Opinion: Since my early days of university, I have thought of US–China relations as the defining issue of our time.
During my time as Australian ambassador to the United States, I delivered a series of lectures on deterrence – integrating and synthesising US, Chinese and Indo-Pacific perspectives and mapping out where I see the future headed.
I believe they are just as relevant today, and I wanted to share them here with you. – KR
I was recently in Austin, Texas, and I had the opportunity to spend some time at the LBJ Presidential Library.
I have long been an admirer of LBJ, notwithstanding the difficulties he faced in his political career, particularly in relation to the Vietnam War.
LBJ, however, was a man of courage. And he joins that long line of US presidents who had worn the uniform of the US Navy before themselves becoming commander in chief – JFK, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and HW Bush.
While at the Library, I discovered something of LBJ’s war service record, he having joined the US Naval Reserve in 1940, before enlisting for active duty two days after Pearl Harbor in 1941, then seeing active service in my own country of Australia and in Papua New Guinea.
General Douglas Macarthur found LBJ’s presence at his field headquarters in Brisbane (my own hometown) to be a positive pain in the you-know-where. But he tolerated Johnson, not least because LBJ at that stage had been a long-serving US congressman from the great state of Texas. And when he heard of LBJ’s participation in reconnaissance flights over enemy-occupied Papua New Guinea when much of the aircraft he was in was blown away, he reversed his tune and promptly awarded LBJ the Silver Star.
I was taken in particular while visiting the library with a singular, pithy observation by the 36th President taken from his State of the Union in January 1964, who said: “We must be constantly prepared for the worst and constantly acting for the best. We must be strong enough to win any war and we must be wise enough to prevent one.”
There is something of an old fashioned, almost Lincolnian farm-boy wisdom about LBJ. Because in that single aphorism, from that single reflection, he sums up the central dilemma that brings us together in this conference today some 60-years later: namely, how to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and how to do so wisely and in a manner which does not provoke Chinese unilateral military action in the first place.
The importance of military dialogue
I’ve been privileged to address a range of private gatherings with various arms of the US military and intelligence communities over recent years on many of the complex questions concerning China’s rise.
As a result, over many years now, I have been constantly impressed by the calibre of the US military leadership, those who have occupied distinguished positions from chair of the Joint Chiefs, the individual service chiefs, and much nearer to home in Australia, the Indo-Pacific Command or, for those of a certain age such as myself, what was once called PACOM.
So, I begin my remarks today by saluting your service as those who proudly wear the uniform of United States Navy, with whom the Royal Australian Navy has been working together, both in peace and in war, over the better part of a century. Or indeed, those of you serving in other militaries from our friends and partners around the world.
For the record, over many years now, I have also spent time in China, speaking to various gatherings of the Chinese military.
As a student of China and Chinese language for nearly 50 years now, I’ve had opportunities to speak at the National Defence University in Beijing, the Xiangshan Forum, as well as the People’s Liberation Army’s Annual Conference on Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” in Qingdao.
I was able to do much of this when we lived in happier political and geopolitical times. In more recent years, as you will all understand intimately in this gathering, it has become much more difficult.
Although I have always been of the view that it is much better to talk than not to, particularly in the case of the military, not least because it is the armed forces of the two countries that ultimately put themselves in harm’s way, not the political class who direct them – and as Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in a speech earlier this week, the circumstances we face only reinforce the need for militaries to be in contact.
The intellectual legacy of Sun Tzu
Those of you familiar with Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” will know that it is one of the seven great Chinese military classics.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (Mandarin: Bingfa), is the earliest known treatise on war and military science
These classics are imbibed by most of China’s political and military elite. In the case of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”, the scholarship generally concludes that it was written sometime in the warring states period in China’s pre-imperial history [475BC to 221 BC] and represented a military guide to a number of China’s contending kingdoms – before the Kingdom of Qin finally prevailed in 221 BC, thereby establishing China’s first unified empire under Emperor Qin Shihuang.
When I addressed the Sun Tzu Conference in Qingdao nearly 10 years ago, just after leaving the office of Prime Minister in Australia, I spent time, in particular, emphasising Chapter 1, Verse 1, of the “Art of War”, which states: “War is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death. A road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of enquiry that can on no account be neglected.”
