The US is the essential status quo power, led by a revisionist president. China loves the current status quo, while liking how the tide of change flows its way.

The labels ‘status quo’ and ‘revisionist’ suddenly matter in relations between the top two nations.

The US has branded China a revisionist power and announced that conflict with China is a bigger threat than terrorism.

In politics and diplomacy, words are bullets. In strategy and defence, bullets are bullets—but the words mount the arguments, set the plans and define the targets. Word salvos are flying.

The US national security strategy issued in December uses the word ‘revisionist’ just once, in describing three sets of challenges: ‘the revisionist powers of China and Russia, the rogue states of Iran and North Korea, and transnational threat organizations, particularly jihadist terrorist groups’.

The charges against China are that it challenges ‘American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity’, wants ‘to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests’, and seeks ‘to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor’.

The strategy trashes ‘engagement’ as the failed policy of trying to turn rivals ‘into benign actors and trustworthy partners’.

The companion national defence strategy issued in January launches from the revisionist proposition: ‘The central challenge to US prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers.’

The defence strategy stunner is that ‘inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security’. America ranks a clash with China ahead of the threat from jihadists. The next war looms as great-power conflict.

War with China caused a Canberra flurry—that’s what happens when ministers muse before the talking points are agreed. Defence Minister Marise Payne said Australia shared US concerns, while Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was typically forthright in saying that China is a bigger threat to Australia than terrorists: ‘It’s a statement of the bleeding obvious that any nation that does have the capacity to basically overrun you is always a greater threat.’

Because words are bullets, stating the bleeding obvious can cost blood. The prime minister and foreign minister jumped in to avoid wounds and rework the words. A new talking point became the order of the day: China is not a threat. Not. A. Threat. Repeat as needed. It’s a standard talking-point tactic. When dealing with a tough topic, go for denial, say what it ain’t, define it away.

Joyce was guilty of stating a strategy truism: capacity builds slowly while intent can change quickly. On capacity and intent, see the ASPI paper on a new era of risk by Canberra wise owls Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith: ‘Australia’s strategic outlook is deteriorating and, for the first time since World War II, we face an increased prospect of threat from a major power.’

Since the 1970s, Canberra’s defence plans stated that it’d take a decade for any Asian power to develop the capability to assault Australia. Dibb and Brabin-Smith see the 10-year rule shrinking.

The issue of intent returns us to whether China is a revisionist or status quo power—an academic argument that’s been bubbling for two decades. The trouble with power-transition theory in international relations is that it’s a binary categorisation: states are either status quo or revisionist. Revisionist exemplars are revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

The revisionist case is well put by Walter Russell Mead. (The Foreign Affairs editors gave his discussion of China, Iran and Russia extra colour with the heading ‘An axis of weevils?’, an uncomfortable reminder of a previous US crusade against an axis of evil.)

I prefer John Ikenberry’s counter to Mead that China is a part-time spoiler that’s deeply integrated into the world economy and institutions. My twist is calling China a status quo–tidal power—a conservative state that loves both its current status and how the tide is running away from the US towards China.

The revisionist conclusion declares engagement and diplomacy a dead end, while zooming onto the military highway. Washington’s embrace of the revisionist label as policy ignores the relative decline of US influence as the great global story of our age. We aren’t going back to the bipolar status quo (1945–1989) or the unipolar status quo (1989–2008). The age of globalisation keeps moving the game.

One of the age’s arch-realists, Henry Kissinger, captured the trend in World order, describing the US and China as ‘indispensable pillars of world order’, even though both have a history of ambivalence about the international system they now anchor.

Dr K. argues that America and China must achieve an unprecedented blend of partnership and military balance in Asia’s modern system:

The combination of balance-of-power strategy with partnership diplomacy will not be able to remove all adversarial aspects, but it can mitigate their impact. Above all, it can give Chinese and American leaders experiences in constructive cooperation, and convey to their two societies a way of building toward a more peaceful future. Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.

