In offering security and economic integration to the South Pacific, Australia is starting gently with small steps. The soft-and-slow approach to integration has the best chance of success, because South Pacific states will embrace the …
Articles by: "Graeme Dobell"
Reaching beyond the usual language of partnership with the South Pacific, Australia is offering economic and security integration. The integration policy is a new ideal: not just neighbours, but joined. It’s a complex task for …
In geoeconomics and trade as much as in the security realm, Australia fears the international rules of the game are being battered and eroded. In musing on the future of the Indo-Pacific, Australia’s new foreign …
Australia’s foreign policy white paper is a contrast study, both dark and light. Bright vistas of international opportunity are described beneath storm clouds of ‘political alienation and economic nationalism’. Here are both dreams and nightmares: …
Asia’s summit season is bountiful. Flowers bloom, weeds sprout, thorns thrive, all coloured by policy and politics and the personalities of leaders. The APEC summit and the East Asia Summit (EAS) bring lots of people …
The core belief system of Australia’s approach to international affairs for 75 years is the cause that can barely speak its own name. Whisper it softly: ‘liberal internationalism’, an aspiration big enough to encompass democracy …
Simultaneous serendipity struck when the new magazine Australian Foreign Affairs and its US inspiration Foreign Affairs dropped into my mailbox on the same day. The wattle-yellow cover of the newborn publication made a fine Oz …
A good political memoir offers the joy of the fight and the smell of the gang warfare. Insight is ever welcome. Ditto inspiration. Plus laughs to help the medicine go down. Gareth Evans’ Incorrigible optimist: …
Australia spent years saying no to a central role in the mounting crisis in Solomon Islands. Then, in 2003, Canberra did a huge U-turn and led the intervention that ran for 14 years and ended …
Three things Australia didn’t want to do in the South Pacific came to culmination this year. Two of them were things Australia hadn’t wanted to do, but then changed its mind on. Having made the …
Americans do one great favour to sitting presidents—they re-elect ’em. Landing the top job is extraordinarily tough. Doing it is nigh impossible. Getting re-elected is the oft-recurring gift. Dating the modern superpower presidency from Franklin …
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 …