Last weekend, when preparing for this lecture, I looked back at my 2014 text and saw that I spent much of the time analysing the core elements of the “Art of War”, including such classical Chinese precepts as the arts of feint and deception, as well as the ultimate desirability for political leaders and military commanders to “win without fighting”.
I was at pains to remind our Chinese audience that these precepts were no longer national secrets. I said they were now widely studied across the Western academy. They therefore had entered the realm of universal military art and science, in the traditions of both Machiavelli and von Clausewitz in the West.
I nonetheless concluded my remarks to that Qingdao Conference by underlining one of the lesser-known conclusions from Sun Tzu’s ancient text.
Quoting from Sun Tzu Chapter 12, Verses 21–22, it states that: “But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being, nor can the dead ever be brought back to life … hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and a good general full of caution. This is the way to keep a country in peace and an army intact.”
In other words, classical Chinese strategic thought tends to exhort caution rather than reckless risk.
These are sobering reflections from the ancient sage, both for Chinese and American audiences, as we approach the great subject of today, which is the future of the United States, China and Taiwan.
Purpose of the lecture
Ten years after making those remarks in Qingdao, the year after Xi Jinping had come to power, we are now well into the second decade of Xi’s rule.
We now confront much starker strategic circumstances than we did back then, although if we look back, there were already emerging trend lines.
Today, we are confronted afresh with the great questions of history: namely how to prevent a war which none of us want and how to fight such a war if indeed we must.
And in our examination of deterrence, these are opposite sides of the same coin.
Today, I’d like to address what I judge to be the central question of our time. Namely, how do we deter Xi Jinping from undertaking unilateral military action against Taiwan.
I want to discuss what we mean by deterrence as a concept, both as defined in the US literature as well as articulated through our own doctrinal statements in Australia.
Second, I want to describe what I see in China’s contemporary literature concerning its own strategy for the future of Taiwan.
Third, I’d like to discuss what integrated deterrence actually means in relation to Taiwan, if in reality and not just in theory we are going to be successful in deterring what would otherwise be a war of truly catastrophic proportions between the world’s two largest economies and militaries, and one with unknowable geostrategic, geoeconomic and geopolitical consequences for the rest of the century.
In doing so, my disclaimer is that these are very much my own views as a China analyst, rather than necessarily reflecting those of the official position of the Australian government.
Understanding the concept of deterrence and integrated deterrence
The single most significant development in recent times in terms of overall US strategy towards China has, in my view, been the US National Security Strategy of November 2017.
You will recall that this was when the US formerly replaced a doctrine of strategic engagement with one of strategic competition as the central organising principle governing its overall relationship with the PRC.
In many respects, this represented a belated recognition of the underlying nature of the US–China relationship as it evolved since the earliest days of Xi Jinping.
Certainly, that is the realist prism through which China views the US relationship, irrespective of the sunny, declaratory language that China may prefer to use to describe the relationship.
Indeed, strategic competition is very much the substance of the relationship when we carefully observe China’s operational behaviour across most policy domains over the better part of a decade.
What is remarkable about the 2017 document is the fact that it has now been embraced on a bipartisan basis and across multiple US strategic policy documents in the nearly seven years since then, thereby providing a remarkable degree of strategic continuity, notwithstanding the significant changes and continuing partisan debates within US politics.
Within this frame of strategic competition, the US, through the national security and defence strategies of both the Trump and Biden administrations, has also embraced fully the concept of deterrence as the principal mechanism to prevent war with the PRC over Taiwan, which successive documents have now described as “the US pacing challenge”.
Under the Biden administration, we also saw the introduction of the concept of integrated deterrence through the 2022 National Defence Strategy. This document outlined the broad conceptual content of this idea across all military domains, non-military domains, as well as the full spectrum of potential conflict across peacetime, grey-zone and up to and including direct, kinetic engagement.
It is to this concept of integrated deterrence as it relates to China and Taiwan that I will return later in this lecture.
Australian strategic and foreign policy doctrine
Deterrence is also a concept readily embraced across Australian strategic, defence and foreign policy doctrine.
In the Australian Defence Strategic Review of November 2023, deterrence is defined as compelling an actor to defer or abandon a planned strategy or activity by having in place steps or responses to change its risk assessment, and therefore its decision making.
The document states that deterrence can be achieved through raising the costs or reducing the benefits to an adversary through denial or dissuasion or punishment.
