Dr. Paul Monk on Geopolitics, World Order, and Good Judgement

Transcript below ^_^

Dr. Paul Monk on Geopolitics, World Order, and Good Judgement
Melbourne, 16 November, 2025

[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:12)

Welcome back to Bloom, a conversations podcast about anything and everything. My name is Nick Fabbri, and I'm joined yet again by the wonderful and esteemed Dr. Paul Monk. Paul, welcome to the show.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:12 - 0:25)

Thanks, Nick. It's always great, as I say, to have these conversations. It's a great medium.

It's a great freedom. And we cover, if I may say so, so many different topics that I would like to think will never get boring.

[Nick Fabbri] (0:25 - 1:21)

Indeed, we certainly will be keeping listeners on their toes. So in recent episodes, recording here in our studio in the heart of Melbourne, we've covered topics such as the Lord of the Rings, your own personal memoir and autobiography, The Nature of Autobiography, and a couple of really nice, gentle readings about poetry, the poetry that you produced for some very important and special women in your life. Today, we are shifting gears somewhat to the topic of geopolitics and world order.

And this is something that listeners of this show will be aware we've covered in depth at various points in response to particular moments in history, you know, the election of Donald Trump in the US, the rise of Xi's China in particular and increasing totalitarianism and authoritarianism, the future and fate of liberal democracy and liberalism itself in the Western world and more broadly.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:22 - 1:24)

Reflections on the defence of Australia, even.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:24 - 2:11)

Indeed, indeed. So today, we're really here to do a bit of a reflection on the last 35, 40 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and reflecting on the nature of international relations and also decision making. Because I think one thing everyone can sort of agree on is the increasing fragility, perhaps, and instability of the global order, with the rise of the multipolar world with China and its sort of alliance with Russia, and increasingly a divided and internally focused United States.

So Paul, it's great to have you here. And yeah, would you like to sort of take the floor and make some opening remarks about today's discussion?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:12 - 7:05)

Thanks, Nick. Yeah, I thought that perhaps a useful point of entry might be to read a couple of paragraphs from a book written by a man I'd like to describe as a good friend. And I say that despite the fact that he and I have only met once for a few hours, for a long, wide ranging conversation of just the kind you and I are about to have.

Because I think that these two paragraphs with which he begins his book, help to set the stage for the things we wish to discuss. And he's a very thoughtful man. So these are the first two paragraphs from the preface of a book called The Weary Titan.

Like most books, this one is a product of its times. Like many, it is also intended to serve more than one purpose. As the reader will soon discover, much of what follows is an attempt to reconstruct and to analyse the deliberations and decisions of a small group of turn-of-the-century British statesmen, military officers and bureaucrats.

Because of the enormous difficulty of the challenges they faced, their story has a certain intrinsic drama and interest. The purpose of this study is not, however, purely or even primarily to provide a record of past events. As I will argue, the essential problems that confronted Britain's leaders at the end of the 19th century were not unique to their particular time and place.

The questions of how statesmen come to understand and seek to respond to their circumstances are universal ones. More specifically, how leaders measure relative national power and how they become aware of and react to shifts in the position of their own country are puzzles that, I will try to show, lie at the very heart of most theories of international politics. Along with its historical and theoretical motivations, this book is also driven by a pressing contemporary concern.

At least since the end of the 1960s, Americans have been divided by debate over where their country stands, where it is going and what role it should seek to play in the world. One central theme in this ongoing discussion has been the question of whether, and if so, why, the United States has experienced a relative decline in its power. The matter has been taken up by academics, journalists and politicians.

Public anxiety over the apparent erosion of America's relative military capabilities and general political stature helped to determine the outcome of the 1980 presidential election. A parallel concern for the nation's economic future has manifested itself with increasing force as the decade has progressed. The debate over decline and the pressures that have helped to force it to the surface seem unlikely to subside.

Indeed, they will probably continue to shape the evolution of American national strategy for at least the remainder of this century. Now, the thing to get is that that passage, those two paragraphs, that book, were published in 1988. That's significant for two reasons.

It's now a considerable while ago, but in a way that Aaron Friedberg, the author, who's a professor at Princeton University, manifestly didn't anticipate. 1988 was one year before the collapse of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe in peaceful revolutions that transformed Europe. It was three years before the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.

And what followed in the decade after that in the 1990s and up to the turn of the 21st century was what we've known as the unipolar moment when so far from being perceived as in relative or never mind absolute decline, the United States was seen as the only military superpower. Its economy boomed. The high-tech economy started to emerge centred in the United States.

And at the end of the 1990s, in the year 2000, in the final year of President Clinton's term of office in the White House, the United States was in very good shape indeed, and it was in budgetary surplus. So, it didn't appear at all to have gone into recline. It appeared to have vaulted to an unparalleled position of both prosperity and power.

Then things started to go wrong. And famously, of course, in 2001, literally out of the blue sky, the US was hit by radical Muslim terrorists. The World Trade Centre was destroyed.

The Pentagon itself was attacked. A plane was in the sky, apparently intended to be flown into the White House itself, but was shot down in Pennsylvania.

[Nick Fabbri] (7:05 - 7:10)

Strikes on the heart of American military, financial and political might.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (7:10 - 12:26)

Yes. So, not only damaging in a physical sense, but symbolic. That the apparently, you know, unstoppable hyperpower could be hit right in its heartland by small groups of highly motivated enemies was a seismic shock.

But what followed was even more telling. And, you know, looking back, I can say that my immediate response to those events, which, of course, shocked me as much as anybody. Well, that's too large a claim.

I'm sure it shocked some people more than it shocked me because they were closer to the action or more immediately, you know, affected by it. But I wrote a piece, let's say, for the Australian Financial Review within a few days of these events, in which I stated, among other things, that we, collectively speaking in the West, would be wise to assume or prudent to assume that those who had perpetrated these attacks had thought several moves ahead. And that like Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, Argentinian-Cuban, in 1965, when he declared that we, that is the communist revolutionary movement globally, should start two, three, many Vietnams in an effort to bog the U.S. down in unsustainable counterinsurgency wars, that the al-Qaeda and its affiliates had a similar plan in mind. They wished to draw the U.S. into a series of unsustainable, highly expensive and draining military interventions. That was published, as I said, within days of 9-11. And what we ended up with, of course, was the invasion of Afghanistan, which dragged on for 20 years, then the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which likewise dragged on for many years, cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and at a minimum, tens of thousands, perhaps some hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi lives.

As if that wasn't enough, although the U.S. had been in surplus at the turn of the century and looked like it could pay down its national debt, it started to run deficits, and these started to get out of control, but exacerbated by the fact that in 2008, the global financial crisis occurred, where the U.S. housing market tanked. And it turns out that because of the use of very clever financial instruments, derivatives, it turned out that the financial system more or less around the globe was leveraged and vulnerable in ways that nobody had adequately taken oversight of, least of all inside the U.S. government, where, if anywhere, responsibility lay for being aware of these risks. And the result was another very expensive debacle, which affected not only the U.S. economy, but the global economy. So we went within a decade from the hyperpower seemed to be at its apogee to appearing as under attack, vulnerable, not well governed, and heading into heavy weather. And I think it's fair to say that since then, if you look at the presidencies of Barack Obama, Trump won, Biden, the U.S. has appeared to be straying further into the quicksand, despite efforts to pull these things back. That since then, the U.S. has showed itself to be battling with that heavy weather. And to top all of that, depart from the, as it were, self-inflicted wounds that the U.S. has suffered from its apogee. We've seen during that period another major development. That is that China, having embarked on a process of at least ostensible economic reform and opening, was optimistically admitted to the World Trade Organisation in 2000 and grew at a staggering pace in the 2000s and 2010s.

And the bet placed by the U.S. authorities and the whole Western and developed world was that the rising tide would lift all boats, that as China prospered, it would inevitably nationally, sorry, rationally open up its economy, become a huge market for the exports of the West, and that it would then politically reform because this would be the logic of the economic prosperity. The middle class would grow and demand greater representation. That hasn't happened.

Instead, China is running consistently and relentlessly. Mercantilist policy has poured money into a huge military build-up, into an intense surveillance society and renaissance autocracy, and now is bidding to displace the United States at a minimum from East and Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific, and more or less to displace it, you might say, as the hyperpower, to really turn things on their heads. That's the geopolitical world in which we now find ourselves.

