other people's wars. While it clearly was in Australia's best interests to participate in an alliance with the United States to defeat Japan, can the same be said on an alliance that might involve a war with China? Some Australian politicians have explicitly stated that Australia would have no alternative, but to line up military, militarily with the United States in the event of war.

To conclude, it has long been accepted that Australia as a middle power must seek out powerful allies and is not able to go it along, alone. After its attachment to the British Empire came to an end, Australia may now have opted for membership of a new empire with all the uncertainties and risks that, that entails. Winston Churchill comments on this dilemma. There is only one thing that is worse than fighting with your allies, and that is fighting without them. I'll now hand over to Hugh.

Hugh White:

Well, thank you very much. Well, thank you first, John, for that wonderful presentation and more fundamentally for the book that you've given us all. I can tell you, it's a terrific read and makes some really important points at a very important time. Thanks also, Marie-Louise for hosting us and for Sharon and her team for making all of this work. It's really a great pleasure to be here to second John's thoughts on all of this stuff. I mean, it is worth thinking back to those moments, the months that followed the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the repulse those first months of 1942, I think seen very much across the country.

The months that followed the fall of Singapore, the eruption of Japan into the Southwest Pacific right to Australia shores, the bombing of Darwin, and the very real threat of a Japanese invasion. The fact that we found ourselves in that predicament was a fundamental failure of policy and arguably the most fundamental failure of policy in Australia's history. And the heart of that failure was, as John has explained, decisions by success of Australian governments to depend on the United Kingdom, to defend us from an Asian great power, recently risen in its economic scale and its technological capacities that was intent on expelling the predominant Western powers, which had for so long been the leading powers in our part of the world and taking their place as the regional Hegemon.

Now, that experience made an indelible impression on the generation that experienced it. I grew up in a household in Melbourne in the 1950s and '60s that was sprinkled with artefacts. The tray under the kettle in the kitchen, a ball of string, which actually fishing line that I used for flying my first kites, the rooksack in which I took my first hikes as a scout, and the 22' on which I was taught to shoot. All of these were things that my father had collected as he and some of his friends. He was then in uniform in the Air Force, but based at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, their plans to, as he said, "go bush and establish a resistance movement when the Japanese landed." Now, my father was a wonderful man, but he wasn't particularly imaginative. And so the fact that he took all of this so seriously made a huge impression on me and made some contribution to the way I've spent my professional life.

Now, what John's book does is challenges to ask, what can we learn from that mistake?

What can we learn about how to meet the challenges that we face today? Because the analogy which underlies his book is very compelling. It's an analogy between the situation we faced in the 1930s and the situation we face today. And it's not just his analogy. It's an analogy which is really, I think, universally adopted amongst our political leaders on both sides of politics. On either side of politics, can an Australian political leader make a speech on these sorts of subjects without reciting some version of the proposition that today we face our most dangerous strategic circumstances since the 1930s and early 1940s, which is precisely the point of the analogy that John is drawing.

And I might say they're right to think that. I do think that the rise of China, the scale of its power, and the scale of its strategic ambition to take America's place as the leading power in East Asia and the Pacific, is a really significant shift in Australia's strategic circumstances and contains at least the seeds of a threat to Australia, unlike any that we've faced since 1942. Now, that's a big subject, and I don't want to spend too long on this, but I just want to make a point. I don't think China today threatens Australia, but the scale of China's power and its ambitions to become the leading power in East Asia and to displace the United States will change the foundations of our security and make us more vulnerable to future security threats in the decades ahead and that is very important development. So I buy the analogy that our political leaders are so fond of drawing between that time and this.

And it's worth bearing in mind that it was an accident of Australian history, and it is just an accident, that ever since 1788, with the exception of those months from the 7th or 8th of December, 1941, whichever side of the international dateline you're on that day, Pearl Harbour, and well, roughly speaking, the 4th of June, 1942, when the Japanese defeat at Midway really was the beginning of the end of their challenge to American naval supremacy, with the exception of those months, ever since Australia was settled by Europeans since 1788, either Britain or America has been the world's biggest economy, the world's dominant maritime power, and the strongest power in East Asia. So for our entire national history, except for that crisis, we have been able and we have taken advantage of relying on an Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, globally dominant power to make Asia safe for us.

