After this week, Prime Minister Tony Abbott might be forgiven for wanting to revise his ‘more Jakarta and less Geneva’ mantra. (More Wellington, anyone?) The apparent leaking of the Australian Signal’s Directorate information about Indonesian …
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. …
ASPI today released my report Moving beyond ambitions? Indonesia’s military modernisation which examines Jakarta’s plans to build a modern defence force over the next decade. It’s an important topic, because the military balance between the ADF …
Students of regional security architecture will now have another acronym to add to their lexicon. Last Friday the 20 member states of the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC), at its annual meeting …
An ASPI report published this morning sets out a plan to help deliver a sustainable solution for the future of Bougainville. A decade after the successful peacekeeping mission, and a year and a half before …
Last week, the furore over spying allegations revealed in reports leaked by Edward Snowden that rocked Europe reached Australia. On Thursday 31 October, Fairfax papers reported that Australia had been spying on its neighbour from …
Russell Hunter and Victor Lal’s reflection on the implications of the election on Australia’s relations with Fiji raises more questions than it answers. The orthodox view since the military coup in December 2006 has been …
Daniel Grant is to be congratulated for his interesting post on the limited prospects for Australia–Indonesia strategic cooperation. I have two comments in response. First, I think the piece underplays the idea of strategic cooperation …
The Abbott government has promised to write a new Defence White Paper within 18 months, and one of the key challenges it will face is considering the place of Indonesia in Australian defence thinking. As …
Anthony Bergin’s recent post Is Australia a pivotal power? has sparked a lot of responses. Below are the latest submissions. We’re also happy to hear from readers who aren’t named Andrew. It’s only words Andrew Davies In …
Anthony Bergin is surely right when he channels his inner Alexander Downer to make the case that Australia is more (but also, I think, sometimes less) than a middle power in international affairs. Any real …
Judging by his output, ASPI’s Anthony Bergin likes nothing more than to test ideas in relation to Australia’s strategic positioning. His recent proposition that Australia is not so much a ‘middle power’ but a ‘pivotal …