[Nick Fabbri] (12:26 - 13:08)

Well, that was an absolute tour de force, Paul, and I think a great example of why we have minds like yours on Bloom. But for someone like me, who's 33 years old and was born in 1992, who's essentially grown up in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, could you take our listeners and indeed me back to 1988 and what it felt like as a private citizen from Australia observing the global order, let alone being a specialist like Friedberg, who essentially foresaw, as I understand your summary of his work, the US entering into a period of relative decline before the exact thing opposite happens over the next decade?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (13:09 - 15:23)

Yes. I mean, that last point is particularly interesting. Let me just first, though, address your question about what it was like in 1988 since you were born in 1992.

I was born in 1956, let's say, the time of the Suez Crisis and so on. And so I'd lived right through the Cold War, well, most of it, pardon me. And in 1988, I was finishing my PhD.

I was writing it up and preparing to submit it for examination. And it was about the US and its efforts to prevent the spread of communism by engaging in counterinsurgency operations in the developing world. And my purpose had been in there to pin down, how did the US conceive the Cold War and conceive the objectives and possibilities of counterinsurgency?

And above all, how well did it think its way through the challenges entailed in this? And so I was just finishing that up in 1988 and corresponding with people in the US who had been involved in all of this, very absorbed in that and tutoring for what it's worth at Melbourne University in Australian politics. And I had written, I did write in the opening pages of the dissertation that contrary to the widespread ideological views in the Western world and elsewhere that had prevailed throughout the 20th century, every time there was a crisis, a major war, a depression, a revolution of some kind, the coming of socialism, the overthrow of capitalism, what in fact had occurred consistently was a demonstration of the vitality and resilience of capitalism and its further extension and that there had been old empires and autocracies that had given way, not capitalism, not the market economy.

And I wrote specifically, this is as I said, it's 1988, that the next in line for capitulation as recent developments plainly show are the command economies of the anti-capitalist states. This was written a year before the Soviet bloc imploded.

[Nick Fabbri] (15:24 - 15:27)

And was this obvious to an everyday citizen or was it really?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (15:27 - 16:42)

It was not obvious to experts. Indeed, as Freedberg clearly shows. Yes, and I have often said and other people have said this to me that if I'd published that in a journal article in 1988, it would have made my career because the next year I would have been vindicated.

But I was just finishing a PhD and I wasn't thinking, I've got to write this because let's be clear, when I talked about the next in line for capitulation, I didn't anticipate that the very next year it would all come apart really quickly and peacefully. That was a remarkable development. And as Nick just remarked, I mean, the great scholar, Aaron, who had been thinking about this right through the 1980s, not only didn't anticipate that, he thought that the US, not the Soviet bloc, was in decline.

And Paul Kennedy, who was one of his mentors in this project, published a book in 1988 in which he specifically stated, I've often quoted this because it's very striking when you think about it, that the Soviet Union was run by realists. The Kremlin was a hardheaded outfit and it didn't withdraw from anywhere and it would not withdraw from Eastern Europe and it would certainly not count on the serenification of Germany. The very next year he was proven wrong on all counts.

[Nick Fabbri] (16:43 - 17:33)

Yeah, and yet his career goes on. He's publishing works and he's probably appearing on TV as an expert, which is, I think, right and true, but to be able to do so and keep contributing to various analyses. But I think what I reflect on when I hear stories like that is the essential randomness of geopolitics and also the ways in which your best laid forecasts can be proven radically incorrect, but also by sort of black swan events like 9-11, which caused the US to sort of stagger into the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So what does it say about just the nature of forecasting, geopolitics, academia, and also how much at all can experts within the bureaucracies and our national leaders prepare for events such as this?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (17:34 - 20:52)

Well, I mean, again, that's a very good question. And the term black swan event, of course, is key. It became famous particularly after 9-11 because that was apparently such a spectacular illustration of the principle.

Where does the term black swan event come from? Well, until people, to their astonishment, discovered black swans, it had been believed for the longest time that swans, by definition, were white. And when somebody discovered, well, actually, there are black ones.

If I recollect it right, it was in the Southern Hemisphere in Australia. It was in Australia, yeah, I think so. And so a shock, something that was not predicted, that's a big surprise, was quickly labelled a black swan event.

Now, let's just take the two examples that I adverted to you before, the 9-11 and the GFC. For most people, these were such events. They appeared to happen out of the blue and couldn't have been foreseen, et cetera.

But neither of those statements is true. And this takes us to a more fundamental and, in principle, tractable problem. That 9-11, in one sense, was foreseen.

That is that the CIA and elements of the FBI and other parts of the U.S. government and other parts of the Western intelligence world had been aware for some time that Muslim radicals were conducting terrorist operations and were wanting to grievously hurt the United States in particular. There was a lot of intelligence work going into trying to anticipate what they might do, when they might do it, how they might do it. And yet they didn't anticipate this particular attack, the timing of it, the nature of it, the consequences of it.

But that's actually of a piece with the fact that once it did occur, the U.S. government arguably reacted, overreacted, let's say, in rage, which, as I said, I had pointed out within days was quite possibly what its enemies had wanted to trigger, to draw it into large-scale, very expensive, unsustainable, and costly counterinsurgency wars, which it did. So in one sense, something like this was anticipated. Had there been better intelligence coordination, it's possible that this particular attack could have been headed off, which draws us into the world of...

So intelligence collection, intelligence analysis, political and strategic analysis and planning, how are these done? We'll come back to that. Let's just draw the parallel with the GFC.

The fact that the derivatives were getting out of hand and being overexploited, and then a huge bubble was building up in the housing market, was noticed by a number of dispassionate observers. In other words, it wasn't in that sense a black swan. It could have been seen.

But the very striking thing is that the responsible authorities who should have foreseen this and found ways to corral it were asleep at the wheel. And that included the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, the ratings agencies, and the intelligence arms of the big banks on Wall Street.

[Nick Fabbri] (20:52 - 21:02)

And meanwhile, you had canny traders and people like Michael Burry in the big short famously foresee this and make a lot of money out of it.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (21:02 - 23:48)

Well, that's the ace in the hole. The fact that Michael Burry, who was a sole trader, very much on the spectrum, and an amateur, an amateur in the sense that he didn't work for another organisation. He'd actually trained at medical school, I think at Stanford.

And then at the time of the tech stock boom in the late 1990s, he'd observed many people around him being irrational and blowing their money and getting caught in a bubble. And he thought, this is just psychologically interesting. And so he decided to get involved in analysing markets and risk.

And he set up a little firm called Scion Capital, which did this very successfully in the 2000s. And as he was operating in various risk parameters and investments and making good money for his clients, he noticed what was happening in the housing market. And he thought, I can't stop this from happening.

But if I could short the housing market, I could make a lot of money for my client. All right. And the long and the short is that he persuaded bankers, at Deutsche Bank in the first instance, to create insurance paper that enabled him to short the housing market.

And then the people whom he persuaded realised that he was onto something, and they got onto marketing this stuff. And then the great perversity occurred, which is Goldman Sachs and other bankers thought, actually, this is true. And we can make money coming and going.

We can sell, right? It's disturbing, isn't it? Yeah, right.

And that really shouldn't have been permitted. But there weren't regulatory procedures in place to prohibit it. And that's when things got completely out of hand.

So in other words, we're looking in both those instances at the fact that if scrupulously analysed, if probed away at and thought through, if then regulated or planned for in a responsible way, so-called black swan events may not occur. Or if they do, the consequences can be very significantly mitigated. Vis-a-vis the pandemic of 2020, for instance.

Well, that too, right? And the idea that we need procedures, institutions, et cetera, in place to cope quickly and effectively with emergencies of that nature. And so the core factor we're talking about here, if we go back to, say, 1988, why was it that almost nobody perceived or was publicly declaring the Soviet Union is about to collapse?

You were a kind of Michael Burry figure in a way. Well, in my own way, except I didn't figure out a way to short any markets, so I didn't make any money. That's right.

[Nick Fabbri] (23:48 - 24:19)

But stepping back even further, as Friedberg does, and you go to the periodisation of 1895 to 1905, so the late Victorian or early Georgian period, what benefit and utility can we derive as analysts or specialists or observers of geopolitics from trying to look at the patterns of history, the way in which empires have grappled with these things in the past? And yeah, and what applicability, I suppose, does it have to the present day?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (24:20 - 26:33)

Well, I think that Aaron Friedberg's primary point is international relations theory tends to talk about states as more or less unitary rational actors, as if they're automatons that react in a predictable mathematical way, doing a calculus of the relative balance of power and adjusting accordingly, forming alliances, breaking alliances. It's much messier than that. All right.

