Source — AITW Ep069 — Biden's Early Days; Quad; Pacific Islands Forum¶

Episode Metadata¶

Field	Value
Episode number	69
Title	Biden's early days; Quad; Pacific Islands Forum
Publication date	2021-03-13
Recording date	Friday, 12 March 2021
Guests	None — Allan and Darren only
Allan present	Yes
Format	Regular news episode — three items plus reading segment

Summary¶

Three items: (1) Biden's first seven weeks — Biden's State Department speech, Blinken's first speech, and the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance ("Renewing America's Advantages"); (2) the Quad leaders' virtual summit happening that day — Allan characterises the Quad as fundamentally a signal to China and advises against over-investment; (3) the fracture of the Pacific Islands Forum — five Micronesian states initiating withdrawal after a contested secretary-general election. Reading segment: Sinica podcast — Jude Blanchett on dangerous heuristics in China analysis.

Biographical significance: Allan discloses his information-gathering philosophy in the clearest statement of the corpus: "I want to be able to hunt and gather information for myself rather than being served an all-you-can-eat buffet by an algorithm." The APEC leaders' meeting parallel (Clinton 1993) carries personal weight — Allan was Keating's foreign policy adviser during that summit. He also delivers his bluntest trade formulation yet: "Biden's foreign policy for working Americans is just Trump's America First with better manners."

Key Quotations¶

"Just Trump's America First with better manners"¶

"On trade policy, I've said this before, but in a lot of ways, Biden's foreign policy for working Americans is just Trump's America First with better manners. I don't know anyone who's worked with American trade officials over the years who hasn't come away from that experience with an admiration for their professionalism or for their single-minded focus on American interests. And that's going to be magnified now."

— [00:10:54.900 --> 00:12:34.700]

The formulation is blunter than the Ep060 version ("America first with better administration and sharper aims") — "better manners" reduces the distinction to style. The TPP 11 example is precise: when the US withdrew from TPP, 20 US-instigated provisions on investment, procurement, and intellectual property were dropped by the remaining eleven countries. That is the baseline of US trade aggression — not Trump's tariffs but the decades-long single-minded advocacy of American interests embedded in professional trade negotiators. Biden's "foreign policy for working Americans" amplifies this, not changes it. The political calculation is also named explicitly: "the disadvantaged workers Blinken is trying to appeal to here are precisely the Donald Trump voters that the Democrats want to hack." Allan is not complaining — he is stating what he understands to be the structural reality of US trade policy regardless of administration.

"I'm always reassured when the blob is back, Darren. I do not mean that."¶

"I'm always reassured when the blob is back, Darren. I do not mean that. I mean, when people who know what they are doing are back in charge."

— [00:21:24.180 --> 00:21:47.980]

"The blob" is Ben Rhodes's coinage for the bipartisan Washington foreign policy establishment — used as an insult by populists on both left and right. Allan deploys it with evident affection for the practitioners who constitute it, then immediately walks it back ("I do not mean that") before restating the underlying point: competent professionals are back. The self-correction is the joke: he is not endorsing the blob's every policy, just its existence as a functioning system in which people know what they are doing and coordinate their actions. The gap between the deployed insult and the underlying endorsement reveals something about Allan's position — he is sympathetic to the practitioner class that "the blob" caricature targets, without being naive about its failures.

"I didn't see a single reference to sovereignty"¶

"Just back on your word count, Darren, I didn't see a single reference to the podcast's 2020 Word of the Year sovereignty. So, it's got more faith in multilateral institutions than we saw under Trump."

— [00:23:31.540 --> 00:25:20.380]

He has been tracking his own Word of the Year (sovereignty, Ep037) as a marker of Trump-era ideological commitment. Its absence from the Biden NSC document is treated as evidence of a worldview shift — from the assertion of sovereign autonomy as primary to a willingness to work through multilateral frameworks. The counting habit (Darren has done a word count; Allan responds with his own observation about absences) is characteristic: he reads policy documents systematically, looking for what is and is not present.

