Debate: "General"
How the West’s research aids China’s military

In 2016, Chinese student Huang Xianjun completed his PhD at the University of Manchester, working with the discoverers of graphene, a material with incredible strength, electrical conductivity and flexibility. Then he returned to China to …

After the INF Treaty: whither arms control?

Rod Lyon’s recent analysis on the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia concludes with a sober warning of more intense nuclear competition on the horizon. So what …

Rethinking Australia’s Plan B

There’s been a lot of talk on The Strategist lately about a Plan B for Australia’s defence. Much of the discussion has called for increased defence spending and greater action by Australia to support the …

Soft power ‘with Australian characteristics’ (part 2)

The Foreign Affairs team conducting Australia’s soft power review has been travelling the country to invite a national conversation about influence and persuasion. In Hobart, for example, interlocutors ranged widely from public, commercial and educational …

Not the new cold war

Competition and confrontation build between China and the US. The era of engagement fades. Superpower rivalry returns. Great power challenges great power. The world’s biggest economy faces off against the second biggest. The descriptor of …

ASPI suggests

The world US President Donald Trump’s next target in a growing list of international agreements is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Commentators in the Washington Post and The National Interest contend that Trump is right …

US foreign policy and the start of a new cold war

America’s greatest error was not the Iraq war, calamitous self-inflicted wound though it was. Rather, it was adopting Francis Fukuyama’s now discredited idea that the end of the Cold War marked ‘the universalization of Western …

Trump’s floundering North Korea strategy

‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ This aphorism, often attributed to Albert Einstein, seems to be the inspiration for US President Donald Trump’s North Korea policy. Trump’s …

A difference of degrees: the looming climate catastrophe

The release earlier this month of a major UN-sponsored scientific report on the significant impacts expected from 1.5°C of global warming—the aspirational limit countries adopted in the Paris climate agreement—generated widespread media interest. Much of …

Policy, Guns and Money: Counterterrorism special

In this special podcast, we consider the state of counterterrorism in the UK and Australia. Sir Paul Stephenson, who was commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police from 2009 to 2011, gives his views on the situation …