We have never thought about how to make our way in an Asia, which hasn't been dominated and may save for us by our Anglo-Saxon English speaking mates. So if China succeeds where Japan failed, it will be a really fundamental change in our national situation.

Now, I just want to look a bit closer at what happened in the 1930s, some aspects of the story that John has told. The first point to make is, as he's touched on, it's not that we didn't see the Japanese challenge coming. Deakin and others, Alfred Deakin and others in the late 19th century, saw very clearly that Britain for all its power was declining relatively to the rise of a whole lot of different challenges, Germany, Russia, America, and Japan. And that recognition drove, amongst other things, the urge to Federation.

The idea that six separate states would not make their way in a world in which Britain was no longer as dominant as it had been, as well as one Federation. Federation was all sorts of things, but it was amongst other things, a very farsighted act of strategic policy. It was Deakin who just days after the Japanese sunk the Russian fleet at Sushima in 1905, recognised that that moment marked the emergence of an East Asian power that was comparable to the European great powers for the first time in modern history.

And that's what drove that foundational challenge to start developing our own naval forces and introduced to Australia what has remained ever since the foundational question about our defence policy. Do we depend on allies and build our armed forces to support our allies so they can support us or do we build armed forces to defend ourselves? Can we depend on our allies when our allies are so distant from us? We're not like Canada with America next door, for better or for worse, Canada might worry about America absorbing them, but they never worry about America abandoning them. Whereas for Australia, the possibility of abandonment by our allies has always been present.

And then of course, in 1914, when war broke out, the fact that we were worried about Japan and uncertain about Britain's capacity to defend us from it was right at the heart of our national decision to contribute. A lot of strands contributed to our decision to go to war in 1914 and to stay at war through all of the horrors that follow for the next four years. But right at the heart of it was recognition that we depended then on the Royal Navy to defend us from Japan. If Britain had been defeated in Europe, and the Royal Navy had been taken over by Germany, which is what would have happened, that's after all what we did to the German when we won, then we would have been left defenceless in the face of Japanese power. That's one of the things we were fighting for in 1914.

And then between the wars, the problem became worse because Britain, of course, was weaker. I mean, right at the heart of John's book is a wonderful detailed description of Jellicoe's mission, and it is a terrifically interesting historical moment, amongst other things, a moment of strategic delusion. John said the idea that Jellicoe came up with of a British fleet in the far east of eight battleships and eight battle cruises and dozens of other ships was an absolute fantasy. And Jellicoe was not a fantasist. He was quite a sober person.

The British imagined this, but it was completely impracticable, and that's where the idea of the Singapore strategy came from, a base without a fleet. And as John spells out, over the 20s and 30s, it became a clearer and clearer that with the demands, particularly in the 30s, with the demands on Britain in Europe, with the economic pressures it faced as it struggled to recover from the First World War, as it faced stronger and stronger rivals elsewhere, the idea that it could maintain a fleet at home big enough to dispatch a strategically valuable fleet to the Far East, particularly if it was involved in a war in Europe, became increasingly implausible.

And that was the predicament that Australia found itself in, in the lead up to those terrible months in 1942. We depended on Britain to solve our Japan problem for us at a time when the cost benefit calculus for the British of maintaining the kinds of forces that would be required to deliver our defence simply didn't add up. And the question we've got to ask ourselves is how do we allow that to happen? I mean, as John has touched on, there was an element of, to quote a later generation of British public servants, economy with the truth in the British reassurances that yes, the fleet would be sent to Singapore if we needed it, but I think we need to focus not so much on the failings of the British system, important though they are, but on the failings of our own system in believing what we were being told, we ignored the fundamental power shift, which made it, so to speak, arithmetically implausible that the British was going to have the power to defend us in this part of the world against an adversary as powerful as Japan at a time when it faced so many other demands.