The Quad as gang signal — and the Clinton APEC parallel¶

"The Quad from the beginning was fundamentally a signal to China from the other powers in the Indo-Pacific. So it was a, 'hey there, Beijing, we can form our own gang' message. And that's worth saying. And with the leaders meeting now, it's a bigger and brighter signal... And in that, it's reminded me of Bill Clinton and the APEC leaders meeting."

— [00:31:53.900 --> 00:33:34.180]

Two things. First, the Quad characterisation: "our own gang message" is unusually colloquial for Allan, and all the more analytically precise for it. He is stripping the Quad of its democratic framing (he immediately notes: "not a shared commitment to democracy, given what's happening in India") and describing the structural reality: four major powers in the Indo-Pacific signalling to Beijing that they can coordinate. A signal is sensible; it does not need to be more than that. "I'd bet against it ever becoming a military alliance" — India's non-alignment and Japan's constitutional impediments are named as structural obstacles. Second, the Clinton APEC parallel: the 1993 APEC leaders' summit at Blake Island, Seattle, was a Keating-era success in which an ad hoc annual gathering of trade ministers became a leaders-level meeting. Allan was Keating's foreign policy adviser at the time. The reference is not casual: he is drawing on personal experience of what it looks like when a regional consultative forum is upgraded to leaders level. The Quad is following a pattern he has watched from inside.

"Hunt and gather information for myself" — against the algorithm¶

"You know me and social media, Darren, many benefits, I'm sure, but in my view, the downside of its impact on society outweighs the benefits. And besides, I want to be able to hunt and gather information for myself rather than being served an all-you-can-eat buffet by an algorithm."

— [00:43:01.690 --> 00:44:25.390]

The fullest statement of his social media philosophy in the corpus. Previous formulations ("conscientious objector," Ep012) were moral; this one adds an epistemological dimension. He is not only objecting to social media's social harms but to its effect on how he thinks. "Hunt and gather information" is the active mode: he goes looking, follows trails, makes judgments about what is worth pursuing. An algorithm does the opposite: it optimises for engagement, serves content based on revealed preferences, removes the friction that makes active searching productive. Allan values that friction. The contrast between "hunt and gather" (agency, effort, specific intent) and "all-you-can-eat buffet" (passive, quantity over quality, no discrimination) is exact. He then concedes that the Clubhouse discussion was enjoyable — but explains it by exclusion: "maybe that was because it didn't seem like my idea of social media." People could talk at length, respond, ask questions — none of the engagement-optimising dynamics.

The whole-of-government NSC document extract — "something very much worth the conversation in Canberra"¶

"This might end up, of course, being absolutely nothing. But the fact that it appears in this early document, and as we were saying before, these things have obviously been in planning well before the beginning of January, suggests that some thought has been given by the Biden administration to a fairly basic reassessment of the structure of national security making in Washington. And that's something very much worth the conversation in Canberra as well."

— [00:27:08.780 --> 00:29:48.580]

The extract Allan reads from the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance is about integrating economics, technology, critical languages, and a range of non-government actors into national security decision-making. He reads it at length because "there are lessons for Australia here" — he is explicitly translating a US policy document into Australian policy terms. The caveat ("this might end up, of course, being absolutely nothing") is both honest and characteristic: he does not oversell the policy commitment before he has evidence that it will be followed through. The final line — "that's something very much worth the conversation in Canberra as well" — is the practitioner's conclusion: the institutional reform question is not peculiarly American.

Biographical Fragments¶

The Clinton APEC leaders' meeting — personal parallel drawn¶

Evidence: Ep069 [00:31:53.900]. Directly stated as a comparison. Confidence: Likely (direct reference; personal knowledge probable given his role as Keating's foreign policy adviser at the time of the 1993 APEC leaders' summit).