Importantly, it acknowledges that deterrence exists in the “state of mind” of a would-be adversary, thereby making the credibility of deterrence especially important if it is to have any prospect of actually changing real behaviour by a would-be adversary.
The Defence Strategic Review is also clear in the breadth of deterrence across five domains: maritime, land, air, cyber and space.
Furthermore, it underlines the fact that such a deterrent effort requires a “whole-of-government framework” and relies, in turn, on harnessing all elements of national power.
Speaking at the ANU National Security College Conference earlier this week, the Australian Foreign Minister spoke about the need to deploy Australian national power to ensure that the perceived costs and risks of an adversary are greater than any perceived benefit.
She made clear that this requires not just an ability for Australia to be able to defend itself and have the resolve to do so, but more broadly, to have the national resilience necessary to withstand, endure and recover from any significant external disruption, thereby making Australia a harder target and less susceptible to various forms of coercion.
The Foreign Minister also made plain that without credible military capability, the efficacy of diplomacy is invariably diminished. Diplomacy plays an important role in framing the calculus each country faces. Diplomacy signals intent, and even red lines.
Australia’s new concept of National Defence, outlined in the forthcoming inaugural National Defence Strategy, argues that as we seek to maintain peace in our region, our nation’s frontline is diplomacy.
What the minister said earlier this year also made clear that while Australia worked towards maintaining the conditions of peace through diplomacy, we also play our part in “transparent, collective deterrence of aggression”.
The minister noted that across the region “we see military powers expanding” and that Australia had a responsibility to “change the calculus of any potential aggressor so that no state concludes that the benefits of conflict outweigh the risks”.
The Foreign Minister has made plain that “our foreign and defence policies work together to make Australia’s contribution to the strategic balance of power that keeps the peace in our region” and that this was “a balance where strategic reassurance through diplomacy is underwritten by military deterrence”.
The Foreign Minister has also observed “that our foreign and defence policies are two essential and interdependent parts” of Australian influence in the region and the world, and that together “they make it harder for states to coerce other states against their interests through force or the threatened use of force”.
She stated that “combined, our foreign and defence policies contribute to the strategic balance of power that keeps peace in our wider region”, noting earlier statements by the Australian defence minister and deputy prime minister that “deterrence is not an alternative to cooperation, because they are, in fact, mutually reinforcing”.
On the wider Indo-Pacific region, the Foreign Minister has said that “countries want a region that is peaceful and stable, and that means sufficient balance to deter aggression and coercion, a balance to which more players – including Australia – must contribute if it is to be durable”.
To this, our deputy prime minister and defence minister has added that in the Indo-Pacific, “Australia will need to contribute to a more effective balance of power to avoid a catastrophic failure of deterrence”.
On the specific question of China and Taiwan, the Foreign Minister has been equally explicit: “A war over Taiwan would be catastrophic for all. We know that there would be no real winners. And we know that maintaining the status quo is comprehensively superior to any alternative. It will be challenging, requiring both reassurance and deterrence, but it is the proposition most capable of averting conflict and enabling the region to live in peace and prosperity.”
In terms of reassurance, I believe this is primarily about three things.
The first is being clear-cut in our communications with Beijing that neither the US nor its allies have any interest in overturning the Chinese political system, given that China’s governance is entirely a matter for the Chinese people themselves – although this will never cause us to resile from our view on universal human rights norms as anchored in existing multilateral covenants to which China too is a signatory.
Second, that neither the US nor its allies will support or condone, let alone encourage, a Taiwanese declaration of independence, but instead support the status quo.
And third, that mutual reassurance could be enhanced between the militaries of both sides through effectively operating guardrails, or what the Foreign Minister has described as preventive architecture, that would lessen the risk of crisis, conflict and war by accident, arising from collisions between the naval and air assets from China, the US, and US allies in the region.
In summary, the government of Australia has a realist, balanced, and well-developed concept of what deterrence means as an operational concept in Australian foreign and strategic policy, and in partnership with our friends and allies.
This speech, part one of two, was written by Kevin Rudd and presented to annual Foreign Affairs Conference of the US Naval Academy in 2026. Rudd is a former prime minister of Australia, former Australian ambassador to the US and former leader of the Australian Labor Party.