Former prime minister and Asia expert Kevin Rudd will dissect the volatile relationship between superpowers China and the United States at a rare author’s talk on the Sunshine Coast.
Maleny Community Centre will host the next Outspoken event, featuring Australia’s 26th prime minister in conversation with Steven Lang, on Wednesday (May 4).
Mr Rudd, who is now based at Sunshine Beach, has just released his book The Avoidable War.
This confronts the reality that US-China relations are beginning to hurtle out of control and considers the growing possibility of a catastrophic war that once had been unthinkable.
But the book also offers a way forward, challenging those politicians, strategists and generals on both sides who seem hell-bent on surging down the slippery slope toward military conflict.
Geopolitical disaster is still avoidable, but only if these two giants can find a way to coexist without betraying their core interests through what Mr Rudd calls “managed strategic competition”.
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The book implores them to take up “a common strategic narrative for the future that might still be sufficiently acceptable to both sides, an understanding of the past and a vision of the future that might just reduce the risk of catastrophe”.
The insight into relations between China and the West is particularly important given the recent security deal between China and the Solomon Islands.
Security experts fear an expansion of Chinese military reach in the region, and have warned Australia to expect Chinese ships and aircraft to arrive in the Pacific nation within weeks.
Mr Lang said The Avoidable War “should be essential reading for any Western politician anywhere in the world”.
“It is extraordinary,” he said in lead-up to the event.
“Reading that (US-China) history, you’d have to say that the US has just made blunder after blunder after blunder which has really made it very difficult for China to trust negotiations with the West.
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“One of maybe 20 examples was that during the First World War, China, which was by then a republic, sent 150,000 men to support the Allies in the trenches.
“They dug trenches and they provided food and they did medical services.
“When the war was over, the Chinese kind of assumed that when Germany was defeated, the lands in China that Germany had taken over would be given back to the Chinese.
“In the Versailles Treaty, the West gave them to Japan.
“You come across this time and time again. Why would the Chinese ever trust any of us at all?
“All this feeds into a mutual distrust with the Chinese believing they don’t have to follow through on whatever it is they say they are going to do.”
Mr Lang is expecting a sell-out crowd for the event, which also includes author Kári Gíslason.
Gislason’s book The Sorrow Stone is an epic and compelling novel that re-imagines the fate of one of Iceland’s women of history.
After committing an audacious act of revenge for her brother’s murder, Disa flees with her son through the fjords of Iceland to save their lives and her honour.
Outspoken will be held from 6pm on May 4 at Maleny Community Centre. Any tickets still available are $25 for adults and $18 for students. Visit the website.
