North Korea’s latest satellite launch helps expose the paucity of the international community’s options for responding against a determined proliferator. The UN huddles to agree on new sanctions against Kim Jong-un’s regime. China counsels all …
Articles by: "Rod Lyon"
In 2016 we live in a comparatively peaceful world. No great power is at war with another. Even middle-power conflict is absent: no Iran–Iraq war with chemical weapons being tossed about, for example. Wars can …
Mark Beeson’s latest post, speculating about the future of the ANZUS alliance under a Trump presidency, quietly champions the idea of an ‘independent, non-aligned Australia’. Such an Australia, Mark argues, wouldn’t have to make difficult …
President Obama has delivered his last State of the Union address and thoughtful assessments of it can be found here and here. But in this post I want to look more closely at what the …
Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test on 6 January. Technically, we know comparatively little about the device that it tested. In terms of seismic signature the blast seems to have been from a bomb about …
Originally published 27 January 2015. Picked by David Lang. No Australian minister has made a full-blooded speech on nuclear deterrence for many a long year—not since the early 1990s, I suspect. In truth, that’s not …
Twice now, within the space of a month, the government has signalled an unhealthy submissiveness to its security advisers. The first signal occurred in the National Security Statement. The second swirls through the recent media …
In his recent post here on The Strategist, Professor Mark Beeson raises a number of questions which, he believes, we usually overlook in our rush to address more immediate policy debates. His central question—from the …
In late October, Christine Leah and Crispin Rovere published a provocative piece on the War is Boring blog. Titled ‘Australia needs nukes’—and the Twitter accounts of the authors suggest it wasn’t their title—the piece argued …
The recent freedom of navigation operation undertaken by the USS Lassen in the South China Sea advertises a new sharper edge to US–China relations. Some analysts have begun to write about a ‘tipping point’ in …
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has recently shown a more open-minded approach to Australia’s nuclear future. In a radio interview in South Australia in late October he speculated on the possibility of a nuclear industry in …
Recent reports that the Obama administration has begun pursuing US Senate approval for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty don’t sound entirely credible. It might be that the administration wants to flag the issue …