Australia in the World

Christopher Joye is a a director and strategic adviser to a number of funds management and financial services companies. He\'s also a blogger and columnist for the Financial Review. I come to the defence debate hampered by being a clean-skin, but without the baggage of legacy conditioning

Below, a comment from Marilyn Shepherd. But first, Hugh Wyndham writes: I must protest at the repetition, in a reputable publication, of the ill-informed errors contained in Rawdon Dalrymple\'s post. The worst is the statement that \'there is no evidence they are seeking asylum from

The views expressed here, based on this working paper, are the author\'s and do not reflect those of the Department of Defence or the Australian Government. Periodically the US military is host to a robust, heated, and sometimes painful debate on the future character of war. These debates are

Rawdon Dalrymple is a former Australian ambassador to Israel, Indonesia, the US and Japan. The Expert Panel\'s report on \'asylum seeker\' policy was prepared in less than seven weeks, a remarkable achievement to produce a succinct but comprehensive and compelling document covering all

Part 1 of this article is here and part 2 is here.  Consider a single political-diplomatic start date for the idea of the Asian Century. It is 1988 and Deng Xiaoping is meeting Rajiv Gandhi. China\'s leader tells India\'s Prime Minister: \'The 21st century can only be the Asian

Part 1 of this article here. The Asian Century White Paper has to be broad enough to touch the conceptual edges of the Defence White Paper that will come out in the middle of next year. Notice the key word here is \'touch\' rather than \'enmesh\' or \'integrate\'. The two White Papers will

Dr John Blaxland is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU. Hugh White\'s recently released book, The China Choice, is an enjoyable read, capturing much of what he has blogged about on The Interpreter over the last couple of years in relation to the US and China

If you\'re a military aviation buff, the pictures emerging from Exercise Pitch Black, Australia\'s premier air warfare exercise, are spectacular. To see Indonesia\'s Russian-designed Sukhoi fighters on Australian soil and in formation with our F/A-18s is a rare and impressive spectacle. But

Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan is author of Running the War in Iraq. Professor Paul Dibb offers those who will draft the Defence White Paper 2013 two choices: a modified DWP2009 or an approach based on a new force structure designed to meet restricted funding. At the same time, he mentions the

The PNG-Australia relationship has had a pretty rough year. Comparisons can be made with the fragility of our relationship with Indonesia – seemingly small issues can trigger a large backlash. Despite the breadth and depth of the relationship and our shared history, there is a new tension in

Australia\'s Fairfax newspapers have set the cat among the carrier pigeons, with these dramatic reports about supposed \'plans\' and \'recommendations\' for a US nuclear aircraft carrier base in Western Australia. What the news stories neglect to mention is that the relevant American

Here\'s telling demonstration of the sometimes unexpected effects of Australia\'s embrace of international education: tonight the Bollywood family comedy \'From Sydney With Love\' premieres at the University of New South Wales. This SMH story quotes writer, director and star Prateek

First came the positive murmurings out of the May meeting of the Pacific Island Forum's Ministerial Contact Group on Fiji. The ministers, including our own Bob Carr, were encouraged by the changes they saw in Fiji. Now, just three months later, Fiji, Australia and New Zealand have reached a

Below is part 3 of my interview with renowned US foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead; part 1 here and part 2 here. Q. Walter, you again make an intriguing comment near the close of your previous answer, so I\'d like to ask you about \'the emergence of an Asian society of

Foreign Minister Bob Carr has rejected the suggestion I made in a Lowy Institute Snapshot yesterday, that the South China Sea is the most unpredictable and dangerous dispute in our region and that Australia should be more active in helping work towards a solution. Here\'s what Senator Carr told

Imagine if we decided that, at $17 million per gold medal, preparing elite athletes for the Olympics was too expensive and that instead we\'d pay our fastest and fittest to train only for 40 days each year. Come Rio 2016, no one would expect many Australian Olympic champions. Yet that\'s precisely

A report emerged this week (thanks Sam) that the UK is gearing up for a possible mass evacuation of British citizens from Syria, with a helicopter carrier and amphibious assault ship to be deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean for exercises after the Olympic Games finish. The exercise has evidently&

Justin Jones\' post on the continuing relevance of warning time as a strategic concept has been somewhat neglected and is worth returning to. The concept of Australia having enough warning time to mobilise a larger defence force for a major conflict has underpinned strategic planning for

There has been so much media coverage of the speech the Lowy Institute hosted last week by Australia\'s so-called top spy, it would be an intelligence failure of the highest order if you had somehow missed the story. In any case, the full recording of the speech by Nick Warner, Director-General of

Last Thursday Graeme Dobell put down some thoughts on the historic speech by Australian Secret Intelligence Service chief Nick Warner. He has some additional insights in this video, recorded right after the event

Not wishing to pile on to Abe Denmark\'s piece dismissing the idea that the US is containing China, but I have another concern to add to those of Hugh White. It relates to this passage in Denmark\'s piece: The key question is not whether China develops its own military power, but how

Abraham Denmark is right that US policy towards China is not containment, if we use \'containment\' the way he does. He defines the word rather narrowly, to refer only to the specific set of polices adopted by America towards the Soviet Union. So for him to say that the US is not containing

To round off Graeme Dobell\'s piece about Tony Abbott\'s foreign and aid policies as described in the leaked Coalition speaker notes, let\'s take a look at the speech Abbott gave at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC on Tuesday.   First, it\'s important to say that