So he said, let's look at how British statesmen 100 years ago and more actually thought about what was observable, that is that both Germany and the United States were overtaking Britain in industrialisation, and therefore were going to overtake in terms of military power, what were the implications for the British Empire? Because as he says, that's an interesting case study in the nature of the case, because this was the British Empire at its apogee. It was a global empire, immensely prestigious.

And we know what subsequently happened. But what were they thinking at a time when it wasn't falling apart? It wasn't bankrupt.

It was at its height, but there was trouble looming on the horizon. That's a really interesting case in point. And the fact that he wrote in 1988 suggests that there should have been more people thinking on parallel lines about the United States.

But perhaps one reason they didn't is because the contrary to very widespread, almost universal expectations, as we were saying, the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, within a few months, just turned the other way around and became pro-American democratic. The Soviet Union itself collapsed. China had a crisis issuing in the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square, but appeared set on reforming its institutions and opening its economy.

The US throve and under Bill Clinton, it had run budget surpluses. What was that like? Decline or fall?

What are you talking about? Might have been, quite realistically, might have been the mood, right?

[Nick Fabbri] (26:34 - 26:42)

And that sort of Fukuyama end of history feeling of, you know, liberal democracy and capitalism, Western values have triumphed.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (26:42 - 27:58)

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's the classic rhetorical question. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, and so this prompts questions about the very nature of international relations. And of course, we can say this now with, shall we say, feeling, because unlike Aaron in 1988, or Bill Clinton in the mid 1990s, or the turn of the century, we now look around the global order and think, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is getting really ominous, right? For those of us who might in the 1990s and early 2000s have thought, we're approaching what Winston Churchill famously called the sunny uplands of history, right?

Or post history, as you suggest, by Fukuyama. I don't think there's very many people right now who are thinking that way. All right.

So even when it comes to the matter of technological innovation, the story du jour, as it were, is AI. And there's as much fear and anxiety about AI as there is optimism. Is it going to solve all our problems for us?

Is it going to transform us into an advanced, but just and well-administered capitalist society where there's growing prosperity and productivity? That seems a daydream right now.

[Nick Fabbri] (27:58 - 29:47)

Yeah. You mentioned in your opening remarks about the ways your interest or your PhD and scholarly research in the ways that institutions or bureaucracies, as well as nation states, and I suppose the executive made up of individuals within the governments who think their way through crises and respond to events, et cetera. It seems to me that there's also another side of the coin, which is about how in the world of geopolitics, both bureaucracies, in terms of governmental departments and so on, but also governments, so nation states, can seek to steer or guide events.

And two examples in our conversation come to mind. The first is George H.W. Bush's, I think, adept handling of the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the way in which he wasn't triumphant and he sought to integrate a lot of the former Iron Curtain states into the Western bloc, but also maintain Russia's sphere of influence so it wouldn't be revanchist and so on. And then secondly is the question you brought up about China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in the early 2000s and the way in which that, I think, global states people would have hoped that that would have seen China itself liberalise, democratise.

And I think it strikes me that both of those examples in which the nation states or governments have sought to engineer or steer geopolitics or global events in certain directions have gone completely the other direction. So China, obviously, which you can talk about, but also the revanchist Russia and Putin seeking to restore the territory of the Soviet empire and have a really strong hemispheric sphere of influence in Eurasia.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (29:47 - 33:33)

Yes. I mean, it just goes to show that even where good faith efforts are made to be insightful and exercise foresight and maintain and underpin stability are in evidence, that still the future is very difficult to govern, very difficult to predict. And one of the reasons for that is that a lot of information is actually not available to the people who are trying to exercise that responsibility.

And, you know, when President Bush Sr. gave what is known as his chicken Kiev speech, he was urging the Ukrainians to remain part of a federation with Russia for the sake of economic reform, political stability, etc. The Ukrainians voted all but unanimously to separate from Russia. Now, where President Bush was coming from was this broad, brushed geopolitical view of stability and the development of amity.

Realism as well. Well, realism only in the very broadest sense, right? Was it realistic given that he didn't really know the history?

He didn't really understand either Ukraine or Russia. He just thought, well, we've been able to work with Gorbachev and he's still there. And let's see if we can help him to reconstruct a more or less unified Russia, which includes Ukraine.

And then when the Ukrainians said, no, we want independence at long last, the Americans and at this stage, I think, still led by Bush said, well, we want Russia to feel comfortable with its new state of affairs and we don't want a war to break out there. So we will give security guarantees to this new state of Ukraine, provided that it gives up its nuclear weapons and hands them over to Russia and that the Russians will then in turn guarantee the security in the borders of Ukraine. Now, it so happened that Russia at that point was very weak.

Gorbachev had actually gone and Boris Yeltsin had stepped up. But Yeltsin, although he had been at focus for a brief while because he championed Russian nationalism and Russian separation from the Soviet Union, was in the end an incompetent and corrupt drunk. And to cut a long story short, the idea of a stable federation or of a peaceful and intelligent separation of the two and security guarantees, all was an attempt at realism.

But look where we are. So in short, what Bush and the people around him at that time were trying to do surely was responsible. But it didn't play out the way he and others manifestly hoped.

And he was surrounded by, I think most reasonable people would agree, very competent people. You know, but best efforts didn't work. And similarly with China.

I mean, Bush again was president when Tiananmen Square occurred. And the question was, how do we react to the fact that the Communist Party has slaughtered many hundreds, possibly thousands of its own citizens and arrested lots of others and lots of its leading intellectuals are fleeing the country, seeking asylum in the United States? Well, we're horrified by this.

You know, this is completely contrary to where we thought China was heading and hoped it would head.

[Nick Fabbri] (33:34 - 33:36)

Through the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and so on.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (33:36 - 36:44)

Yes, yes. In the 1980s. Now, if you'd been keeping a close eye on what actually happened in China prior to that, you'd have realised that Deng Xiaoping was opposed to democratisation.

He wasn't trying to get there. He wanted the Communist Party to retain its dictatorship. Nevertheless, the fact that things got out of hand from his point of view, and so he sent in the tanks and large numbers of China's own citizens have killed the heart of its capital.

This was not a good look. But the discussion in the White House and in the State Department and so on was, but what's the most intelligent way to respond to this? And the consensus was, if we confront China about this, if we isolate it, if we impose enduring and severe sanctions, that's only going to lead to hostility and discourage the reformers and encoach the hardliners.

And that's not where we want to go. So we're going to just say to the Chinese, all right, that's a speed bump on the way to reform. It's a tragedy.

But, you know, we can get past that by encroaching China to remain stable, to open up its economy, keep reforming. And as it reforms, we believe this was the big bet, that China will prosper. That'll be good for everybody.

And as it prospers and as its middle class grows, as we said earlier, it will inevitably reform politically. That's the logic of the development model, the way we think. Well, it didn't turn out that way.

And then, you know, I was reading earlier from the weary titan, Aaron Friedberg's book of 1988, much more recently, but 30 years on from that, he wrote a book called Getting China Wrong, in which he talked about this was the bet placed on China, you know, in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s. But you get to the point where Xi Jinping is in power, and it's clear that bet was wrong. We got it wrong.

We did not sufficiently allow for the dogged determination of the Communist Party to use economic growth, to undergird its own power, and to refuse to go down the path of political reform, and its willingness, indeed, its visionary determination to build up its military and in a sense, seek revenge against the West. It was that dark for perceived abuses in the 19th century. Century of Humiliation.

So-called Century of Humiliation, right? Now, that's a whole subject. But to cut to the chase, in all of these cases, whether you're talking about the rise of or the origins of the GFC, or the problems in Russia, or the Communist Party in China, in every case, the challenge in front of decision makers was to understand how complex the realities were they're trying to think their way through, and not to put too many chips on the one place on the table, to have the cognitive resilience, the strategic resilience to head off untoward and unwelcome developments, if that's what started to happen. In all four of those cases, these things did happen, and nobody was prepared, nobody headed them off in a timely way.

