An ageing dictator, looking to his legacy, pushes the button on a long-planned invasion of a smaller neighbour. The fiction of an “international community” is quickly exposed: some countries barely bat an eyelid, preferring the economic rewards of a close relationship; others fear that anything beyond sanctions and stern words risks escalation – the story that this dictator has spent years telling his people, about their destiny and about himself, makes this conflict existential. This is Vladimir Putin and Ukraine in 2022. Could it be Xi Jinping and Taiwan a few years hence?

So much has been written on the rise of China, and on how the United States and the wider Western world ought to respond, that much of what former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd calls for in his new book, The Avoidable War?, inevitably feels familiar: better mutual understanding between America and China, of one another’s world views and strategic red lines; managed strategic competition, drawing lessons from how the Cold War stayed cold.

Still, this book has two important things going for it. Firstly, Rudd offers up the fruits of “decades in the practitioner’s trenches”: sustained, high-level engagement with China and its neighbourhood, including a number of lengthy meetings with Xi Jinping himself. A student of Chinese culture, fluent in Mandarin, Rudd can reasonably claim to have bridged what remains a significant divide. Xi does not speak or read English, and America has yet to produce a president who speaks or reads Chinese. Second, Rudd manages to marshal his and others’ accumulated wisdom on US-China relations into one of the best available primers on the subject.

Early on, Rudd observes that many of the Chinese trends we associate with Xi’s rule – an intensified ethnonationalism; greater assertiveness on the world stage – actually predate his leadership. He is less the mastermind than the product of forces that can be traced back to Chinese Communist Party shock at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism.

With this in mind, and given Xi’s all but unassailable position in China, Rudd is justified in devoting the bulk of his book to exploring “how the world looks from Xi’s desk”. He arranges these concerns into 10 concentric circles, beginning with the innermost: “the politics of staying in power”. This involves maintaining a difficult balance between Marxism-Leninism and an authoritarian capitalism whose legitimacy rests upon its vaunted historicity (the CCP have reclaimed Confucius to this end) and its success in creating wealth.