The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping’s China
Speaker: Honorable Kevin Rudd (President & Chief Executive Officer, Asia Society; 26th Prime Minister of Australia)
Date: 29 March 2022
Speaker Session Summary
SMA hosted a speaker session with The Honorable Kevin Rudd (President & Chief Executive Officer, Asia Society; 26th Prime Minister of Australia) as part of its SMA NDU (INSS/PRISM) Speaker Series.
It is important for actors competing in long-term strategic competition to maintain a framework that allows them to compete for geopolitical objectives, while also cooperating towards shared interests. This framework is especially important for avoiding escalation toward a mutually destructive conflict. Mr. Rudd commented that a key factor in achieving this framework is a mutual acceptance that strategic cooperation is still in countries’ best interests—even while they compete. The US and China will need to work together to form this framework as their competition for geopolitical influence continues and grows. Chinese ideological material—which is distributed by the CCP to Chinese citizens—shows that China wants to become a hegemonic power in the Asia Pacific, expand its maritime control, settle island disputes with Japan, and eventually replace the US as the preeminent global power. Moreover, China is using Huawei’s construction of 5G networks to grow its soft power influence. Mr. Rudd stated that the US’s failure to lead the world in 5G construction is a significant failure of US industrial policy, admitting that part of US’s industrial strength is allowing innovation to occur independently of US government control.
Even though China is aiming to achieve its global geopolitical objectives, the CCP is still mostly concerned about controlling its domestic population. In fact, there have been several critical articles written and opinions expressed about President Jinping’s authoritarian regime within China. Despite China’s recent advancements in modernization, the US can compete in a long-term strategic competition, which something that it has done before; the US adopted a long-term strategy during the Cold War which persisted through several presidential administrations and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the US will need to develop a new long-term strategy to deal with an emergent China, according to Mr. Rudd.
Speaker Session Recording
Briefing Materials
Biography:
Kevin Rudd became president and CEO of Asia Society in January 2021 and has been president of the Asia Society Policy Institute since January 2015. He served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2012 to 2012, before returning as Prime Minister in 2013. He is also a leading international authority on China. He began his career as a China scholar, serving as an Australian diplomat in Beijing before entering Australian politics.
As Prime Minister, he led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis, reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major developed economy not to go into recession. Mr. Rudd co-founded the G20 to drive the global response to the crisis, which in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into depression.
As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the U.S. and Russia in 2010 and launched the long-term concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia Pacific Community. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a 20 percent mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. He represented Australia at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, which produced the Copenhagen Accord, for the first time, committing states to not allow temperature increases beyond two degrees. He was appointed a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability and is a co-author of the report Resilient People, Resilient Planet for the 2012 Rio+20 Conference. This report was the first to recommend the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Mr. Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for 2012-2014. His government also saw the near doubling of Australia’s foreign aid budget to approximately $5 billion, making Australia then one of the top ten aid donors in the world. He also appointed Australia’s first-ever Ambassador for Women and Girls to support the critical role of women in development and reduce physical and sexual violence against women.
Domestically, Mr. Rudd delivered Australia’s formal national apology to indigenous Australians. In education, his government introduced Australia’s first-ever nationwide school curriculum, undertook the biggest-ever capital investment program in Australian schools with the building of thousands of new state-of-the-art libraries across the country, as well as introducing the first-ever mandatory national assessment system of literacy and numeracy standards. In health, Mr. Rudd, in 2010, negotiated with the Australian states a National Health and Hospitals Reform Agreement, the biggest reform and investment in the health system since the introduction of Medicare 30 years before. His government established a national network of leading-edge cancer care centers across Australia before introducing the world’s first-ever plain-packaging regime for all tobacco products. To improve the rate of organ and tissue donation, he established Australia’s first National Organ and Tissue Transplant Authority. In 2010, his government introduced Australia’s first-ever paid parental leave scheme and implemented the biggest increase in, and reform of, the age pension since federation. He also founded the National Broadband Network to deliver high-speed broadband for every household, business, school, hospital, and GP in the country.
Mr. Rudd joined the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) in New York as its inaugural President in January 2015. ASPI is a “think-do tank” dedicated to using second-track diplomacy to assist governments and businesses in resolving policy challenges within Asia and between Asia and the West. In this capacity, he chaired an international panel which produced an ASPI report entitled on the development of long-term security architecture in the Asia-Pacific region, entitled Preserving the Long Peace in Asia. Mr. Rudd released a series of speeches, articles, and essays from 2020 in the collection, The Avoidable War: The Decade of Living Dangerously. This volume works to help make sense of where the U.S.-China relationship is heading in the next decade and follows on from Mr. Rudd’s 2019 collection, The Avoidable War: The Case for Managed Strategic Competition, and 2018 collection, The Avoidable War: Reflections on U.S.-China Relations and the End of Strategic Engagement.
Mr. Rudd worked as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2014, where he produced a major policy paper, U.S-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping. Mr. Rudd remains a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School.
Mr. Rudd is Chair of the Board of the International Peace Institute in New York, a United Nation-related think tank dedicated to peace and security issues, focusing on the Middle East. In his IPI capacity, Mr. Rudd in 2015-16 chaired a two-year-long Independent Commission on Multilateralism, which produced a comprehensive report on reforming the UN system entitled UN 2040: Rebuilding Order in a Fragmenting World.
Mr. Rudd was appointed to the IMF Managing Director’s External Advisory Group in 2020 and is a member of the Global Leadership Council for Sanitation and Water for All. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Chatham House in London, a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, a Distinguished Fellow at the Paulson Institute in Chicago, and a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s Group of Eminent Persons. He serves on the International Advisory Board of the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University. Mr. Rudd is proficient in Mandarin Chinese.
Mr. Rudd, in his private capacity, has established the Australian National Apology Foundation to continue to promote reconciliation and close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
Mr. Rudd is a regular contributor to global media on international relations, climate change, and China. He has been featured in the Financial Times, The New York Times, and Le Monde, and regularly appears on the BBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox, and Bloomberg.
The SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series description and list of the other sessions in this series can be downloaded here.
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