[Nick Fabbri] (36:46 - 37:08)

So given that discussion, and the fact that governments and bureaucracies, despite the best of intentions, often don't adequately respond to crises as they emerge, what are we to make of the theory of international relations at all? And how does this bear upon the seemingly tempestuous times that we're heading into, in terms of geopolitics?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (37:09 - 42:31)

Yeah, a good question. And particularly, you might say, for somebody who chose to do his PhD in international relations, as it happens, when I embarked on my PhD, I hadn't done international relations theory. I'd done European history as an undergraduate.

And I didn't launch into a course in international relations theory. I was plunged simply into doing a dissertation. And I wanted to address an empirical problem, not a theoretical one.

And consequently, I looked at an actual problem and its ramifications, rather than subjecting the reality I was looking at to a theoretical, preconceived theoretical construct, even to test that construct. And I learned a great deal approaching it the way I did. And then I went into the intelligence world, where it was a matter of practical advice to government, rather than theory, as such.

Nonetheless, I've remained interested in theory. And Aaron, of course, in his book, was primarily interested in theory, because he said that there are a number of dominant theories of international relations, all of which more or less assume that statesmen know what they're doing, that states are more or less unitary actors, that there's a certain logic to international relations. Even if the system is, in a sense, anarchic, that leads to predictable behaviours by states to protect themselves, to bandwagon on big powers, to form coalitions to keep aggressive powers in check, and that a constant of powers, a balance of power is the common outcome, the desideratum, and probably the best thing we can get.

Now, he then says two things, and we can develop each of these, at least briefly, as follows. The first thing he says is that since the theory assumes that statesmen in the abstract are really simply almost the puppets of an underlying structural logic, and that states behave as they do because of their net power and their place in the system, we have to ask ourselves, well, why then are there so many anomalies or tragedies in the way states behave? Why don't they behave more rationally?

And since we can demonstrate that empirically, well, what value are these theories, except in the vaguest possible way? What we need to understand is how do real human beings, with their imperfect knowledge and their conflicting interests, behave when it comes to assessing the relative power of their state and its options and its possible allies and when or whether to start a war or whatever? That's why he did the book that he did.

And what emerges from that study and from others is that states are not unitary rational actors. States, whether big or small, are conjuries of interest groups, some of them in power, some of them in business, some of them at the popular level. Some of them are political parties vying for office who conduct the foreign policy of their country from the point of view of the interests that they hold by and large or compromises over those interests with other people.

And this is very far from being an optimal rational strategy in any theoretical sense. But the second thing is then that being the case, when we look at the current scene, do we see states behaving according to some theoretical logic? Only, again, in the vaguest sense.

What we can openly see, whether it's in Russia or in China or in the United States and in many other countries to which one might advert, is we see interest groups and demagogues and dictators behaving according to a self-interest which runs clean contrary to what an independent person might perceive as the national interest. You have an example of such a thing? Yeah.

Well, I've been arguing for quite some time that if you take China simply as a nation and ask what would be in the rational interest, the best interest of China as a nation in the contemporary world with regard to Taiwan, the thing that would be of least advantage to China in that set of circumstances is to start a war over Taiwan, to invade Taiwan. And yet that is exactly what Xi Jinping is preparing for on a large scale and with open rhetoric and not reluctantly. How do we reconcile, therefore, the case that it would be in China's national interest as China, not as the communist-ruled regime, to say to the people of Taiwan, you've done splendidly.

There's no insurgency. There's no hostility, no threat to us in Taiwan. You're prosperous, more prosperous actually per capita than the mainland.

You've got your own army, your own currency. You are independent. Let's be friends.

We want you to trust us, to trade with us, et cetera. Why on earth would we want a war? Yeah.

All right? There's a gulf between these two positions.

[Nick Fabbri] (42:31 - 43:37)

But it strikes me that that's a really important dimension or complicating factor to a lot of international relations theory. I mean, whose place is it to say what the national interest of any given country or civilisation is? You know, you take the example of the Bolsheviks in 1917, for instance, and the revolution in Russia deposing Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov dynasty.

That was a small coterie of Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized power in the Winter Palace. They, in a way, determined what the national interest was. It was a small sectional interest group, right?

But, you know, you take the example of China and Taiwan. Well, were you to adopt the Chinese perspective and you were steeped in the history of the opium wars, the century of humiliation, the Boxer rebellion, I mean, so many other, you know, this feeling of national or civilisational decline, you would have a completely opposite view to what the Western alliance of Australia or America and Japan would regard as being a China's national interest.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (43:38 - 44:55)

Well, you might or you might not. When you say the Chinese perspective, it isn't the Chinese perspective. It is a particular perspective on Chinese history, which is sedulously propagated by the Chinese Communist Party to stir up nationalism and xenophobia because they are one of the pillars of its attempt at legitimacy in China, right?

There are many, many Chinese who have differing views about the past and what it means. But above all, even if one took that as a widespread Chinese view, the reality is the opium wars 150 years ago, 170 years ago. And since then, the United States in particular has played an overwhelmingly constructive role in China's advancement and modernisation.

American missionaries went and built schools and hospitals in China. The United States supported Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese, right? Once the Chinese Communist Party said, we want to reform and open, the American government did more than any other government to welcome it into international institutions, to give trade concessions to it, to give it a position in the World Trade Organisation on a preferential basis as developing economy, to invest in China.

So the idea that China's experienced only a century of humiliation from the West is just nonsense. It just simply isn't true. And least of all, is it true with regard to the United States?

[Nick Fabbri] (44:55 - 45:19)

I think the broader point I'm making, though, is about the essential contestedness of unitary theories of national interest, though. Take the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Marxist-Leninist CCP almost appropriating the Chinese national identity and sense of national interest for itself and its own means, right?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (45:19 - 46:42)

Exactly so. To pick up the one you mentioned first there about Russia. So the Czarist regime says it's in Russia's national interest to fight on the Allied side against the central powers in the First World War.

The Bolsheviks seize power from the Czarist regime and take precisely the opposite point of view, or more precisely, not the opposite point of view because they don't want to fight on Germany's side. They want global revolution, right? They're really messing with the system.

And then global revolution does not occur. What would then be in the national interest of Russia? Well, it would have been in the national interest of Russia to find a way after the First World War to remain part of the system, right, in order to resume the rapid industrialisation and development that it was enjoying before the First World War.

But the communists shut it off from the global system and therefore repudiated debts to Western banks, which meant they couldn't, for obvious reasons, since they wouldn't repay debts, they couldn't get loans. So they were short of money to develop the economy autonomously. And Stalin then doubled down by forced collectivisation, extracting a surplus from the peasantry.

So in other words, this is the same country, but under totally different regimes, it makes polar opposite judgments, which underscores the fact that regardless of which country you're talking about, those who get to make the choices aren't doing it in a neutral, rational way. They're doing it from a certain point of view. And that may be a very irrational point of view.

[Nick Fabbri] (46:42 - 47:19)

Indeed. One thing that piqued my curiosity about what you were talking about before was the sense in which national interest or decisions of bureaucracies and governments and states, rather, are made up by these sorts of imperceptible discussions, almost at a coffee shop corridor level. And I think you referred to it in another piece as the Brownian motion of the random discussions and different lobby groups and things.

And how attuned are we essentially to those sorts of more imperceptible but really influential changes in different states and bureaucracies?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (47:20 - 48:38)

Mostly not very much. I mean, we have, at least in the Western world, and I think it's fair to say in any what we like to call advanced state, certainly in the case of Russia or China, rights with the Communist, very substantial intelligence and foreign policy bureaucracies whose task it is, at least initially, to understand how other societies really work and what threats there are, what opportunities there might be. And in some respects, some of the time, they do a good job.

All right. Let it be said. But knowledge is generally imperfect.

And in international competition and within, partly as an offshoot of that, within countries, a great deal of secrecy is imposed on those bureaucracies with the result that they can spend so much time obsessing about secrecy and, let it be said also, pursuing the analysis objectives that their political masters want from them, that they do not dig down deeper to look at what I called earlier the Brownian movement of micro forces, ideological, economic, social, that actually constitute the reality of other societies.

And that's one reason why they frequently miss developments that were brewing beneath the surface.

[Nick Fabbri] (48:38 - 48:45)

Like the group think of a lot of the US financial systems domestically missing the GFC and the subprime mortgage crisis, for instance.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (48:46 - 51:46)

Well, yes. Although I think it must be said that in the months before that crisis broke, the risk managers and CEOs of the big Wall Street banks knew what was brewing. They just felt, we've got to keep dancing until the music stops, then try and grab a chair because it's too late to turn back.