We had a failure of imagination about a world in which the Royal Navy was no longer the dominant narrow time power for generations, of course. You might say Australia's whole existence as a British colony was framed by the global position of the Royal Navy. We had too much faith in loyalty and sentiment over strategy. We had too much deference to Whitehall. Our officials were reluctant to go to Whitehall and say, "We don't believe what you're telling us." And of course, there was some politics involved. It was convenient for the conservative side of politics to ring the imperial loyalty gong because they thought that was awkward for Labour, as it was.

And of course, it was a problem of what to do instead. If we didn't rely on Britain, what did we do? And it has to have some sympathy for the scale of that challenge. Well, let me just draw the comparison with today, when another great power wants to push our great and powerful friend out of Asia, but with this difference, that China today is much, much stronger relative to the United States than Japan ever was, five times, roughly speaking, stronger than Japan was at the beginning of the Second World War. And again, of course, we are very anxious about what that means, about our place in Asia. And in response to that, we became increasingly dependent. We increase our dependence on a distant, great and powerful friend to solve our problem for us. And that of course is what AUKUS is all about. We've had ANSA since 1951, but AUKUS is a very deliberate decision to deepen and amplify and tighten that relationship.

And that's really what it's all about. Of course, at one level, AUKUS is programmed to buy submarines, but really the submarines, if you like, are the means, the end, the core objective, both in Canberra and in Washington, I leave London at one side. The core objective in Canberra and Washington was to use the submarine acquisition as a way of binding the alliance closer.

And at the heart of that is two propositions. The first is that America can and will defeat China's challenge and remain the primary power in East Asia and the Western Pacific as it always has been in the past. And so we can continue to rely on it as we have always done. And secondly, that in order to do that, in order to defeat China's challenge, it will and should, if necessary, go to war with China to defeat the Chinese challenge, most probably over Taiwan, and that Australia should support and indeed encourage it to do so. That's really what AUKUS is about. And I believe that's profoundly wrong in two ways. The first is the United States won't remain in Asia. And the reason for that is exactly the same as the reason the British didn't remain in Asia because the fundamental shift in the distribution of wealth and power, there's raw economic and technological weight that gave Britain the capacity to dominate the global oceans through very much of the 19th century, and it gave America the capacity to dominate the globe's oceans for so much of the 20th century is just not there anymore.

It's not of course that America's in decline, not about America in a way. It's because China's economic rise and the strategic rise that goes with it is for real. And what that means is that the costs for the United States for maintaining its position in Asia have gone up as the power of its rival has gone up, and the imperatives to do so have gone down. This is not after all the Cold War. It's not as though America just faces one rival. We're in a multipolar world, very complex interactions of power, and that's already happening because whilst the United States has talked big about sustaining its position in the Western Pacific in the face of China's challenge, it has done nothing. In fact, nothing material to sustain and enhance its position in Asia to meet the growing power of China. Indeed, AUKUS is a very potent symbol of that because AUKUS is about all the United States has done and AUKUS does nothing to shift the fundamental transformation of the military balance in China's favour back towards America's favour.

The second point to make, the second reason why I think that set of propositions is wrong, is that I very strongly believe that America should not try and win a war with China, fight a war with China to preserve its position in the Western Pacific in the face of China's challenge. Not because I don't think an Asia dominated by China will be a much harder place to live in than an Asia dominated by the United States, but because I don't think the United States has any chance of winning that war, and it's very likely to be a nuclear war. It's a very sober question for Australia, but one we really shouldn't avoid. Are we better off living in an Asia in which China does end up being the leading power, or rather one of two leading powers, because India's there as well, or should we fight a war we can't win, which may well be a nuclear war?

It's an awkward choice, but not a very difficult one to make. So are we wrong to pin our future on the US and Asia, as implied by AUKUS, the way we were wrong to base our future on support for the United Kingdom in the decades before 1941 and 1942, before those scenes?

