Defining diplomacy down

Some 25 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor who in the course of his career served as United States ambassador to the United Nations and a US senator from New York, coined the …

The real significance of the Quad

In India, Australia and other Indo-Pacific countries, we have been regularly inundated with commentary about the ‘Quad’, the informal name for a grouping of countries comprising the United States, Japan, India and Australia. There are …

The Battle of Marawi, one year on

One year ago, a gruelling five-month house-to-house, room-to-room battle ended a campaign by Islamic State–inspired militants to turn Marawi into the capital of ‘wilayat sharq Asiyya’, a Southeast Asian province of their imagined empire. The …

The end of America’s China fantasy

A long-overdue shift in America’s China policy is underway. After decades of ‘constructive engagement’—an approach that has facilitated China’s rise, even as the country has violated international rules and norms—the United States is now seeking …

Arms control and a nuclear order in decay

President Donald Trump’s statement over the weekend that the US plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia underlines the current pace of strategic change. A nuclear order forged primarily during …

The five-domains update

Sea state The European Union Naval Force (EU NAVFOR) and the People’s Liberation Army Navy conducted the first joint exercise at China’s base in Djibouti. The medical evacuation exercise followed EU NAVFOR’s operational commander’s visit …

The disruptive power of ethnic nationalism

In July, Israel passed a controversial new ‘nation-state law’ that asserted that ‘the right [to exercise] national self-determination’ is ‘unique to the Jewish people’ and established Hebrew as Israel’s official language, downgrading Arabic to a …

ASPI suggests

The world Amid the fallout over the alleged murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, Middle East Eye has obtained gruesome details via a leaked audio recording, purportedly of the killing. BuzzFeed reports that …

Strange and stressful days for Oz foreign policy

Seeing Australia’s foreign minister and their opposition counterpart arguing international affairs on the same stage is a rare thing. The federal parliament is the nation’s great clearinghouse for all arguments, but big set-piece foreign policy …

Hard times in Australian strategic thinking

Australia has long been ‘the lucky country’—basking in endless beaches, summer barbecues, democratic government, and mineral wealth. It’s also been lucky in terms of its strategic policy, able to ride the coat-tails of a global …

What’s the big deal about digital identity?

Unless you’re an avid reader of federal budget statements, you probably missed the $92.4 million allocation in the 2018–19 Budget to build a digital identity scheme known as GovPass—the second one that taxpayers will now …

National security wrap

The beat Compromised cases The Massachusetts Supreme Court has dismissed thousands of drug convictions because of misconduct by a state chemist and two assistant attorneys-general. In 2014, Sonja Farak, a chemist at the Massachusetts State …