Articles by: "Graeme Dobell"
Muting Australia’s regional voice

Gutting Radio Australia and killing the international TV service is bad, sad and mad. Bad: Lopping 60% from the ABC’s international service is lousy for the national interest. A strategic asset in Asia and the …

The new relationship of Japan and Australia

Japan has quickly risen to become a defence partner for Australia that ranks beside New Zealand and Britain. Thus, Japan sits on the second tier, with the traditional Anglo allies, below the peak where the …

Japan and Oz—ready, willing and Abe

Australia is developing the habit of balancing an address to the Parliament by an Asia-Pacific ally with a matching speech by China’s President. The contentious words in that sentence are ‘balancing’ and ‘ally’, even if …

Asia, not Atlantic, for Hillary

A part of being a foreign-affairs tragic is believing any memoir by a modern US Secretary of State is interesting, no matter how flawed the book or the Secretary. This tragic ranks the autobiographies of …

What is China’s strategy?

A simple question about what China has been doing to its neighbours keeps recurring: How is that smart? The question came up in dozens of conversations at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific …

China’s peaceful rise into pieces

China has gone from peaceful rise to rising by pieces, as it smashes the nascent regional security order. Not much peace in prospect as China forcefully asserts its ownership over pieces of the East China …

Athens and Sparta come to the South China Sea

A few millennia after recording the basic tenets of hard-edged power politics and creating the historian’s craft, Thucydides has popped up in the South China Sea. Malaysia’s Prime Minister has dipped into the historian, philosopher …