Allan compares the Biden-initiated Quad leaders' summit to "Bill Clinton and the APEC leaders meeting" — the 1993 summit at Blake Island, Seattle, where Clinton upgraded APEC from a trade ministers forum to a leaders-level gathering. This was Keating's foreign policy achievement as much as Clinton's: Keating had been pushing for a leaders-level APEC meeting, and the 1993 summit was the realisation of that. Allan was Keating's International Adviser and foreign policy speechwriter during this period. The reference is personalised: he draws it without being asked, as a natural historical comparison from within his own experience. The Quad leaders' upgrade follows the same logic: a consultative forum elevated to the leaders level changes its character and gravity without necessarily changing its institutional structure.

"Hunt and gather information" — research method made explicit¶

Evidence: Ep069 [00:43:01.690]. Directly stated. Confidence: High.

Allan's most direct statement of his information-gathering methodology: he prefers active search to algorithm-curated delivery. "I want to be able to hunt and gather information for myself rather than being served an all-you-can-eat buffet by an algorithm." This is consistent with reading habits documented throughout the corpus — he reads from a wide range of sources (German historians, American social scientists, Australian practitioners, Chinese popular cinema), follows recommendations from listeners and colleagues, and tracks specific analytical questions across time. The hunting metaphor implies deliberate pursuit: he is looking for something specific, not scrolling for what catches his eye. The algorithm is the antithesis of this because it removes the friction of the search and optimises for engagement rather than information quality.

Style and Method Evidence¶

"The blob" self-correction: He deploys a loaded term with evident ironic affection, then immediately walks it back. The joke is that the correction restates the underlying point without the baggage: the practitioners are back, which is good. He is not naive about the establishment; he is genuinely relieved that it exists.
Absence-counting as analysis: Noting that "sovereignty" appears zero times in the Biden NSC document, after tracking it as his 2020 Word of the Year, is the kind of systematic reading that distinguishes a professional document analyst from a casual reader. He has a framework he applies across documents over time.
"Not a shared commitment to democracy, given what's happening in India": Blunt realism about India's democratic backsliding. He does not use the diplomatic register on this; he states it as a fact that forecloses one possible function of the Quad.
Translating US documents for Australia: His selection of the whole-of-government NSC extract — the last two paragraphs before the conclusion, missed by Darren in his first reading — is the move of someone reading primary sources carefully and for a specific purpose: finding the policy lessons applicable to Canberra.

Reading / Watching / Listening Segment¶

Sinica podcast — "Getting Chinese Politics Wrong," interview with Jude Blanchett (CSIS)¶

Context: Recommended without prompting from Darren. Allan's comment: "It's a discussion of the dangerous heuristics that analysts and policymakers use when they're thinking about China and the dangers of doing those sort of quick shorthand judgments without drawing on solid research, and they do an interesting discussion in particular about thinking about Xi Jinping in that regard. So it's an enjoyable discussion about an ever-present problem." Reveals: Allan reaches for a podcast about analytical method — how analysts think about China, not just what they conclude. Jude Blanchett (Freeman Chair at CSIS) is a practitioner-academic. "Dangerous heuristics" and "quick shorthand judgments" are precisely the analytical failures Allan himself resists throughout the corpus — his persistent insistence on reading primary sources, checking prior assumptions, and resisting monocausal explanations. He recommends a podcast that is, in effect, a methodological self-portrait. Note: Darren subsequently recommends Blanchett's own podcast Pekingology on the Past, which he has recommended before. Sinica is also part of Allan's regular China information diet (noted at Ep056).

Open Questions¶

APEC 1993 and Allan's role: The Clinton APEC leaders' summit reference is personalised. How much is documented elsewhere in the corpus about Allan's specific role in the APEC process under Keating? Ep015 mentions "I was there" for the 1990s achievements including APEC, but this is the most specific historical parallel drawn.
The Quad evolution: Allan commits to scepticism about military alliance but endorses the signal function. Does he track the Quad's development through subsequent episodes? Does his scepticism soften further as AUKUS emerges?
Pacific Islands Forum: Allan says the fracture is "embarrassing for us" — the family language of Pacific Step-up has not produced the capacity to avoid a regional split. Does the PIF crisis resolve in later episodes, and does Allan track it?