Source — AITW Ep049 — US Turmoil; India CSP; G-7; WHO Lessons; HK; Australian Geoeconomics¶

Episode Metadata¶

Field	Value
Episode number	49
Title	Ep. 49: US turmoil; India CSP; G-7; WHO lessons; HK; Australian geoeconomics
Publication date	2020-06-14
Recording date	Thursday, 11 June 2020 (Darren: "it's Thursday, the 11th of June today")
Guests	None (Allan and Darren only)
Allan present	Yes
Format	Regular news episode — six topics

Summary¶

Six-topic news episode recorded in the wake of the George Floyd killing and BLM protests. Topics: (1) US racial unrest — Allan draws on personal memory of Washington in the early 1980s, seeing the 1968 riot scars on 14th Street; (2) Australia-India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership ("I've got no bloody idea, Darren" — dismissal of the label's meaning, but acknowledgment of real underlying interests); (3) G7 expansion invitation — historical fun fact: Australia was "blackboarded" by the US when Japan tried to add us in 1979; (4) WHO resolution post-mortem — "Was it possible to get to this sensible outcome without the damage to Australia's relationship with China that we incurred?"; (5) Hong Kong joint statement — Allan would have preferred Australia to follow New Zealand and speak alone rather than with the US and UK; (6) Australian geoeconomics — the observation that feels most significant: "without quite saying so, the Australian government has moved decisively away from an expectation of engagement or cooperation with China to a default adversarial position." On Five Eyes: "as someone who spent part of my young life around the closely guarded secrets of the Five Eyes intelligence relationship... I really find it perplexing how much this is now spooked all over the front pages." Reading: Wind of Change podcast (Spotify) and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.

Key Quotations¶

"I've got no bloody idea, Darren"¶

"I've got no bloody idea, Darren. Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships are a recent invention, which I suspect represent no more than an idea for an announceable at the end of a summit."

— [00:11:01.100 --> 00:12:27.760]

One of the bluntest openings in the corpus. The question is what significance attaches to the Australia-India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Allan's immediate answer: none discernible from the label alone. He then develops the argument — Australia has CSPs with China (with whom we're "basically not talking at all") and Singapore (a genuinely intimate partnership); the fact of having the same label tells you nothing about the substance. The "Christmas tree full of dangly things" describes the joint statement appendix of MOUs and declarations. Characteristic precision about what institutional labels actually indicate versus what they claim.

"A Christmas tree full of dangly things"¶

"The statement after the summit appends a long list of arrangements and declarations and MOUs. It's a sort of Christmas tree full of dangly things, and the issues they cover range from maritime cooperation to vocational education, and as always with these things, they vary in importance, but some of them are genuinely important."

— [00:11:01.100 --> 00:12:27.760]

A vivid image for the standard form of a bilateral summit communiqué — a list of cooperative arrangements in every possible domain, designed to make the occasion look productive regardless of whether the underlying interests are aligned. The Christmas tree metaphor captures both the festivity (it looks impressive) and the arbitrariness (the ornaments are hung regardless of whether they match). "Some of them are genuinely important" is the concession that keeps the analysis fair.

"Whether the game was worth the candle for Australia"¶

"Was it possible to get to this sensible outcome without the damage to Australia's relationship with China that we incurred? And that's a question of diplomacy, and I can't see myself quite how we got into so much collateral damage for so small a return... I just wonder whether the game was worth the candle for Australia."

— [00:19:28.120 --> 00:21:25.440]

The WHO inquiry post-mortem compressed into one phrase. The WHO resolution that eventually passed was sensible but achievable without Australia's high-profile push; China co-sponsored it anyway; the diplomatic damage to the bilateral relationship was real. "Game worth the candle" is an older English idiom (from candle-lit card games — is the prize worth the cost of the candle to play for it?) deployed precisely: the candle cost is named (relationship damage) and the game (the resolution) is characterised as achievable by other means. Characteristic: a single phrase doing the work of an extended argument.

"Australia adding its voice to a joint statement by Singapore, Japan and South Korea certainly would have increased the pressure"¶

"Australia adding its voice to that of the United States and Britain on this issue was not going to ramp up the pressure on China. Australia adding its voice to a joint statement by Singapore, Japan and South Korea certainly would have increased the pressure. So I think it's not just the numbers of countries, it's the countries that you have and whether they have an impact in the capital city you're aiming at."

— [00:27:05.460 --> 00:28:47.680]

The sharpest piece of strategic advice in the episode. On Hong Kong, a joint statement with the US and UK was predictable to Beijing — historically expected Anglosphere solidarity — and therefore not increasing pressure. A joint statement with Singapore, Japan and South Korea would have been surprising, regionally significant, and genuinely harder for Beijing to dismiss. The framework: it's not the quantity of countries, it's their salience to the target audience. Classic diplomatic calculation — who you're speaking with determines whether the message lands.

"Without quite saying so, the Australian government has moved decisively to a default adversarial position"¶

"It does feel to me that without quite saying so, the Australian government has moved decisively away from an expectation of engagement or cooperation with China to a default adversarial position. So we're just not hearing any more the 'we don't have to choose between China and the United States, it's a false binary choice' stuff that we heard so frequently. And what strikes me is the speed with which we've moved into this new era."

— [00:32:59.120 --> 00:35:30.600]

A significant structural observation, not a policy verdict. Allan is not saying the shift is wrong — he is saying it is happening without being explicitly articulated. "Without quite saying so" is the key phrase: the government has changed its posture without making a speech, issuing a white paper, or explaining the reasoning to the public. The contrast with the old "false binary" rhetoric makes the change visible. This is the corpus's clearest statement of what he sees as a fundamental foreign policy shift occurring in real time — and his frustration that it is happening through ministerial backgrounding and Wolverine MPs rather than formal articulation.

