Source — AITW Ep068 — Natasha Kassam on Preparing for a China-led World¶
Episode Metadata¶
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Episode number | 68 |
| Title | Natasha Kassam on preparing for a China-led world |
| Publication date | 2021-02-25 |
| Recording date | Wednesday, 24 February 2021 |
| Guests | Natasha Kassam (Director, Lowy Institute Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Programme; former DFAT diplomat) |
| Allan present | Yes — as interviewer |
| Format | Guest interview — "the tables have turned" — Allan interviews Darren and Natasha about their joint Australian Foreign Affairs essay "Future Shock: How to Prepare for a China-led World" |
Summary¶
Unusually, Allan is in the interviewer role for this episode. He interviews Natasha Kassam and Darren about their co-authored essay "Future Shock" in Australian Foreign Affairs, which asks what a China-led international order would look like and what Australia might do about it. Allan's questions are substantively challenging — Darren thanks Natasha afterward for "attracting some of Allan's friendly fire."
The analytical centre of the episode is a debate about which specific liberal values China's party-state needs to suppress or eliminate, and whether the China-Biden comparison on promoting one's own model actually holds up. Allan's most interesting contribution is his Woodrow Wilson observation at the end: the liberal order's founding aspiration (Wilsonian transparency — "open covenants openly arrived at") failed so badly in the interwar period that the UN system was deliberately designed to be less transparent, more power-based through the Security Council. He wants to think through the implications of this for Natasha and Darren's argument about transparency as the liberal value China is eroding.
Biographical significance: Allan names his starting point as "the world-weary eyes of a realist"; discloses a prior view he has been holding ("I confess I've subscribed to myself") that China would not want to export its model; describes "the space in between" competing imperatives as "where practitioners live." No reading segment — Allan explicitly notes the absence and nominates the Kassam/Lim essay itself as the recommendation.
Key Quotations¶
"World-weary eyes of a realist"¶
"I guess I'd begin by looking at China with the world-weary eyes of a realist. That is, I see it as great power acting in the world in ways that great powers do. Some people view it through a distinctly Chinese lens, drawing on particularly Chinese history and culture to help them think about how China will behave. And you could describe this as the Middle Kingdom view, and we all know people who begin there. Or you could see it through the lens of the particular party-state system that Tash just described. Now, all of us understand the importance of all three perspectives, and we all bring them all into our analysis. I'm just talking about the sort of starting points."
— [00:08:44.290 --> 00:11:30.650]
Allan names three analytical prisms for understanding China: (1) realist — great power behaving as great powers do; (2) Middle Kingdom — Chinese history and culture as explanatory; (3) party-state — the CCP's distinctive interests as primary. He acknowledges all three matter. But his self-description as beginning with "the world-weary eyes of a realist" is the biographical payload: it locates him in the practitioner tradition rather than area studies or ideological critique. "World-weary" is doing real work — it signals accumulated experience, scepticism of bright-line explanations, and a reluctance to be shocked by power behaviour. This is the analyst who has watched great powers act for fifty years and finds their behaviour largely predictable at the structural level.
The three-prism framework is also a practitioner's map of the analytical landscape: he knows where everyone is sitting before the conversation starts.
"I have the utmost confidence in your and Tasha's ability to handle the hard one"¶
Darren: "Allan, that is a very difficult question. Did I ask you anything that difficult when I was interrogating you?" Allan: "I have the utmost confidence in your and Tasha's ability to handle the hard one, Darren."
— [00:11:30.650 --> 00:11:42.650]
A small exchange that reveals something about Allan's enjoyment of the reversal. He asked what specific liberal values China needs to suppress or eliminate — a genuinely hard analytical question that requires precision about which elements of the post-war order are actually liberal. Darren's complaint is fair: it is harder than anything Darren typically asks Allan. Allan's response is genial, mock-innocent, entirely satisfying to himself.
"One I confess I've subscribed to myself" — revising the China model export view¶
"Until recently, one of the pieces of conventional wisdom you'd often hear about China, and it's one I confess I've subscribed to myself, is that China's leadership is so preoccupied with its own internal problems, which are numerous, and the cultural sense of Han uniqueness runs so deep that they had no desire to export their system."
— [00:36:34.430 --> 00:38:22.610]
Characteristic intellectual honesty about a prior view he now considers in need of revision. He does not present this as a debunked belief of others — he names himself as a holder of it. The view: China would not want to export its model because (a) internal preoccupations, (b) cultural particularity (Han uniqueness). The episode's discussion — China's internet governance influence, surveillance technology exports, the WHO transparency issue — is pressing him to revise this. He does not complete the revision on air; he discloses that it is under way. This is the pattern from earlier episodes (the agency debate, the Quad scepticism) — he names the revision point honestly before the new position is settled.
"The space in between is also where practitioners live"¶
"There are two competing imperatives. The first is the maintenance of an order with universal participation in order to address challenges like climate change, and secondly, and we've been talking about this, the preservation of universal liberal beliefs about the rule of law and individual rights. Then you say the space in between is where strategy emerges and the space in between, of course, is also where practitioners live."
— [00:45:27.870 --> 00:45:59.930]
He is paraphrasing from the Kassam/Lim essay and then adding a line. The addition is the biographical statement: practitioners occupy the space between irreconcilable imperatives as their normal working environment. The two competing imperatives (universal participation vs. liberal values) cannot both be maximised simultaneously — climate change requires China at the table; liberal values imply confronting China's behaviour. Strategy, as Kassam and Lim argue, emerges from navigating that gap. Allan's addition — "that's also where practitioners live" — is not elaborated; it does not need to be. He has spent fifty years in that space.