Well, I think we are just as we were wrong in the 1930s, and for the same underlying reasons, because it ignores the fundamental shift in the distribution of wealth and power, which underpins all of these transitions. And we are getting this wrong as a country for the same reasons we got it wrong in the 1930s, because we can't imagine a world without US leadership because we've grown up within that framework just as our predecessors grew up within the framework of British leadership, because we're too inclined to focus on sentiment rather than strategy, because we're too inclined to defer to what the people in Washington say, because we think they must know what they're talking about, because the politics of stepping back from our alliances, the domestic politics of stepping back from our alliances is so awkward, and because we haven't had the energy or courage to think about what we might do instead.

Now, that last question is a really critical one we should be focusing on, and I'll just allow myself to finish by saying that whatever the answer is, we don't need a fleet of nuclear powered submarines, is not what we need. We don't need them, and we won't get them. Thank you very much.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Thanks very much, John and Hugh. I've been depressing you guys, really. We have time for a few questions, and for those who are less familiar with being at the library, if you'd like to ask a question, can you please put your hand up and wait until the mic comes to you? We've got a question down here at the front.

Audience member 1:

Hello. Could you talk a little bit about the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet and whether that was influential in any way, whether it was a blip? Is there any lessons to learn from that moment?

John Seymour:

I've been asked to talk about the great white fleet. This was in, as you say, in 1908, and it was Deakin's idea. He realised that the United States Navy was sending out a large fleet, and he said, "Oh, it would be a good idea if it called into Australia, because that would promote support for the Navy and awareness of our vulnerability." The foreign office was absolutely furious. They were not consulted, and this upstart Australian was asking the United States fleet to visit, and he made it worse by writing to the Admiralty afterwards and saying, "Awfully sorry, and if you want to send a fleet as well, you do that." And of course, the British didn't have the capacity, so it was a fascinating development that focused on the need we were going to experience in the future.

So Deakin was extraordinarily shrewd, and he pulled that off because there were crowds everywhere welcoming the Great White Fleet. It was a wonderful coup and a wonderful way of underlining Australia's vulnerability.

Audience member 2:

Hugh, this is probably for you. You're a former senior official, and I'd like your opinion as that type of man and a person who's engaged with these people for years. Maybe I'm unduly cynical, but I don't expect politicians to be on top of the issues or fully understand them. Their whole background is, by and large, not that, but I expect senior officials to understand the issues. Now, the failure to see the failure of an alliance looming for people in the early 40s and today, is it a failure of imagination they've lived with so long they can't conceive an alternative, or is it they know this is coming, but they just don't want to admit it and like the ancient mariner in fear and dread, don't dare turn their heads sort of thing.

Hugh White:

Yeah. Look, it's a really good question. I think the historians will have a bit of fun with this because they will look at AUKUS and they will look at the fact that, I mean, this is a different topic, but that the chances of the submarines being delivered is functionally zero. And so, well, people will ask, how could we possibly have done this? But more broadly also, how could we possibly put ourselves in a situation where the foundation of our national strategic policy is to encourage the United States to believe that we will go to war with them alongside them against China when nobody seriously thinks that's a war that can be won.

So these are really fundamental questions. I think, I mean, I tried to touch on it in the last few sentences of my remarks, but I think the fundamental point is A, that we have this generation, I'm going to allow myself to make a generational point. This generation finds it harder to come to terms with America's relative decline because it came of age in the 1990s when America seemed unimaginably all powerful.

I think Australia is Australia, including Australian, so if I can put it this way, official culture, I mean, the culture of this town is more dependent, more psychologically dependent on the United States than we were in the '60s and '70s and '80s, because we were more familiar with ... Well, more familiar with American failure, though I think Iraq and Afghanistan would help us along on that. But I think the other thing is that it does require us to fundamentally rethink not just our defence policy, but the whole way we think of our place in the world. We have lived in a world because we've lived in a region, which has been dominated and made safe for us by these Anglo-Saxon powers with whom we share all the stuff about history, Langer, culture, values, all that sort of thing. And this requires us to rethink that really from the ground up, and it's very frightening.