Yes, Henry! Engagement works. Mix partnership with power politics, as the tide of the status quo shifts.

The war in Vietnam is widely perceived to have been the first television war, fought not only on the battlefield but also in the living rooms of America (and Australia).

If that thesis is correct, and there are differing assessments of the overall effect of televised coverage of the carnage, then the Tet Offensive staged by the North Vietnamese (NVA) and the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) in January–February 1968 represents the pinnacle of prime-time broadcasting.

Tet was ultimately a battlefield disaster for Hanoi and its forces, which were often destroyed in close-quarter fighting by the superior firepower of the American and South Vietnamese (ARVN) militaries. But psychologically the Tet campaign succeeded brilliantly—footage of CIA officers battling Viet Cong infiltrators on the grounds of the US Embassy in Saigon proved enduring. That vision convinced more than a few Americans in an election year that, contrary to the reassuring assessments of the Johnson administration and the US military, the war was far from won.

But the eye of the Tet offensive was not to be found in Saigon. Rather, the critical battle was fought in the ancient imperial capital of Huế, where NVA troops and NLF guerrillas seized almost of all the city, including the Citadel, a royal fortress that dominated the metropolis of some 140,000 citizens.

The stunning early success of the North Vietnamese; the near defeat of the US and ARVN; and the gruelling, bloody often incompetently directed fight to reclaim the city is the searing subject of Mark Bowden’s Huế 1968: A turning point of the American war in Vietnam.

Bowden has previously authored the definitive Black Hawk down, about the heroic failure of a US special forces mission in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Heroism also abounds in Huế on both sides of the fighting, but the most compelling elements are to be found in the sheer, dogged determination of the grunts to survive and succeed in extraordinarily hostile circumstances.

For Tet represented a strategic shift in the war. From small unit guerrilla activities, Hanoi decided to commit major forces to battle to inspire a revolution in the South. The Tet New Year holiday represented the perfect opportunity to inflict a serious and surprise defeat upon Saigon and its US backers. Huế, Vietnam’s second city, was pivotal in that campaign.

The indications of an offensive were not completely concealed. And while President Thieu’s office refused to cancel the customary truce, some field commanders like the superb General Ngo Quang Truong, at Mang Ca Garrison at Huế, did increase security. Bowden writes:

So the warning signs were not ignored. But no one imagined the scale of what was coming. None of the clues had registered a big alarm, because they did not fit the overarching narrative. The story American forces had told themselves about the war went like this: The enemy was weak. He had little or no popular support. He had no significant presence in South Vietnam beyond small bands of rebels capable of minor raids in rural areas. If Hanoi was going to launch a surprise attack, it would come at a remote outpost like Khe Sanh. In Westy’s [General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, 1964–68] overconfident narrative there was simply no way his enemy could invade and occupy South Vietnam’s second-largest city, or launch surprise attacks in cities throughout the country. It could not happen.

But it did. With murderous consequences for thousands of civilians.

Bowden has little but praise for the combatants and he has been at pains to acknowledge the courage of the NVA troops engaged.

However, again on both sides, Bowden is scathing about the incompetence of senior commanders, remote from the fighting, issuing orders to achieve objectives that were impossible and caused needless causalities.

In particular, Bowden is scathing on Westmoreland’s briefings of LBJ, which dramatically underestimated the strength of his opposition in Huế. He believed that only a few companies of communist troops were in the Citadel, when in reality Hanoi had some 10,000 soldiers in the city.

The result, in a Washington that was endeavouring to micro-manage the war, was that strategic assumptions became useless as a guide to battlefield deployments and diplomatic initiatives.

Tet had an enormous political impact in the United States, compounding LBJ’s woes with both his own Democratic Party and the electorate. His withdrawal from the presidential race, in March 1968, following his humiliation in New Hampshire at the hands of anti-war senator Eugene McCarthy, may be directly linked to the shock of the Tet Offensive.

