A fortress with no water supply: Hugh White’s ‘How to defend Australia’
By James Goldrick and Euan Graham*
Hugh White, in his new book How to defend Australia, calls for a complete revision of Australia’s grand strategy and the force structure we maintain for our defence. His basic premise is simple. China is now so powerful that its domination of the East Asian and Southeast Asian periphery is inevitable, if not an accomplished fact. The era of America’s primacy has ended, and the result can only be the weakening and likely collapse of the alliance and security arrangements that have prevailed largely unchallenged for many decades.