Now, I do think in the end, this does come back to the politicians. The quality of advice that politicians get depends enormously on the quality advice they demand. And I'm going to allow myself to say, and I am going to be showing my age here, that the political leaders that we had, and this is not a partisan point, because if we were going through the present moment with Malcolm Fraser, or Bob Hawke, or Paul Keating, I'm going to stop there, then, or I might say, I think, John Gorton, then I think those politicians would have demanded a much better performance from the public service.

Audience member 3:

Thank you, John, for the talk. Question that you both might want to comment on is, my understanding is that Lord Jellicoe was relatively, he came up through a merit system rather than part of the sort of buying your commission in the army type of and that the Royal Navy was much more a meritocracy than, say, the British army. So my question is about his report and this, I guess, fantasy of this Singapore based fleet with the eight battleships and the eight battle cruises, et cetera. Do you think he just lost the plot later in his life, or was he under great political pressure from elements in the British government to come up with a kind of, he was the leader of, because of his World War I and earlier reputation to sell it.

I guess I'm surprised that someone of his stature would come up with such a seemingly fantastic report, which probably even, and again, you might be able to comment on this, within the British bureaucracy as well as the Australian bureaucracy was being questioned pretty well from day one. So I'm just, yeah, I'm surprised, I guess.

John Seymour:

Well, he was out of power, and he was an ex first sea lord. And I think his successes didn't much like him. And there was some suggestion, I think, that he should be shunted off around the empire and let him have a couple of years in HMS New Zealand and have a good time. So he was weak, but I think he did his sums correctly. He had worked out the size of the threat posed by Japan, but he couldn't get from the Admiralty any answers about what sort of ships the Admiralty will be building. And of course then the Royal Navy went into some sort of recession, but he complained about writing to the Admiralty and saying, "Look, I need to know more about the financial situation to support my report." And they often simply ignored him.

Hugh White:

Okay. Well, I'm going to defer to you. You know a lot more about Jellicoe report than I do. I just make this point. I actually think eight battleships and eight battle crews, give or take some questions as to whether battleship for what you should be building. But he wasn't actually a bad answer to the question he was asked. What do you actually need to provide adequate defence for the Eastern Empire? He gave the right answer. It was just completely unrealistic and so in some ways, I mean, I think he did come up through a meritocratic system. That was not quite true of all senior officers in the Royal Navy at the time. Admiral Beatty, the commander of the battle cruises I think was very much a favourite, Jellicoe wasn't. He was a dower sort of professional. But I think he actually, in a sense, got the right answer to a question that nobody wanted answered.

And that's a warning to that and that too.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Got one more question here.

Audience member 4:

Thanks. John, that was a fabulous presentation. Thank you very much indeed. I enjoyed it enormously, but I'm sorry. My question really is probably pointed more at Hugh, which is to ask Hugh. The last month or so probably hasn't changed your views terribly much, but would you hazard your hand at a bit more of a forward looking perspective on your thesis that you presented tonight in the light of the last month?

Hugh White:

Thanks, comrade.

Look, so I made a mistake early on. When the operations against Iran first began, I told anyone who would listen that there was less to this than met the eye, because we had a pretty clear idea of how Trump operated. He's fundamentally isolationist, but he loves looking powerful. And so he has a tendency to do short, sharp military operations that really achieve nothing substantial strategically, but sort of look good. And the strike in Syria, the assassination in the first term, the assassination of the IRGC guy in the first term, the strikes in Nigeria, the Venezuela operation, that all fitted this pattern. And so at first I thought he wouldn't strike, wouldn't go after Iran because he would make no sense to do a one night special. So I dragged on, I thought, oh, well, he'll let this run for a couple of weeks and then he'll stop.