Enter Richard Nixon, elected president in November that same year.

Patrick J. Buchanan, an unofficial yet sympathetic biographer of Richard Milhous Nixon, has already chronicled Nixon’s year of 1968 in his engaging The greatest comeback. Now, in Nixon’s White House wars: The battles that made and broke a president and divided America forever, he charts the course of an administration divided over a number of domestic and foreign policy questions, especially on how to exit Vietnam and bring the American commitment to an end. To achieve ‘peace with honour’.

The key to the Nixon White House, as in most American presidencies, was access.

Legend holds that Nixon once told his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, after meeting one of his cabinet members, that his job was to make sure that that ‘son of a bitch never gets another Oval Office meeting’. That was in spite of the fact that, in the preceding meeting, the president had agreed with his cabinet secretary on everything.

As one of Nixon’s speechwriters, Buchanan enjoyed a close relationship with this angry, brooding man. Perhaps more significantly, he was the favoured speechwriter of Vice President Spiro Agnew, scourge of American liberals and most media.

Within the White House, however, it was Buchanan’s role in summarising the presidential news briefing that gave him real power, for he was also charged with recommending appropriate responses.

In that role Buchanan witnessed constant White House manoeuvring of egos, with Dr Henry Kissinger prominent in assertiveness, whether it be on policy towards China or the Soviets or the creeping issue of Vietnam.

Nixon was perplexed:

By midyear [1969], President Nixon was growing frustrated. Despite his restraint in the use of US power—his continuance of LBJ’s bombing halt of North Vietnam, his peace offers to Hanoi, his withdrawal of 25,000 troops from the South—there had been no reciprocal response from the enemy. The fighting was still going on, the caskets were still coming home, and the patience of the nation was running out. We seemed to be in an endless and unwinnable war.

Nixon’s efforts to find the exit door for Vietnam are among the most enlightening sections of this insider’s perspective on Washington. Nixon sought to enlist both the Soviets and the Chinese in this effort, to no avail. Even when he tried to convince Moscow that he was an unpredictable ‘madman president’, which he had learned from Eisenhower, there was no movement.

Buchanan writes with clarity and humour, which affords this account a greater authority. He knew Richard Nixon well and contrasts him with the other president whom he served, Ronald Reagan.

In a telling observation, while detailing Nixon’s tendency to cool down, reconsider an order and then change his mind, Buchanan quotes veteran aide Bryce Harlow: ‘Watergate happened when some damn fool came out of the Oval Office—and did exactly what the President told him to do.’

Buchanan may be ideologically immobile, but it is his ability to recognise insightful assessments and appreciate their significance that elevate his words beyond the narrow confines of merely defending a president who was often pursuing the indefensible.

US President Donald Trump has decided not to certify that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement constraining Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. In effect, Trump has challenged the US Congress to do what is normally the executive branch’s responsibility: create foreign policy.

What that policy will be remains an open question. While Congress is already preparing sanctions, these will not, on their own, comprise a comprehensive Iran strategy. Instead, the US and Iran will need to negotiate directly on a range of non-nuclear issues.

As it stands, few assert that Iran is actually failing to comply with its obligations under the JCPOA. Even US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has made no secret of his disdain for Iran, complains only that Iranian leaders are violating the ‘spirit’ of the deal. But the JCPOA is clearly—and deliberately—focused on curbing Iran’s nuclear-weapons development, not its missile programs, regional ambitions or animus towards Israel.

The Trump administration also takes issue with the time limits on the JCPOA, with some provisions—such as strict limits on research and development of advanced centrifuges—in effect for just 10 years. Trump’s denunciations of the deal have fuelled debate over the appropriateness of the time limits, though such discussions often fail to recognise that Iran agreed to adhere to International Atomic Energy Agency standards, including its advanced inspection protocols.