The Woodrow Wilson irony — transparency and the liberal order¶
"You introduced centrally, really, the idea of transparency as a value to me, and I want to think more about that. And one of the reasons I want to think about it is that one of the ironies here is that our current multilateral system — the Paris Peace Conference with his 14 points famously began with the demand for open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view. Well, it didn't work so well, so the UN system in response to that was from the beginning much more power-based through the weight and authority of the Security Council, for example. Well, that's a lot to think about."
— [00:50:37.590 --> 00:51:53.710]
This is Allan's most analytically interesting contribution in an episode where the guests are doing most of the work. Darren and Natasha have placed transparency at the centre of their argument about what China erodes in the liberal order. Allan's response is to point to a historical irony: the liberal order's founding moment (Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, 1918) placed "open covenants openly arrived at" as Point One — the demand for radical transparency as the foundation of a new peaceful order. It failed catastrophically; the interwar order collapsed. The UN system, deliberately designed after that failure, moved away from Wilsonian transparency toward power-based authority concentrated in the Security Council — closed meetings, great-power veto, much less public diplomacy. So the liberal order already made a pragmatic compromise on transparency at its founding. Darren and Natasha's argument — that transparency is what China uniquely threatens — runs into the historical fact that the order itself has always been ambivalent about transparency. Allan is not dismissing their argument; he is identifying a genuine complication that he wants to think through. "That's a lot to think about" is his honest closing — not a conclusion but a disclosure that the conversation has given him something real.
The Wilson reference also signals his historical range: he reaches immediately to 1918 without hesitation.
Biographical Fragments¶
Self-identified starting point: "the world-weary eyes of a realist"¶
Evidence: Ep068 [00:08:44.290]. Directly stated. Confidence: High.
The phrase is significant because Allan very rarely provides a self-label for his analytical starting point. He is more often associated with the "analyst not strategist" self-definition (Ep113) and the "boring pragmatist" label (Ep032). "World-weary realist" adds a third dimension: the realist tendency to see great-power behaviour as structurally predictable, combined with the exhaustion of long experience ("world-weary"). This is the analyst who has watched the same patterns for fifty years and finds them less surprising than those entering the field for the first time.
Revising the China model export view — "one I confess I've subscribed to myself"¶
Evidence: Ep068 [00:36:34.430]. Directly stated. Confidence: High.
Allan discloses that he previously held (and is now revising) the view that China would not want to export its political model because of internal preoccupations and the cultural specificity of the Han experience. This is a substantive analytical revision: the essay's argument — that China's influence normalises elements of its model even without direct export — is changing his mind on this point. He names the prior view, attributes it to himself, and discloses the revision process without completing it on air. Consistent with his pattern throughout the corpus of naming intellectual transitions honestly before they are complete.
Style and Method Evidence¶
- The three-prism framework: Naming his analytical starting point as "realist" while acknowledging the validity of the other two frames is characteristic of his self-aware analytical practice. He maps the intellectual landscape before entering it.
- Friendly fire: Darren's "friendly fire" characterisation is endorsed by the transcript — Allan's questions consistently challenge the essay's precision, particularly on (a) which liberal values specifically need suppressing, (b) whether the China-Biden comparison on model promotion holds, and (c) whether the UPU and other technical agencies are actually liberal. Each challenge is genuine, not rhetorical.
- The Wilson move: Reaching immediately to Woodrow Wilson's first point when transparency is raised — without preparation — confirms the depth of historical knowledge that Allan brings to theoretical arguments. The point he makes is non-obvious and important: the liberal order was deliberately made less transparent after the Wilsonian experiment failed.
- "That's a lot to think about": He closes the episode's intellectual content with this phrase — one of the few times in the corpus where he explicitly declines to resolve a question he has raised. The honest non-answer is itself a methodological statement: some things require more thinking before they can be answered.
Reading / Watching / Listening Segment¶
No formal segment — Allan nominates the Kassam/Lim essay itself¶
Allan explicitly notes the absence of the segment: "I'm putting that in, Darren, because we didn't have that usual reading, watching, listening bit at the end." He nominates the Kassam/Lim essay "Future Shock" in Australian Foreign Affairs as the de facto recommendation: "It's a great article, which asks important questions and provides interesting answers. This is my blurb."
Natasha Kassam and Darren Lim — "Future Shock: How to Prepare for a China-led World," Australian Foreign Affairs, February 2021 Allan's verdict: "a great article, which asks important questions and provides interesting answers" — one of the more complete on-air endorsements he offers, covering both form (asks important questions) and substance (provides interesting answers). He adds: "I am going to be rethinking some of the issues that we've talked about for a while yet."
Open Questions¶
- The transparency revision: Allan says the Kassam/Lim transparency argument is making him rethink. The Wilson irony he raises — that the UN was deliberately designed to be less transparent as a response to the Wilsonian failure — is a genuine analytical complication. Does he develop this in later episodes? Does he return to the China model export question after revising his prior view?
- The "world-weary realist" label: Is this a one-off self-description or does he use this framing elsewhere? It sits in productive tension with his practitioner-not-strategist self-definition from Ep113.
- Kassam as recurring guest: Darren says she will return to discuss the Lowy polling work. Does she? And does that discussion develop the China model / transparency thread?