He'll declare victory, just as he always does. I mean, this is a man who can persuade Americans that the Chinese pay the tariffs, so he could easily persuade Americans that he had a triumph in Iran and he'd go home. Now, that's not what's happened. And I don't know quite how to assess what it means, what it means for Trump specifically. And I think that's very important because I think Trump is a very important figure because I don't think he's not just an aberration or something big has happened in America, but it doesn't change my fundamental assessment.

My fundamental assessment of America's place in the global order is that unipolarity, being the unipolar leader of the world, worked for America in the post Cold War world as long as they thought it was going to be cheap and easy. And it was going to be cheap and easy if there were no great powers opposing them.

And the great belief that arose in the 1990s and persisted all the way through the 2000s and even into the 2010s was that Russia and China and others were going to accept America as the world's dominant power and would basically go along with it. Now we now know that's not true. And so the United States has to ask itself whether it's prepared to sustain in a polarity, including a leading position in East Asia, in the face of a determined push by a very powerful adversary, in the case of China, the most powerful adversary the United States has ever faced, twice as powerful relative to the United States as the Soviet Union ever was, where the costs and risks to America of preserving that position in East Asia, in the face of China's very determined challenge, can be justified. And under any political leader, Donald Trump or Joe Biden or anybody else, that arithmetic doesn't add up.

So I'm as sure as I can be. Now on that most fundamental grounds, just as in the end, it wasn't worth it for Britain to sustain Admiral Beatty's fleet, which is what it needed to do in order to sustain British position in the Western Pacific, because in the end, we didn't matter that much to them, can view the other things they had to deal with, and they were right.

It's a slightly melodramatic way of putting it, but they had to make a decision between the eight battle cruises and eight battleships on the one hand, or 455 spitfires a month in September, 1940. They made the right decision. So I think that just as Britain faced that choice, America faces that choice. And I think in the face of that, and this is what happens, as power shifts, relationships change, we have lived the rights of China as the biggest and fastest shift in the distribution of wealth and power the world has ever seen. And we still have approached it with the assumption that we can have this fundamental transformation of Asia economically and it be unchanged strategically. Well, that just defies the laws of political gravity.

And so actually, I'm going to come back to that. In the end, I don't think what's happening in Iran is all that significant, but I'm just going to add one cautionary note, slightly risky thing to say, but Donald Trump does seem to me to have got himself in a really quite difficult position and it comes more difficult by the day because he's getting harder and harder for doing what Trump usually does so well, which is declaring victory and leaving.

And if he feels he can't do that, if there's no exit ramp for him, then the option to escalate looks, well, what else can he do? And if he does try and bomb every power station and doesn't destroy them all on one night, as he said in his press conference yesterday, then I do think we have to start asking what the risk is that Trump starts to think about nuclear weapons.

It's a very uncomfortable thing to think, let alone to say, but if you ask yourself, under what circumstances does the political leader find themselves thinking about it, this looks a bit like them and that would be different. Still wouldn't change my fundamental judgement of the underlying question, but sorry, that was a bit of a long answer, but it's quite a good question.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Oh, look, I'd like to thank you both for actually reminding us of how important it is to think historically about current day issues, which is actually why we've got this giant collection that you're going to keep using, because we think it matters to understand our current day kind of strategic political social issues. It's very hard to do so without understanding where we've come from, where the residences are and where they are not. And of course, it doesn't always chime evenly, but we need to really take that into account. So thank you for a really interesting discussion for tonight and for those great questions as well that have led us to some uncomfortable thoughts. Now, if you'd like to learn more, John's book is in the bookshop and is available for purchase. And I think you've probably got a few of yours there because you've written a few.

And also, just a reminder that if you think anybody else would like to hear the discussion tonight, we do actually have our recordings of our events on our YouTube channel, so you can always get back to that again. So thank you again very much, John and Hugh for your discussion tonight. Thanks for coming along. And of course, my library colleagues look forward to welcoming you back to the library again sometime very soon. Thank you.