Articles by: "Hugh White"
Australia must plan to defend itself alone

Many people believe that Australia would never need to defend itself unaided. Even if US support cannot be taken for granted in the future, they think that we needn’t ever stand alone, because we have …

How to defend Australia: control and denial

Could Australia defend itself independently from direct military attack by a major Asian power like China? That’s the key question I set out to answer in How to defend Australia. My answer was a cautious …

How to defend Australia

You don’t have to be as pessimistic as I am about the future of American power in Asia to start seriously thinking about what we should do if it falters. You only have to accept …

US could ask Australia to host nuclear missiles

What would we say if Washington asked to base nuclear-armed missiles, aimed at China, on Australian territory? It’s not an entirely hypothetical question. Amid all the talk of a new cold war with China, the …

Deterring Russia

If you wanted to sum up America’s (and its allies’) military-strategic posture towards China in Asia today in a sentence, you’d say that we aim to deter China from using force in situations like Taiwan …

Australia’s real choice about China

Australia’s problem with China is bigger and simpler than we think, and thus harder to solve. It isn’t that Beijing doesn’t like Julie Bishop, or that it’s offended by our new political interference legislation, or …