The Australian government often describes Australia and New Zealand as ‘natural allies’. But Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement of the AUKUS security partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom on 16 September—which he …
Articles by: "Joanne Wallis"
Australian debates about the geopolitics of the Pacific islands in many ways represent the broad contours of discussions about Australia’s foreign and strategic policy, notably our relations with China. It’s possible to identify two dominant …
Australia’s new Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne probably envied New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s welcome at this week’s Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Nauru. During the leaders’ retreat lunch break yesterday, Nauru …
The report this week that China is in talks to build a military base in Vanuatu has generated consternation in Australia, with Malcolm Turnbull expressing his ‘great concern’ about the potential militarisation of the Pacific …
As Julie Bishop recently stated in a major speech on Australia’s relations with the Pacific islands, the region is ‘of great importance to Australia’ as ‘our nearest geographic neighbours’. Reflecting the region’s proximity, Australia has …
Australia faces an increasingly crowded and complex geopolitical environment in the South Pacific. While the most important external powers in the region have traditionally been Australia, New Zealand, the US and France, which have long …
Australian Defence white papers have long identified the strategic import of ‘a secure South Pacific and Timor-Leste’. As renowned strategic thinker T.B. Millar once reflected, Papua New Guinea is an ‘an exposed and vulnerable front …
Peter Jennings and Karl Claxton’s recent ASPI Special Report A stitch in time: Preserving peace on Bougainville represents an important—and necessary—attempt to move Bougainville to the centre stage of Australian foreign and strategic policy debates. …
I’ve previously written on The Strategist that it’s time for Australian policymakers and academics to see the South Pacific as an ‘arc of opportunity’, rather than an ‘arc of instability’ (PDF). That proposal was tested …
In 1999 Paul Dibb used the concept ‘arc of instability‘ to describe the security challenges facing the Pacific. The concept had its roots in the geographic school of strategic thinking, which holds that Australia’s main strategic …
US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s decision to attend the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in the Cook Islands this week signals the growing strategic importance of the South Pacific. Clinton’s attendance may also be a …
A continuous theme of successive White Papers has been that our strategic challenges in the South Pacific come not from powerful states, but from weak ones. The idea that weak South Pacific states pose a …