In any case, the key to preventing recidivism after the JCPOA sunset provisions expire will be to move Iran towards good-neighbour policies, and to ensure that its economic interests supersede its ambition to become a regional hegemon. That is where bilateral negotiations come in.

One reason why the JCPOA did not cover non-nuclear issues is that several other partners and allies—namely, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union—were involved, and each had its own perspective and objectives. Regional powers with ringside seats to the talks, such as Saudi Arabia, also had plenty to say.

Reconciling these actors’ conflicting interests and demands concerning the full range of relevant issues would have been next to impossible. Bilateral negotiations between the US and Iran, however, might allow the US to make progress on the issues that are important to it—and, equally significant, to understand modern Iran better.

Such negotiations would likely start with a lengthy discussion of the two sides’ conflicting interpretations of the history of their relationship—in other words, each country’s grievances with the other. For Iran, such grievances include US support for the 1953 coup in Iran, and America’s subsequent ties to the Shah and his brutal secret police, the Savak.

The US, for its part, would probably raise the 1979 abduction of US embassy staff by Iran’s fledgling Islamic revolutionary regime, and, more recently, its targeting of American troops using Shia militia groups in southern Iraq. These discussions should include detailed questions and specific answers. Working groups might be established to try to create a common narrative.

The negotiations would also need to cover contemporary issues, including a tour d’horizon of current hotspots. What is Iran doing in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and especially Syria? How does it define its interests in these countries? Does it actually see itself, as many Sunni Arabs assert, as a protector of Shia Arabs?

In Iraq, the US invested heavily in toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and then in supporting a political process that has produced a Shia-led government—a positive outcome, from Iran’s perspective. The key question, then, is why Iran continues to support militia groups that have often undermined Iraq’s government.

As for Syria, Iran moved quickly to support President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Iran’s backing of an administration dominated by the minority Alawites (a Shia sect) has clearly unnerved Sunni Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, which regards with great concern this ‘Shia crescent’ just across its northern frontier. Iran cannot really expect the Saudis to be indifferent to such a change in their geostrategic position.

But Iran is not the only actor that must explain its Syria strategy. The US, too, has so far pursued policies that, to put it mildly, have not always had a self-evident rationale. Now is the time for the US to put its cards on the table. Does it seek regime change, or would it settle for policy changes by whatever government Syrians eventually choose?

And what about Israel? During his presidency from 2005 to 2013, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inflamed world opinion by repeatedly questioning whether the Holocaust happened. Does this kind of ignorance and contempt for the Jewish people persist among Iran’s current leadership, colouring their approach to Israel?

The final vital issue that must be addressed in any bilateral talks between the US and Iran is the latter’s military activity and, in particular, its missile programs. Iran frequently alludes to its right to maintain a modern military, with advanced missiles, though unlike, say, North Korea, it stops short of claiming a right to nuclear weapons. To determine the appropriate role and capabilities of Iran’s military, direct talks between the US and Iranian militaries, like those the US has pursued with China, might be in order.

The US cannot continue to base its policy towards Iran—a huge country with a population of over 80 million, a growing economy, and strong regional influence—on sanctions and vitriol. Likewise, Iran needs to retire poisonous slogans like ‘Death to America’ and instead work with the US to advance its own interests and aspirations. Perhaps the mountain of mistrust will turn out to be too high for the two countries to scale. But getting to the other side is worth a try.

The US national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, recently stated that the president is ‘not going to accept [North Korea] threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon … There are those who have said, “What about accept and deter?” Well, accept and deter is unacceptable.’ So, unless the North Koreans choose to freeze their nuclear program—and the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that they won’t—then the implication of McMaster’s position is that the US will (soon) launch a preventive war to eliminate the North Korean nuclear threat.

