Kevin Rudd
speaker
641 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Kevin Rudd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's actually much more hard-headed than you would give credit to.
Number one, it was the Congress that framed the Taiwan Relations Act back in 1979 at the time of diplomatic recognition of the mainland, which is a de facto form of security guarantee for the Taiwanese, and that's an act of your Congress.
Therefore, if you go to the congressional leadership, Democrat and Republican,
They have seen themselves the long-term custodians of that set of arrangements.
But the second is this.
Let's hypothetically assume, Ezra, that Xi Jinping walks into Taiwan tomorrow, decapitates the leadership.
It's gone.
It's now become China's province, fully fledged.
Red flag goes up over the presidential building in downtown.
Taipei and the first party secretary arrives to take over the administration of the province and the suppression of the locals having been much bloodshed in the process.
I think at that point, what Americans need to consider is what happens to the rest of the world's perception and conclusion about US strategic reliability worldwide at that point.
it becomes very much the point at which the notion of Pax Americana goes, disappears in the collective consciousness of allies around the world.
The Japanese, for example, may then conclude it's a time for them to go nuclear.
If they go nuclear, the Koreans will conclude, well, if the Japanese are going nuclear, we'll be going nuclear.
In other words, the whole dynamic of this region changes.
And the third thing for Americans to consider is,
Is it the conclusion here in the United States that China, already having assembled the world's largest surface fleet, for example, having taken Taiwan, that it's time then to deliver to the Chinese people a grand peace dividend, will then reduce the size of the Chinese military by two-thirds because we've achieved our historical mission and will all therefore have better social security payments as a result?
Unlikely.
because Xi Jinping's made plain that China's power projection should be pan-regional, beyond the Taiwan Straits, and because of existing behaviors increasingly global.
And then I think there's this final point, which is,
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