Yeah. And the system had failed at that point. This was no longer a tractable risk.

It was no longer a rational risk, certainly not a responsible one, but it happened. And we have the same kind of issue to deal with. When it comes to, famously, when it comes to, well, how do we protect the global commons?

How do we, the human species as a whole, with its 187 or whatever countries, how does it introduce shared and responsibly enacted processes for reining in climate change? For an energy transition, for more equitable development, for heading off disease vectors in a timely way. Stewardship of the oceans.

Yeah, that too, right? I mean, just briefly to digress onto that point, the movie Ocean, which came out early this year, was a prelude to a conference in Paris where this very issue of the stewardship of the oceans was to be discussed. And David Attenborough says eloquently at the end of the movie, I hope that that conference in two months' time will reach the conclusion that we should all agree that if 30% of the oceans are sustainably protected, then the problem we currently have with the oceans can be solved.

Such a consensus did not emerge from that conference. And we have great difficulty with this, right? And it has to do with climate science big time and with other problems.

And now we have a growing problem that, although it was thought by some people at least at the end of the Cold War and by senior statesmen, certainly in the United States, and they'd be said in the 1990s in Russia, that reducing nuclear arsenals and trying to move in the direction of abolishing nuclear weapons was a sensible thing to do. And some progress was made. The enormous arsenals that had accumulated during the Cold War were radically reduced, but they were not abolished.

And they're still actually very big. They never got below a certain threshold. And in the meantime, of course, the fact that other nuclear powers have emerged has aggravated the problem, and not least that countries like Pakistan and North Korea have developed nuclear weapons, whose regimes are dodgy, to put it mildly.

And so there have been scenarios recently where accidental global holocaust occurs because North Korea chooses to irresponsibly launch a missile or two. This problem has not been adequately solved. In fact, arms control agreements have been dropping away.

[Nick Fabbri] (51:47 - 52:23)

Yeah. Could you expand upon that idea of Brownian motion and sort of talk about where that notion comes from and what it means in a metaphorical sense when we think about international relations theory in terms of decision making and judgement? And I suppose how thinking in that different sort of paradigm shift of the micro level would help us as states and institutions to transcend the inherent limitations of bureaucratic apparatus and structures, as you've mentioned before, like things like groupthink, for instance.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (52:23 - 56:46)

Yeah. Well, Brownian motion is what you might call turbulence or indeterminacy at the molecular level, which could not even be discerned before the development of microscopes and even after development microscopes was only first discerned in the early 19th century. And once you can see these things, you begin to realise the atomists are basically right.

The world has all these invisible microparticles that are bumping around and pursuing their own agendas to which we're oblivious unless we have the instruments to see them. Okay. So the analogy I'm drawing is if you are seriously interested in, for example, what's happening in, let's take the case of China.

What's happening among the Chinese people with urbanisation, with rural poverty, which is still massive, with education, with discontent about autocracy or with subjection to surveillance or with disease vectors and efforts by an autocratic state to both keep control for its own reasons, but to suppress the circulation of unwelcome information and bad news. That's a lot of work. And if you are a member of a government bureaucracy whose ostensible purpose is to follow Chinese affairs, two things can go wrong.

One is that there are just higher priorities than following those particular things. Instead, with limited resources, you're tasked with following how many new ships is China building? How many new robot devices is it building?

What are its plans to invade Taiwan? How is its nuclear arsenal coming along? Because we understand it's trying to rapidly increase its reach parity with the United States.

Those are high-priority strategic goals. And in general terms, whether or not this turns out to be the case with China, this preoccupation with the apparently urgent and the neglect of the all-but-invisible underpinnings can lead to a major surprise when suddenly nobody's predicting it. There's a fracture, let's say, in the Chinese Communist Party.

Xi Jinping dies. He's assassinated, falls. There's a military coup, or there's a split in the government.

These things occur, and people get caught by surprise. Right now, if you said that's going to happen in Chinese time soon, the specialists would say, no, it's not. No, he's firmly in power.

But they said the same about the Soviet Union. They said the same about Indonesia in East Timor. They said the same about apartheid in South Africa.

That it's not going anywhere. They were wrong in all those cases. We need, therefore, somehow or other to analyse what I've called this Brownian movement.

And at their best— What instruments, to take the analogy, what instruments can we apply to our analysis, though, to have that depth of— Well, the closest we generally get is good investigative journalism and good academic scholarship. There's a fellow who used to work in the CIA and the NSC years ago, who about 20 years ago, wrote a book called Reforming Intelligence in the United States. And the line in his book, which, as I've said to him personally, most appeals to me, is where he said, we used to joke to one another in the CIA, why is it that we sometimes miss things or get them wrong when journalists and academics get it right?

And we told each other, the reason is because unlike us in the secret world, those people are not denied access to open sources. In other words, they can openly go and look and interview people that we don't because we don't want to give away what we're interested in because it's all secret, isn't it? I've experienced that firsthand, working in the intelligence system.

And when I left the Australian government, one of the first things I did by invitation was go to Taiwan for a conference. And one of the meetings I was involved in was a meeting with academics at the Academy of Social Sciences. We talked openly about regional security, about missile defence, about air power, et cetera.

When we came out, I said to my academic colleagues, no one else there was an ex-spy, I said, you have no idea what a relief it is not to be a government official. You can have a candid conversation.

[Nick Fabbri] (56:47 - 56:52)

Which is a shame, though, when you think you need to be having these candid conversations and frank and fearless advice in government.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (56:52 - 56:53)

It is, absolutely.

[Nick Fabbri] (56:53 - 56:55)

It's the type of person you should want.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (56:55 - 57:21)

Yeah, yeah. And as you know, and we've said in one of our earlier podcasts, I'm planning to write a memoir. And the second volume, called The Gnomes of Russell Hill, will be about both my doctorate and my years in defence intelligence and the interaction between the two, because it was my consistent experience that all of the pathologies of bureaucratic and secret intelligence that I'd discovered in the US in my doctoral studies were twin spades in Australia.

[Nick Fabbri] (57:22 - 57:46)

And there was an echo with your PhD and Daniel Ellsberg's The Pentagon Papers, which was essentially a massive leak by Ellsberg in the United States about US grand strategy and even sort of more on the ground strategy in Vietnam, how it was conducting the war in Vietnam, how institutions thought, devised plans, how they challenged themselves internally, et cetera.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (57:46 - 59:31)

Yes. Yes, absolutely. You know, I would say, I have said in many places for a long time now that Ellsberg's papers on the war, which is say the Vietnam War, which were written before he leaked the Pentagon Papers, they were written when he was still in government and it ran.

Well, he was wrestling increasingly with the question of why did we go into Vietnam? Why have we fought the way we have? Why is it becoming a quagmire where we're losing tens of thousands of our young men and we're not winning this war?

And there's no clear way we can win it. Why? And he was very thoughtful in this.

And the paragraph, that's all it is, that has always stuck most in my mind is where he said, it became clear that there were cases, the Vietnam War was one in which the US government, starting ignorant, did not, would not learn. There was a whole set, he said, of institutional anti-learning mechanisms, which guaranteed unsuccessful and counterproductive behaviour, beginning with the lack of institutional memory at any level. Now, I not only thought this was a powerful piece of analysis, I read that very late in my own enquiries and I had already discovered that this was true in all the case studies I was looking at in my PhD.

So he'd looked only at Vietnam and he'd said it's one case. I had looked also at the Philippines over a very long period and at El Salvador over a long period. And I even, on the side, that wasn't part of my doctorate, I read about Iran and the Alzberg's essential point was true in all of the cases I looked at.

Now, that doesn't mean the US was uniquely perverse, right? The same is true in other governments.

[Nick Fabbri] (59:32 - 1:00:11)

I think an interesting point is we've talked a lot about institutional and state failures, right, in terms of responding to events, but also trying to steer and shepherd them. But sometimes the US and other empires like Imperial Britain gets things right in terms of guaranteeing their national interests. We've talked before about the example of the reconstruction of Japan following the Second World War, sorry.