This position creates a puzzle. According to the virtually uniform view of the foreign-policy community, ‘accept and deter’ will accomplish the goal of preventing North Korea from using nuclear weapons at almost no risk, while preventive war entails considerable risks. Consequently, it would seem to be utterly daft to even have the preventive war option on the table, let alone to be seriously considering it. What’s going on?

What McMaster knows, and what the foreign policy community effectively ignores, is that the US is not in fact choosing between deterrence and war. Thinking through how deterrence actually works in light of the Cold War reveals that any effort to deter North Korea faces a significant chance of failure (even assuming that the North Koreans are fully rational). It follows that the US is actually choosing between deterrence with the chance of an accidental nuclear war later or preventive war now. The optimal policy choice therefore turns on the relative risk of the two options. So, how risky is deterrence?

The logic of deterrence requires that your nuclear-armed opponent have the capability to retaliate in response to a true alarm that you are attacking them. Unfortunately, that capability necessarily creates the possibility that your opponent might launch a first strike at you by mistake in response to a false alarm. The history of the Cold War shows beyond any possible doubt that military misunderstandings, human error and technical malfunctions will generate false alarms of an enemy attack and that those false alarms can easily lead to accidental nuclear war. Indeed, using engineering methods designed to examine system-failure probabilities, Barrett, Baum and Hostetler put the probability of a US–Soviet deterrence failure leading to accidental nuclear war at around 2% per year.

The history of accidental-nuclear-war near misses suggests that the probability of a deterrence failure increases with political tensions, decision-making time pressure, and rigid decision-making processes.

Political tensions increase the risk of deterrence failure because attack alarms that could be dismissed out of hand during calm times must instead be treated as possibly true, and anytime an alarm is vetted an error could occur (think of the Cuban missile crisis). North Korea has a long history of engaging in highly provocative behaviour, and nuclear weapons will only increase its incentives to act in that way. We can therefore be certain that US–North Korean relations will generally be extremely tense.

Vetting attack alarms requires time (is the alarm true or the result of a technical malfunction?). Yet, North Korea is a small country on the ocean adjacent to the US Navy and US allies. The officers in North Korea’s nuclear command-and-control chain will inevitably have very little time to evaluate attack alarms (much less time than the Soviets).

Accurately vetting alarms requires that command-and-control officers exercise (in the words of a recent Chatham House report) independent and ‘prudent judgement, which might involve disobeying previous orders’ to figure out what’s really going on. Studies of human error in the context of airplane crashes show that people from cultures that have a more collectivist orientation and that are more uncertainty-averse tend to deal with complex and stressful situations by following rules and avoiding independent judgements (and so are more likely to crash planes). South Korean culture is among the most highly collectivist and uncertainty-averse in the world, and it’s safe to assume that North Korean military culture will be even more extreme along these dimensions. To be sure, Kim Jong-un could take active steps to counter these cultural tendencies. But, given that the biggest threat to Kim’s regime is a military coup, the very last thing that he will instil in his officer corps is an ethos that emphasises independent judgement. In short, the North Korean officer corps will be spectacularly ill-suited to exercise the prudent judgement that avoiding accidental nuclear war requires.

The political tension, time and prudent judgement factors therefore all indicate that the probability of a US–North Korean deterrence failure will be even higher than was the already terrifyingly high 2% chance per year (or 25% chance per 15 years) of a US–Soviet deterrence failure.

So, is a preventive war now better than a 25% (or higher) chance of an accidental nuclear war with North Korea sometime in the next 15 years? Given that North Korea doesn’t yet but will very soon have the capability to mount hydrogen bombs on ICBMs and use those weapons to attack the US mainland and US allies, the answer to that question is obviously ‘Yes’. Consequently, the best option the US has to deal with North Korea’s nuclear threat is to eradicate the Kim regime by means of a preventive war—and to do it now.

An Australian in the United States is branded on the tongue. The moment you speak, the accent reveals all. They know you’re not from around here.

In previous decades, the question was usually whether you were English or Irish. As a bloke in Maryland joked the other day, taking me for a Pom: ‘We Americans think you people speak our language real good.’

