‘You [Australia] have found Southeast Asia, don’t lose it.’ These were the words of the highly charismatic ASEAN Secretary-General Dr Surin Pitsuwan, the key-note speaker at last Tuesday’s launch of the Southeast Asia Institute at …
Recent contributions to The Strategist have provided valuable insights on the extent and limits of India’s willingness and capacity to assert itself as a nascent great power. Implicit in these discussions lies a deeper issue, …
With the upcoming US presidential election on 6 November, we’ve put together a special edition ‘ASPI suggests’ of reports and articles relating to US defence policy and spending. Defence policy and spending One of the …
The Australia in the Asian Century White Paper is an ambitious document, and it’s one Strategist contributors will analyse from different perspectives over the next few days. Broadly speaking, there are some important and positive …
In a recent speech to RUSI, Raytheon boss Michael Ward outlined how the Australian Defence industry had dropped from close to 30,000 people down to about 25,000 people over the last three years. Given the …
On 12 October the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution urging African regional troops and the UN to present within 45 days a plan for military intervention in Mali, seven days later Australia won …
Cam Hawker’s recent post about the ‘Asian Century’ moniker got me thinking about the power of words to shape our analysis and perceptions—perhaps, most dangerously, in ways of which we are never aware. Watching the …
Coral Bell’s recent passing has created an unfillable void in the Australian International Relations and Strategic Studies scene. Yet Coral leaves behind a wealth of ideas generated during her illustrious career that retain substantial currency …
In a recent post, Peter Jennings and I argued that if Australia won a seat at the global decision making peak body, the UN Security Council, we’d benefit from picking some signature issues where Australia …
Cam Hawker’s recent Strategist post, ‘Stuck in the middle with you’, suffers from five major fallacies. First, it assumes that Australia–US joint facilities predetermine the strategic relationship between Canberra and Washington. Second, it assumes that …
I’m currently attending the Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Honolulu, the fifth such meeting to be held in Hawaii as part of the now 20 year-old venerable Australian American Leadership Dialogue process. It’s an interesting …
Australia has less room to maneuver in balancing between Washington and Beijing than many analysts suppose. Much of the commentary on Australia’s management of its relationships with the United States and China is framed around …
For your (virtual) bookshelf: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer, Centre for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1999. In the 1990s, the CIA commissioned a study on the nature of intelligence analysis to …
Welcome back for our weekly round-up of articles, reports and events in the strategy, defence and security world. Articles and news What is the biggest security problem in today’s world? This Foreign Policy article discusses five of …
It was hard not to crack a wry smile when reading Tobias Feakin’s post on the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace. Let’s just say that the position of the blocs settling behind a more ‘rules-based’ approach, …
The recent Australian National Audit Office reports on the current and future air combat capability highlighted the risk and potential cost of keeping the 1980s vintage Hornets flying until they are replaced by the F-35 …
Dennis Richardson is preparing to leave the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to join Defence as its new Secretary, and he’ll be the twelfth person to hold that job since Sir Arthur Tange created …
Back in 1970, Time magazine ran an article entitled ‘Toward the Japanese Century’. More recently, in 2005 Mark Leonard was writing about the ‘European Century’. Today you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d envisage …
We will know around Friday afternoon whether Australia has been successful in winning its bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Having just returned from a trip to New York, the vibe …
We saw yesterday how the misinterpreted ‘lessons’ of international interventionism from the Bosnia experience led to the notion of ‘liberal imperialism’ that ultimately came unstuck in Iraq, only to be (somewhat) saved by a ‘surge’ …