So there's that question about, could you reflect on that? So that fact, right, that sometimes things go really well. And then secondly, how do nations conceive of geopolitics and strategic interest as events change?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:00:14 - 1:03:19)

Okay, so there's probably a couple of fundamental points to make there. The first is regarding to Nicholas Spickman, you mentioned in passing. Spickman was writing in the 1940s, so getting on for a century ago, right?

And he's writing at a point where the fascist powers had risen and the Second World War had broken out. And he's trying to make sense of all this. And he says the pivot in international relations, at least in the 20th century, is that Eurasia is the world island, and who dominates Eurasia will dominate the world.

Now, it so happens that the British had dominated the world in the 19th century and in a significant sense well into the 20th, and they didn't dominate Eurasia. So you could question his theory. But US diplomats and statesmen in the immediate wake of the Second World War fairly clearly thought, well, our problem is communism, and it's taking over Eurasia.

And we don't want to see a recrudescence of the fascism in Germany and Japan, which led to the Second World War. So we want to try and solve both problems at once by occupying, reconstructing, and democratising Germany and Japan and containing communism in the Soviet bloc and China. That very prolonged, very complicated task was, one has to say, triumphantly achieved.

If one leaves aside what happened in China where the Communist Party proved tenacious and resilient and is a bigger problem now than ever it was during the Cold War. But what does that tell us about how nations or their elites in general make decisions about international politics? Not a whole lot, because in the 1940s, the United States was in a position by virtue of its supreme industrial power and its financial wealth, particularly immediately after the war when almost everybody else was in ruins, to set the terms for a world order.

And it was run by a democratic party that had just implemented the New Deal in the United States and had a kind of visionary view of human order, human well-being, and so on. And so they set up institutions with the clear intention not only of containing communism and reforming fascist countries, but of making it possible for the world to be as peaceful, as democratic, and as given to the protection of human rights as could reasonably be achieved. But that's almost a unique point in history, to have that combination, the vision, the means, the dominance.

And it's now we're seeing much more difficult if you're openly being challenged by powers, including one in the case of China, that is close to being at the very least a peer competitor and possibly set to overrun the sources of your dominance. Mm.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:03:20 - 1:03:29)

How do we think about grand strategy more deeply by stepping back into the past and different imperial examples throughout the last couple of millennia?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:03:30 - 1:08:18)

A good question. I mean, the first one I think I'd make is this, that the idea of an international order, of an international legal order, of a concert of states that dialogue about keeping the peace, that have regular diplomatic services, regulated borders, passports, all of that, that's European, that didn't arise elsewhere in the same way. And it arose by a series of steps from the 16th century through the 19th.

And when people in the West, at least, come together for conferences to talk about international order, they'll very frequently pivot on the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars and the way in which the victorious powers, who were mostly conservative, set about reaching agreements that would, they thought, not only keep the peace in Europe, that is to say, prevent the outbreak of major war, but would also prevent radical revolution in Europe.

And many people of a conservative disposition, at least, say, well, in the concert of powers work between 1815 and 1914, there wasn't a major war between big powers in Europe. There were small wars, there were changes for sure, and there were some revolutions, but nothing wrecked the general peace and development started to occur. Now, that kind of discussion often omits while the left, of course, will bring it in and emphasise it, that during that century also, the European powers between them, particularly the Western European powers, went out and colonised the world.

All right. Was it peaceful for the rest of the world during that period? No.

But it can be said that because Europe was, generally speaking, stable and industrialising and increasingly prosperous and technologically innovative, when it went out and colonised the rest of the world, it exported many of these ideas and possibilities. And no other figure than Karl Marx remarked that the bourgeoisie, the Western mercantile class that drove these developments, achieved far more than any empire had in the past anywhere in the world. And it spread railroads and telegraphs and industrial production and prosperity and trade in commodities and so on in the most extraordinary way.

Did he mean by that that there was no strife or injustice in the way? Not remotely. Of course, he was a theoretician of class struggle, but he nevertheless paid credit, you might say, where credit is due.

And in a way that would shock many of the activists today and want to pull down the statues of Cecil Rhodes and others who actually did the colonising, Karl Marx himself defended the British colonisation of India on the basis that it was good for India. And he defended slavery in the old United States on the basis that it was necessary to the industrialisation of Britain. You won't find Marxists quoting him as saying these things, but he did.

The debate, in short, is complex. But I mention a concert of Europe because it's recent and it's almost a cliche. Let's go back much further because one of the other great pivots of historiography in the Western world is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

And the question about the Roman Empire has always been for many centuries, first of all, how did it grow? And secondly, why did it fall? Why didn't it last?

And James Lacey, who actually lectures at the U.S. Marine War College, has just published a book called Rome, the Strategy of Empire, in which he opens with the statement that somehow or other, a view appears to have taken hold in the field this century, that Rome didn't have a grand strategy. That it just improvised along the way. And then eventually it ran out of luck and fell apart.

And he says this is demonstrably wrong. And it's baffling that anybody reached this conclusion. He says if you look at the way the Romans went about building that empire, considering whether it could indefinitely grow, where its borders would be most natural, and then built a system of roads, post and communication, frontier defences, capacity to move troops by water, which is much quicker than road along the Rhine and the Danube, the nature of its defences in different kinds of terrain in Syria or in North Africa. He says if this doesn't constitute grand strategy, the term is meaningless. And he says in doing that time, they sustained a very large army, on average about 400,000 men over 400 years.

They trained the centurions. They had the arms factories. They produced the tactics, the discipline.

Supply chains. Right, supply chains, everything. They could move food.

They had the logistics chains so that they could move armies around this chessboard with efficiency and speed. Given the technology of the day.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:08:18 - 1:08:27)

But where does that self-conception of interest come from? Is it just a couple of people in the Senate or the imperial Rome who's deciding?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:08:27 - 1:11:11)

Well, therein lies one of the most pivotal points in Roman historiography, which is that as the Mediterranean basin was overrun by the Romans initially during the Republic, which people like to heroise, in a lot of respects, they simply plundered the Mediterranean world and enriched themselves, generals not least. When Augustus took over as emperor, though of course he didn't call himself emperor, he called himself the princeps, the first citizen from which we get the word prince. And just parenthetically was Machiavelli in his famous book, The Prince, chooses Cesare Borgia, the Renaissance prince, as a kind of model.

Augustus was the prince. I mean, if anybody's ever been ruthless, cunning, insightful, but with a strategic vision, both political and military, it was Augustus. He was remarkable.

He ruled for 45 years. Wow. Right.

And no other emperor in the history of the empire ruled for even half that long. But why or how was the Roman Empire able to conceive and implement a grand strategy? Well, essentially because once it had overrun all of its key rivals, but still clearly didn't rule the entire world.

And there were the Parthians on one border. There were nomads in North Africa. There were German barbarians and some nations on the Rhine and the Danube.

They had to figure out, well, we don't want these people overrunning our provinces. How do we prevent that? And we can't just keep conquering them all because we can't administer this ever-growing territory.

But the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, the desert in North Africa, all these seem to constitute pretty natural borders. Right. And so a series of emperors, starting with Augustus and climaxing with Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Pius, Marcus Aurelius in the second century, systematically thought this through.

And along the way, the Romans built roads. It's recently been ascertained, for example, that though everybody knew they built lots of roads, there were twice as many miles of roads in the Roman Empire as we'd previously calculated. Extraordinary.

It was very systematic. And they built, famously, Hadrian's Wall in Britain to keep out the Picts, but right along the Rhine and the Danube, very systematic defences. And above all, as I said earlier, the systematic training of an officer corps and disciplined military processes and tactics and strategy that lasted for centuries.

The legions, with few exceptions, throughout certainly the first 350 years of the empire, were very rarely defeated by an enemy and never defeated in such a way as to expose the internal provinces or the empire as such to the danger of plunder and overthrow.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:11:12 - 1:11:54)

Do you think it's an overreach to say that these ideas of world order or grand strategy for certain empires or civilisations is a European kind of creation? I think in particular back to the way in which China as the middle kingdom under the Ming dynasty sought to engineer its hemisphere of influence by surrounding Asian states in this sort of idea of a tributary. It was the gravitational centre and all states around it were subordinate to it and would sort of pay tribute to it.

Or you think about the conception of the Russian world. I think they call it Ruskiy Mir or something like that.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:11:55 - 1:15:18)

Let's take the two cases of China and Russia respectively, as you mentioned them, not least because they're currently from the point of view of a Western or what we call rules-based order so problematic. In a case of China since the third century when Qin Shi Huang and his state of Qin conquered all the other states in the Chinese world, he styled himself and subsequent Chinese emperors kept doing it as the lord of all under heaven. And the theory at least and to some extent the practise was that peripheral states were tributary to the emperor, to China.