"I really find it perplexing how much this is now spooked all over the front pages"¶

"As someone who spent part of my young life around the closely guarded secrets of the Five Eyes intelligence relationship based on the cooperation during the Second World War, I really find it perplexing how much this is now spooked all over the front pages of newspapers and talked about as a quasi-alliance without, so far as I can remember, ever making that formal transition."

— [00:35:51.800 --> 00:37:05.480]

A rare moment where the ONA DG and intelligence professional surfaces explicitly. "Spent part of my young life around the closely guarded secrets of the Five Eyes" — a direct admission of youthful proximity to classified material that he still feels the strangeness of seeing treated as front-page news. The phrase "spooked all over the front pages" is a near-pun (intelligence slang "spook" = spy) that may or may not be deliberate. The formal/informal transition point is analytically significant: Five Eyes has expanded well beyond its original signals intelligence mandate without any formal decision-making process to do so.

Biographical Fragments¶

Evidence type: New — Washington posting in the early 1980s; 1968 riot scars

Washington posting, early 1980s: "I've lived in the US but a long time before you did. In the early 1980s, I went to live in Washington, and then just two blocks away from the Australian embassy down on 14th Street, you could still see the visible scars of the 1968 riots after the death of Martin Luther King." Allan "went to live in Washington" in the early 1980s and was two blocks from the Australian embassy — strongly suggesting a DFAT posting to the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. This fits the career timeline: Singapore posting likely 1970s → something in Washington early 1980s → ONA Soviet analyst by mid-1980s (Chernobyl, April 1986). (Ep049 — new career fragment)
"Part of my young life around the closely guarded secrets of the Five Eyes": Confirms early career involvement in Five Eyes intelligence work, consistent with his confirmed ONA analyst period (mid-1980s) and prior intelligence/security roles. The phrase "part of my young life" places this firmly in his earlier career decades. (Ep049 — corroborates Ep013)
Nostalgia for the end of the Cold War: "nostalgic for me because I was around at the time" — referring to 1990, when the Scorpions' "Wind of Change" became the soundtrack to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse. In 1990 Allan was transitioning from ONA to PM&C or already in Hawke's government. He was professionally engaged with Soviet affairs at this moment, having been an ONA Soviet analyst in the 1980s. (Ep049)
Ta-Nehisi Coates heard on a podcast earlier that week: Allan mentions hearing Coates on a podcast "a couple of days ago" before then recommending Between the World and Me. He is an active podcast listener. (Ep049)

Style and Method Evidence¶

The "blackboarded" G7 fact: Allan deploys an obscure historical detail — that Japan tried to add Australia to the G7 in 1979 and was blocked by the US — with total confidence and no caveating. This is not looked up; it is recalled from deep professional memory. The detail does analytical work: it puts the current G7 expansion invitation in historical context and implicitly makes the point that Australia's relationship with these forums has never been simple.
"I'm down from the ledge": Allan's one-line concession after Darren's long geoeconomics argument. Characteristic economy — he had said he might be overstating the adversarial shift; Darren's argument partially persuades him; he accepts the outcome in four words.
The Singapore/Japan/South Korea counterfactual on Hong Kong: Not just criticism of what the government did, but a concrete alternative with reasoning. Allan doesn't just say the Five Eyes statement was wrong; he says what would have been more effective and why. This is the practitioner habit — diagnose and prescribe, don't just evaluate.

Reading, Listening and Watching¶

Allan — Wind of Change podcast (Spotify, Patrick Radden-Keefe, 7 episodes)

"I've got the Spotify podcast, Wind of Change, in which the American journalist Patrick Radden-Keefe pursues over seven episodes a rumour he has heard that an iconic rock song from 1990, Wind of Change, by the German heavy metal group, The Scorpions, which was Europe's soundtrack to the end of the Cold War, was actually written by the CIA. Look, it's great fun and nostalgic for me because I was around at the time, but relevant for you and your generation, Darren, as a reminder of how espionage, propaganda and influence operations worked in a pre-social media age."

Rare podcast-format recommendation (cf. Ep044 Klein/Osnos). The nostalgia is personal — 1990 was a professionally significant year for anyone working on Soviet affairs in Australian intelligence. But he also frames it analytically: useful for understanding Cold War-era influence operations in contrast to the social media era. He is aware of his own generational position and marks it explicitly ("for you and your generation, Darren").

Allan — Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

"Just because we were talking before about the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in America, I'll add Ta-Nehisi Coates's powerful book, Between the World and Me, which was published in 2015 and addressed to his son about the experience of growing up Black in America, it was hugely insightful for me."

Prompted by the George Floyd killing and BLM protests, and by his personal memory of seeing the 1968 riot scars in Washington. He had been listening to Coates in a podcast interview "a couple of days ago." He does not provide extended analytical commentary on the book — just "hugely insightful for me" — the rarity of the admission (personal insight from a non-policy text) marks it as genuine.

Open Questions¶

Washington posting, early 1980s — DFAT to the Australian embassy at 1601 Massachusetts Avenue? Does this appear in any publicly available DFAT career records? The timeline would be: External Affairs (1969) → Singapore (likely 1970s) → Washington (early 1980s) → ONA Soviet analyst (by mid-1986).
Japan trying to add Australia to the G7 in 1979 — "we were blackboarded by the United States." Is this verifiable in public records of G7 history? Does Fear of Abandonment discuss it?
The Wind of Change podcast: the CIA-wrote-the-song premise — does Allan ever report back on whether he found it convincing?
"The speed with which we've moved into this new era" of adversarial China posture — Allan notes the government hasn't explained this publicly. Does any later episode record a formal articulation by the government?