‘Relations with Indonesia have provided the crucible of modern Australian foreign policy.’ —Bruce Grant, 1972 The great Australian scribe, Bruce Grant, penned that thought about Indonesia–Australia tests and trials in the year of a seminal …
Articles by: "Graeme Dobell"
The federal election on 18 May will decide political power, and open or close Canberra doors on many other dimensions of power. The broad consensus on foreign policy and defence between the Liberal–National coalition and …
Australia zipped through budget week and now zooms off to the May federal election. The country will get to vote on the budget before the parliament, which means its tax-and-spend promises are written in sand. …
Books on soldiering can be written from the trenches or the general’s chateau. The foxhole/barracks category is about the lives and fights of individual soldiers, while the general’s genre sweeps across battles and strategy and …
A killer walks into mosques in Christchurch and broadcasts a message of hate around the world. The 50 murders reveal again the disrupted landscape of our digital world. In an age of information chaos, a …
‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’ — Leon Trotsky To shift Trotsky’s line a few degrees, Australians may not be interested in foreign affairs, but foreign affairs is …
Among the many reasons I’m an optimist is the decades I’ve spent inside two strange but wonderful Australian institutions. One magnificent institution is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where I toiled as a journalist for 33 …
The vast construct of the Indo-Pacific and the limited grouping of the Quad (the US, Japan, India and Australia) share a few significant traits. Both are attempts to define and direct the emerging regional power …
The Quad is more notable for the questions it provokes than the answers it offers. The informal dialogue between the US, Japan, Australia and India is a discussion groping towards a grouping. ASPI’s paper Quad …
For any state, regime change is a fraught and dangerous moment. So when the regime that’s changing is the international system of states, the hazards and complexity multiply enormously. With all the alarums and agonies …
As alcohol is an operational fluid of defence and diplomacy, it’s natural that this Wednesday’s debate on new cold war versus hot peace is a champagne challenge (the winner buys the champagne). At the Canberra …
Part of a leader’s magic is to spin a few words into political gold, capturing the moment and proclaiming the future. Think Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’, Winston Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’, or Ben Chifley’s ‘light …