Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s National Press Club address on Wednesday foreshadowed a major role for the Australian Defence Force in responding to natural disasters. From Operation Sovereign Borders to the Pacific ‘step-up’, the Department of …
In this special episode of Policy, Guns and Money, Lisa Sharland, the head of ASPI’s international program, discusses the vital work of gender advisers in the Australian Defence Force with Commander Jen Macklin, Group Captain …
Welcome to our first ‘ASPI suggests’ for 2020. There’s a lot of reading to catch up on, so let’s dive right in. The world The Middle East remains embroiled in conflict and instability. A report …
Scientists say that the climate crisis is real, grave and driven by human activity. However, scientific consensus doesn’t solve four challenging political equations. First, catastrophism doesn’t help. Extreme rhetoric makes domestic and international agreement, through …
Australia has a proud history of engagement with the UN, including participating in and leading UN peace operations, from Cyprus in 1964 to East Timor in 1999. But peace operations have fallen off the Australian …
The strategic policy chapter in the 2016 defence white paper doesn’t provide a framework to determine priorities for force structure, posture and employment. Old concepts such as ‘self-reliance’ have become divorced from their original strategic …
Finally, US President Donald Trump, in the presence of recently indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced his much-awaited peace plan for Israel and Palestine on Tuesday. While the details are still sketchy, enough of …
The beat Organised crime set to thrive in Latin America in 2020 InSight Crime has predicted that political instability, diminishing regional and international cooperation, and the increasingly transnational and interconnected nature of criminal syndicates will …
Despite the substantial transformation in Indonesia’s political system, there’s more continuity than change in Indonesia’s security outlook and strategic culture. Since its early years, Indonesia has developed strategic doctrines that include the concept of a …
The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army is an occasion marked by angst as well as sadness. Anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance around the world, as if the lessons …
It is disappointing that the Brits are doing the wrong thing on 5G, having not exhausted other possibilities. Instead they have doubled down on a flawed and outdated cybersecurity model to convince themselves that they …
Over the past year, long-suppressed strategic debates re-emerged in South Korea: accepting a less-involved United States, strengthening relations with China, securing an independent nuclear weapons capacity, or combining all of these and steering a path …
The outbreak of a new coronavirus that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan has already infected over 4,000 people—mostly in China, but also in several other countries, from Thailand to France to the United …
Four years have now passed since the release of the 2016 defence white paper, the most recent comprehensive review of Australia’s defence policy and capability. The main contours of that document were set down as …
The link between climate change and human security has been on the global security radar for decades. Researchers have long understood how and why the earth’s climate is changing and what these changes mean for …
A month on from my earlier post on bringing the Australian Defence Force into the global warming fight, a lot has changed. Responding to the national bushfire catastrophe, the government has deployed more than 6,000 …
Looming over this year’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, were two contradictory impulses that lay behind the creation of the Jewish state: cosmopolitanism and nationalism. A …
Australia had a part in East Timor’s march to tragedy and a key role in its salvation. Cruel ironies and strange mirror effects mark Australia’s performance in the lead-up to Indonesia’s invasion, in 1974–75, and …
It’s that time again. Coinciding with the biggest musical countdown of the year is the biggest countdown of a defence and strategy site’s most popular articles of 2019. This year saw a couple of perennial …
‘Great nations do not fight endless wars’, US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative …