Originally published 28 May 2019. I recently sailed onboard the landing helicopter dock and Royal Australian Navy flagship HMAS Canberra from Vietnam to Singapore, as one of several academic sea-riders invited to observe Indo-Pacific Endeavour 2019 (IPE 19), …
Originally published 14 March 2019. Judgements about the changing shape of the global order are the stuff of current international discourse. We face a world order in transition. Our current order, built in the age …
Originally published 11 July 2019. This year is proving to be something of a watershed in technology. Government and professional bodies are considering or acting on controls around technologies such as artificial intelligence and encryption. The United States, like Australia and New Zealand, banned …
Originally published 6 March 2019. We are entering a new era in the security of Australia, not because of terrorism, the rise of China or even the cybersecurity threat, but because of climate change. As …
In How to defend Australia, I argued that if we are to take our defence seriously, we need to prepare to defend Australia from a major Asian power independently. That is necessary, I said, because …
When the Cold War ended, many pundits anticipated a new era in which geoeconomics would determine geopolitics. As economic integration progressed, they predicted, the rules-based order would take root globally. Countries would comply with international …
‘The stability and economic progress of Papua New Guinea, other Pacific island countries and Timor-Leste is of fundamental importance to Australia.’ Australian foreign policy white paper, 2017 Australia’s deepest, oldest instinct in the South Pacific …
As I looked back at the article I wrote this time last year, I was disappointed to see the bad had remained, the good had turned, and the ugly got worse. In saying that, glimmers …
Conflict over trade dominated the economic headlines in 2019, so it’s surprising that the year ended with significant progress on three trade agreements. Each tells a different story about the outlook both for the global …
Over recent years, Australian governments have made a conscious decision to recast their shorthand description of the strategic region within which they live. In brief, they’ve moved away from describing that region as the ‘Asia–Pacific’ …
It was 5 August 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded and conquered all of Kuwait, and US President George H.W. Bush could not have been clearer as he spoke from the South …
The year 2014 was just as significant as 1914. Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula elicited a weak response from the West and highlighted a larger strategic problem: the erosion of the liberal-democratic world order. …
