In 1972, Nixon and Mao met in Beijing to begin the Great Asia Bargain. Nixon called it the week that changed the world. The Republican and the Revolutionary ushered in a glorious period. Almost as …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Hillary wants you to know what the US is doing in Asia is a ‘pivot’. The previous Secretary of State thinks ‘rebalance’ is bureaucratic blandness, and dismisses its usage as ‘anodyne.’ Part II of the …
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 …
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 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 …
China has shifted from salami slicing to ramming in the South China Sea. Having created a new ‘fact’ by shifting an oil rig into Vietnam’s proclaimed EEZ off the disputed Paracel Islands, China is ramming …
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 …
The theme of last year’s Shangri-La dialogue was the need to build trust and confidence. As Vietnam’s Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, said then: ‘If trust is lost, all is lost’. Well, trust is lost. This …
The Australian Defence Minister thinks Asia’s security situation is potentially ‘dire’ even ‘catastrophic’. But David Johnston twice assured his Shangri-La audience that the regional impact of the US marines rotating through Darwin on the strategic …