That was in fact not always the case. To take a case that became famous in Westernised really only the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese fought for a millennium against Chinese hegemony. They didn't see themselves as one.

They didn't pay tribute. They fought back. And but above all from the point of view of successive Chinese empires, the northern frontier was their big obsession because there were Mongol peoples who kept attacking the empire and in several cases conquered the empire.

So the Xiongnu who we know in the West as the Huns were a big problem for the Han dynasty and overthrew it in the end. And then there were a series of wars in between but the key and most famous such Mongol intervention was that by Genghis Khan who conquered the Song dynasty in two steps and expanded the notionally Chinese empire because China became part of his empire which extended over much of Eurasia. And this was not a matter simply therefore of Chinese grand strategy but what you might call the logic of urban versus nomad civilisation.

The Ming dynasty came in after the downfall of the Mongols and they decided that this perennial problem of invasion by Mongol peoples from the north had to be addressed. So what did they do? Something similar you might say on a grand scale to what Hadrian had done in the Roman empire.

They built a wall. The idea of which is to simply keep the Mongols out. But two things need to be said about that.

Whenever the Ming felt strong they would attack the Mongols, try and reduce them to tributary status with mixed success. Whenever they felt weak they would pay tribute to the Mongols. They would bribe them to keep them pacified.

And no sooner had the wall been finished than rebellious generals within the Ming empire opened its gates to the Manchus, Mongol peoples in Manchuria who then overran the Ming empire and created the Qing empire, a Mongol empire all over again which was much bigger than the Chinese empire. So there's a mixed story when it comes to China as a civilisation being wise, foreseeing and dominant, et cetera. Nevertheless clearly there was an attempt in different ways at grand strategy.

In the end the grand strategy that the Ming adopted was to concentrate for you might say fairly obvious reasons on the northern frontier and that strategy actually failed. But to stop quite deliberately sea voyages which they thought were a waste of time, that proved very expensive in the long run because the Europeans were developing navigational techniques and they came. China had nothing to withstand European naval forces.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:15:19 - 1:15:26)

From the heights of Admiral Zheng He for instance in the 1400s to nothing because they decided to shut up shop as it were.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:15:26 - 1:17:58)

They did, yeah. I mean and those heights that you said were fleets of huge junks sailed into the Indian Ocean and visited all sorts of places. And these days Chinese spokespeople, Communist Party spokespeople like to say but of course they were peaceful.

They were trained. They didn't try and conquer anybody. Well they didn't try and conquer anybody because they were very self-absorbed and they didn't think they needed anything else.

Europeans circumnavigated Africa or at least came around the Cape of Good Hope as they came to call it because they wanted spices from Asia and they were fed up with the Ottoman Empire sitting in between and taxing them, right? So we're going to go and buy them firsthand. And once they got to Asia they realised, whoa, there's all sorts of stuff here, right?

And you might say the rest is history. So is there a strict power between Chinese grand strategy and Roman grand strategy? In the abstract, yes, right?

And what some people would say is, well, China's in some respects work better than Rome's because the Roman Empire fell apart and never got together again. The Chinese Empire kept getting together again one way or another. Before discussing what the implications might be of that because they're relevant right now, let's take the case of Russia.

Russia's grand strategy right up to the Bolshevik Revolution was expansion. You know, once the – I mean the Mongols had conquered Russia, let's remember, right? Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde and the others.

They conquered Russia and Ukraine. They got as far as the borders of what's now Poland. And they intervened in the Middle East.

They conquered Persia. They overran Syria. They threatened Egypt.

It was an enormous expansion of Mongol imperialism. But the Russians finally were able to free themselves from the Tartar yoke. They established the state and then what did they do?

They expanded and expanded and expanded. So what we now think of as Russia is vastly greater than Muscovy was 500 years ago, right? And it's all called Russia because the Russians made it Russian.

They colonised Siberia. They colonised the dominated Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, the Baltic states, whatever. Was that grand strategy the same?

Was it more successful? Well, the state, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, is more or less held together. All right.

So at the broadest brush level, I can say all of these constituted some form of grand strategy. What lessons do they hold for the contemporary West is the question.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:17:59 - 1:18:42)

Well, that's all fascinating, Paul. Thank you again for the sweeping tour of history and the tour de force, intellectual tour de force, dare I say it. But to come back to today in the present, and you've covered the big tectonic plates of Russia and China and Europe slash America broadly defined to the West.

What does good judgement and good statecraft look like in today? So let's say you're sitting in an office in Washington, for instance, and you're advising the secretary of state or the president or perhaps in number 10 Downing Street or even in Canberra. What intellectual, bureaucratic and other approaches should we take to analysis and judgement, basically?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:18:44 - 1:21:58)

That's what you might call the 64, people used to say $64,000 question. That's more beer now. Let's call it the $64 million question.

In fact, given inflation, it's a $64 billion question. The stakes are very, very high. And the shortest answer I could make to that is that as much as ever, despite all our advances in information technology and to some extent, that is a very mixed bag in education, we have a problem now with the politicians, decision-makers and their bureaucracies that there seems to be growing, let's call it cognitive dysfunction.

Authoritarian leaders don't want bad news. They don't want to be told that they've got the wrong idea, that they should change their policy. And unfortunately, in many of the democracies, although the costs of challenging a political leader aren't as severe as they are under autocrats like Xi or Putin, there is a growing tendency, it seems to me, to basically say to bureaucrats and intelligence analysts, your job is to back us up.

Well, no. So I think that we have a problem in that regard. And I freely say, I've said this many years, I left government service because I was not prepared to play that role.

And I played the role of a public intellectual now for a long time, as well as a consultant critical thinking skills in an effort to make a contribution that didn't kowtow to mere authority. But if you look at what Donald Trump's doing in the United States, he's appointing flunky subordinates to do his bidding. He's not appointing professionals to whom he will listen.

That's a very retrograde development in the United States. We know that Xi is purging scores and scores of senior officials and generals. Because he is the boss man.

That's the law. That's the lesson to be drawn. Putin, of course, dominates and terrifies people around him or buys them off with corrupt gigs.

That's a very poor way to run a state. And one can only hope it brings him down. All right.

But this is not consoling from the point of view of global politics. And we know, let's take a more tractable case on the face of it. Of France, Emmanuel Macron knows, as do many other well-informed people in France, that fiscal reform is vital to France's future stability and prosperity.

He can't get it through the French parliament. And prime ministers appointed by him keep suffering votes of no confidence because they try. So we have some serious problems, right?

And but quite apart from that macro-political picture, there's an analytical problem. And we were adverted to this much earlier in the conversation, where given what I call the Brownian movement of detail, micro-economic, micro-political movements, ideologies that fester and can suddenly explode. How do you, in the best case, if you have somebody, let's say an Obama who does listen and is highly intelligent, how do you give him advice that makes a difference?

Well, you do the best analysis you can. You develop staffs who can do this research for you. You pull it together in briefs.

And you're honest with him. Then he tries things and they don't necessarily work.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:21:59 - 1:22:08)

But it seems to me it relies on the national leader, the Obama figure, because he's an ideal in terms of being intellectual, intelligent.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:22:08 - 1:22:10)

He's the West Wing president, right?

[Nick Fabbri] (1:22:10 - 1:22:38)

Indeed, yeah. But it relies on that figure being open or pervious to doubt and to having their beliefs and things challenged. So it seems to me that we're around the corner from catastrophe because we don't have leaders in those three great superpowers, China, Russia, the US, various nations, other examples.

Reform is intractable because of democratic issues, like in France.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:22:38 - 1:24:41)

And we also have a problem, let it be said, with approaches to analysis and prediction as such. So even in the best case – and this was my point indirectly when I said about Obama could get very good advice and still run up against intractable obstacles or make mistakes. But well after I'd left government and was part of a critical thinking consulting operation, or my business partner, I attended a conference in the United States organised by the CIA about methods for intelligence analysis.

And one of the keynote speakers was a man called Philip Tedlock, who had spent the previous 20 years doing a longitudinal study of the capacity of the best specialists in politics and geopolitics to make accurate predictions. After all, isn't that what intelligence analysis is about? We'll come back to that point because I differ a little from that.