On the accent front, I report progress. These days, Australia is often the first guess, so there’s a fraction more recognition of the land of Oz. And this time I haven’t once had the comic confusion over Austria or Australia.

Another difference flowing from the branded-on-the-tongue moment has been noticeable during our six weeks in Washington, New York and up the East Coast.

During previous visits—under Reagan, Clinton and Obama—being heard as not from ’round here never once triggered a question about what the outsider thought of the US president. The US is a world confidently unto itself, so in the past there was only mild interest in views about America. But the personality of the president never used to come up. It does now.

Grappling with the meaning of Donald Trump has trumped questions about kangaroos and what season it is in Oz. That’s why it was no surprise to see a glum Malcolm Turnbull as one of the faces on the cover of Foreign Affairs magazine’s September/October edition reporting on how allies are responding to Trump: ‘The view from abroad’.

My random sampling finds that the viewers within America are just as mystified. Lots of people around here are pondering what it is they’re seeing in the White House. Some are amazed and scared and outraged. Some, though, love what they see: The Donald ‘flipping the bird’ at the system via tirades and tantrums as the Twittering, Trump-eting troll-in-chief.

The lore and the laughs of the travelling correspondent game decree that a hack arriving in country afresh should make all grand pronouncements within weeks of landing. After that, the gradual growth of understanding and accumulation of facts tend to hamper the sweeping assertions. Sending a letter after six weeks means I’m just covered by the impressions/pronouncements rule. My conclusions:

• Despite or because of all its moving parts, the US system is working well in dealing with the Trump pressure test.
• US economic indicators are really starting to glow after eight slow years; the engine is pumping.
• Americans are as positive as ever about themselves and their country. This is a nation of gusto, from its arguments to its eats. For gastronomic gusto, order the Texas ribs anywhere, but go to Maryland for the crab cakes. For a good argument about anything, just find a New Yorker.
• If Trump doesn’t eat himself to a heart attack with all those extra helpings of dessert, he’s got every chance—based on the economy and the way America usually treats sitting presidents—of getting a second term. To be rejected by two-thirds of Americans and embraced by one-third could be enough—he’s done it once.

On the system working as it should, one of the great pleasures of eating breakfast in America is still the chance to consume the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. For an old hack, this is bliss. After 45 years as a journo, I’ve a simple answer to that question about the books that most influenced my life: the newspapers.

The Donald is a magnificent challenge for American journos. The Times and the Post have been exemplary. New players like Politico are doing lots of lifting. Hard times demand hard news. Strange times can be strangely stimulating for hacks, and America is being well served by its hacks.

The crumbling foundations and facades of the media world may mean this is the last great newspaper war between the Times and the Post. But what a great and worthy war, fought for and with the best traditional weapons.

The Washington walk down Pennsylvania Avenue between the US Capitol building and the White House takes you past Newseum, a museum dedicated to the role of a free press in a democracy. Carved into the front wall, a couple of storeys high, are the words of one of the most profoundly revolutionary texts ever proclaimed by government: the US First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly and the right to ‘petition’ or argue against your own government.

It’s emblematic of the afflictions of American newspapers that the Newseum is in financial trouble. The America of the First Amendment, though, is doing fine despite the Trump stress test.

On any given day, the Times or the Post can make you confident about both America and its journalism. Indeed, the Sunday New York Times shines as a weekly expression of the American experience; on a good weekend, make that the American civilisation in all its hues.

While the Post and Times are feeding on the richest of meat, the poor old Wall Street Journal is on a leash. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, isn’t going to have his newspaper upset his regular telephone conversations with the US president.

The Post and the Times are living out the injunction of the playwright Arthur Miller: ‘A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.’ The Journal is a good newspaper that won’t say ‘boo’ to the president. It’s much the same as Australia’s own policy on dealing with The Donald.