But he did this study. He collected the data. He analysed it scrupulously.

And he published a book called Politically Expert. How good are they? How would we know?

And famously, his conclusion was when you get all these predictions in and you compare them with what actually happened, it's really not very consoling because these specialists making predictions in their own field were about as accurate as chimps throwing darts at a board. And I used the example earlier of Aaron failing to foresee what was about to happen the very next year and create not the decline of the United States, but the unipolar moment, or Paul Kennedy writing that the Kremlin doesn't withdraw from anywhere and won't count this reunification of Germany a year or two before all that happened. It's remarkable on the face of it.

What Tetlock showed is that this happens all the time. And somehow, it doesn't really change. That's really an interesting insight and a daunting one in terms of, well, what do you do then?

[Nick Fabbri] (1:24:42 - 1:24:49)

Well, there are deficits in both our ability to comprehend events and the world order, but also for prediction.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:24:50 - 1:26:23)

There are. And consequently, I argued years ago in the first edition of my China book that making long-term predictions is a feckless exercise. It's far too vulnerable to confirmation bias and a failure, even encourages a failure, to look more deeply into minutiae, into what I've called the Brownian movement of affairs.

Rather, what we need to do is to lay out a set of scenarios as to what could conceivably happen with varying probability weightings, and then pay attention precisely to the Brownian movement to see what are the underpinnings, where are they moving, what could shift it from one expectation to a re-weighting in another expectation. And I specifically said in the case of China, the big bet being placed by the West for years now is on China growing, prospering, opening up, and the rising tidal lift all boats. And I said, that's one possible scenario.

But it's only one, and there are at least three others, and I laid them out. We got to a situation about 10 years ago, and unambiguously by this decade, where that first scenario turned out to be the least probable future. And hence, Aaron's book, Getting China Wrong.

I laid that out in 2005. This is what we badly need to do so that we can be more nimble, so we can say, well, we would prefer this happen. We think it maybe will happen, but there are variables in the picture which mean that this could happen or this could happen, and we have to be able to shift balance and deal with that flexibly as we go.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:26:23 - 1:27:36)

Because the stakes are so high, as you've mentioned throughout the discussion today. And one film I saw recently really sheeted this home, it was called This House of Dynamite. And it was about, as you say, that Brownian motion or that, you know, essentially the fate of the continental United States coming down to the operations in a small crisis room in Washington, I believe.

And the scenario was that an unidentified state has launched a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile from some part just east of Japan. And they're just everyday people. They're highly intelligent, you know, good people, full of integrity and looking to serve their country in a public service.

And despite their best efforts, you know, the defences of the US come up short and there's a 50-50 chance of the US's missile defences shooting down the nuclear warhead and it misses. And the end of the film is essentially the implications of that hitting Chicago, which is 10 million dead, right? So despite our best efforts at trying to do things well, we are both beset by randomness, black swan events, limitations of institutions and how they work.

Absolutely.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:27:37 - 1:32:01)

And, you know, the House of Dynamite is a bracing film, I think, for that reason. And I think it's artfully concluded with, you might say, uncertainty. The president, as you'll recall, is left having to make a very fateful decision with inadequate information and no time.

And we're not told what decision he makes, right? I think that this is a very real scenario and it's true, alas, in a number of fields now. And it's quite possible.

It has to be admitted by any realistic person that humanity collectively is heading for a colossal train wreck because we have at least half a dozen very big problems. That's only one of them. And we don't appear to be getting better leadership.

We're getting flakes, frauds, tyrants, fools, corrupt, you know, autocrats, almost gangsters. And we're getting a populist movements that are quasi-fascistic in their attitudes. This is all very unhealthy and unpromising.

And I thought it might be interesting to factor, you know, this House of Dynamite into a scenario sketched out by Giuliano D'Ampoli by way of finishing off where he's an Italian Swiss journalist and novelist who lives in France. And he used to be an advisor to the Italian prime minister. So he's got a bit of a sense of how things work on the inside.

And in his new book, The Hour of the Predator, the very title of which gives you a sense that he's looking at the world much the way we are, you know, with concern and even alarm. Having been inside the room. Having been inside the room.

And, you know, he's worked as a journalist in various places around the world. And so he's seeing up close and personal as it were many of the disturbing trends that are unfolding. But he says, think of it this way.

A lot of people binge watch TV these days. And there are long TV series that people watch. And he writes, you know, pages 13 and 14 of this new book that if you have an optimistic view of the world, you might call this the West Wing view of the world, you know, in which politics is a virtuous competition between generally competent and well-intentioned people.

And I think audiences reacted to the West Wing in different ways. Some saying, oh, isn't it wonderful, you know? And others would snigger and say, yeah, well, if only that was true.

Or others would say, but the very policy positions these well-intentioned people adopt are fatuous if you really understand the way the system works. But nevertheless, it's an optimistic view of the world. The second sort of shows darker, to say the least, one might add, depicting politics as a Hobbesian jungle in which nobody is innocent and the only law is survival.

And he calls this the House of Cards view of the world. Now, he goes on to say that the third category, and because I think this has been his personal experience of things, is more like Veep. And he says, it shows political life as it actually is, he says, as a perpetual comedy of errors in which the characters, almost always unsuited to the positions they occupy, do their best to muddle along, extricating themselves from a series of unexpected, often absurd, and sometimes utterly ridiculous situations.

Would that it were as simple and as comical as that. But the consequences of this, you might draw a parallel, you know, from an earlier generation of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, very funny, very clever shows. But the consequences of Veep or Yes Minister are increasingly deadly to humanity.

They are dark. And so, you might say that the scenario in the House of Dynamite brings all this home to roost. It does.

This is not a comedy, right? But there is muddle, and in that case, you would say, I think, in that film, broadly speaking, the characters in play are somewhat like the West Wing. They're well-intentioned.

They're competent as far as it goes. But they're overwhelmed by a problem which they cannot control. They can't even think it through clearly.

That's the territory we're now in, in international affairs.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:32:02 - 1:33:02)

Yeah. And that's one office in America, right? And their attempts at trying to collaborate with Russia, with China, who are equally bamboozled, you know, by events and where this nuclear warhead has come from, throws into high relief just how difficult international coordination is on those existential issues like pandemic mitigation, international responses to climate change, for instance, looking after the oceans.

So, it's all very sobering stuff. One of my first questions in the conversation today, Paul, was what it was like in 1988 as a PhD student looking out on world events and what predictions you might have had for the future, and just, I guess, what it felt like to be in the middle of the Cold War, because I, of course, was born after it, and the Soviet Union had dissolved. What does it feel like today in 2025, having had a full career and having done your PhD, and to be immersed in geopolitics and international relations and foreign affairs, all that extra wisdom?

What do you feel looking out today?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:33:04 - 1:35:04)

The most succinct response I think I can give is I do not feel optimistic. But that's counterbalanced to some extent by the fact that I've spent all those intervening years, as indeed I had prior to 1988, earnestly trying to understand the condition of the world, the nature of humanity, the international order. And I don't regret doing what I've done.

I would certainly have hoped that things would have been better managed in this century. What I see right now, in contrast to 1988, where I was comparatively optimistic, is things seem to be unravelling. But let's bear in mind, as I said earlier, that the crucial thing, analytically, is not to make some bold prediction.

That's precisely the mistake TEDLOC specialists kept making, and where they got it wrong. The thing is to think things through on a provisional basis and allow various possible developments, and then to try and specify which variables will do the most to shape this outcome rather than that outcome, and what action can be taken to affect this or that crucial variable, so that there's a better chance of one of these outcomes occurring rather than another. And how can we buffer our systems, our liberties, for example, our prosperity, against the possibility that something will occur, which we can't prevent, right, whether it's a natural disaster, whether it's, you know, not aggressive so much as, you know, unstoppable climate change, with all that appears to entail, whether it's a foreign war, whether it's a nuclear war of some kind.

We need to think about these things. We need to be serious. We can't hide our heads in the sand.

And it seems to me that the conversation in Australia, where we can take some degree of responsibility, is insufficiently deep or engaged, and above all methodologically not well-founded at the moment.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:04 - 1:35:11)

Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time today, Paul. And on that sort of heavy and sobering note, I think we should go and get a beer and have a laugh.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:12 - 1:35:13)

Sounds good to me. Thanks.