Writer
Michael McKinley
Michael McKinley is a member of the Emeritus Faculty, the Australian National University; he taught Strategy, Diplomacy and International Conflict at the University of Western Australia and the ANU.
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The 2-Israel Problem
Palestine’s problem is only partly expressed as a frustrated 2-State Solution; it might, more effectively be understood as a 2-Israel problem. Continue reading »
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Australia’s colonised universities: in partibus infidelium*
A recent article on The Citizen by James Costa carries the welcome news that certain students, professional staff, and faculty have, for some eight years, been disturbing the academic brothel-keepers at the University of Melbourne by urging them to sever the links it has to weapons manufacturers and Continue reading »
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Engaging Pillar 2 of AUKUS: losing self-respect and encouraging self-harm
Pillar 2 is a thing that AUKUS created: it appears at different times and with different meanings and possibilities and yet is not entirely, or even at all, predictable because the initial conditions and predicate logic on which it depends are themselves illusions or fabrications of the collective mind of those who constructed it in Continue reading »
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Allies playing gods
Every generation, or thereabouts, has its moment of unlearning or forgetting two salutary lessons that should be indelibly imprinted on the memory and the consciousness with the advent of war: first, idiosyncrasies or hubris, or both, can overpower political leaders; second allies are not necessarily friends no matter how much they may seem like us, Continue reading »
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Justice miscarried: The unanswered questions of the McBride verdict
The sentencing verdict of David McBride gives rise to question that, if unaddressed, will haunt the Australian Defence Force (ADF) forever. Continue reading »
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Australia’s stunted mainstream defence and security imagination
With Australian defence writers now arguing for society to be reimagined as an ‘input to defence capability’, we are witnessing further incursions in the Democracy – Defence Nexus. Continue reading »
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A silent coup in plain sight: AUKUS and the universities
An invitation: imagine a country wherein, as a matter of policy orientation, its 41 universities have abdicated one of their principal founding roles – to be dominant sites of secular critique practised by people capable of living what they teach and committed to taking aim at the unequal, imperial, antidemocrática present. Imagine, too, that this Continue reading »
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Dead in the water: The AUKUS SSN delusion
The general theme of delusion and the particular theme of ‘dead in the water’ as they apply to the entire AUKUS arrangements are provocations worthy of taking further. Continue reading »
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Research security, information restriction, and the universities
It was bound to happen in one form or another. The AUKUS arrangements were a guarantee of it. The ‘it’ in question is the alleged discovery and lamentation that, possibly, “Australia has one of the weakest research security frameworks in the developed world.” Redress is demanded and of a draconian character; not to do so Continue reading »
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Hope betrayed, arrays herself in bombs
While the speechless unite, in a silent accord. Australia’s Geopolitical Present and Future: Bethlehem through Poetry and Literature. Continue reading »
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War with China: Babbling incoherence and missing evidence
With the expansion of all services of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – no matter that it is consistent with a defensive posture – China’s every strategic move now is rendered totally unacceptable after passing through a prism designed and issued on a complementary basis by the US. Hyper-suspicion is the attitude and threat inflation Continue reading »
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Mimetic engulfment: The US has captured the Australian strategic mind
It is now the case that Australia’s alliance with the United States is best described as the Great Harmonisation. On all principal matters of strategic interest – especially in all fundamental aspects of China as the “pacing threat” – the overwhelming impression is that, though Washington and Canberra are spatially separated, they nevertheless speak and Continue reading »
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AUKUS: transformations and losses
In matters of defence and national security strategy Australia has entered a period of great transformations. The AUKUS submarine project is the proximate cause: a vanity project born of fantasies so dense that, strategically speaking, it has created gravitational waves of a magnitude that warps everything it encounters. More precisely, it warps in ways that Continue reading »
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The future of Australia’s universities under the AUKUS regime
In one of his last posts on this site Dennis Argall contributed an extraordinary insight which needs to be kept, explicitly and unapologetically, at the forefront of all discussions about AUKUS and its bastard child, the Defence Strategic Review. The title of his piece was: “The Defence Strategic Review is a claim to command civil Continue reading »
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The colonisation of the Australian strategic imagination
Interrogating the public record provides a fundamental challenge to the integrity of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR). It comes in the form of a reality which few wish to acknowledge: the captive Australian strategic imagination – a phenomenon of which Peter Dean, Head of the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney and Continue reading »
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AUKUS and the rupture in Australian civil-military relations
When a senior officer in the Australian Defence Force assumes political positions that are in the realm of the overtly political, and is not disciplined for having done so, the government is derelict in its duty to maintain the firewall between the civil and the military. Worse, it constitutes an offence against democratic theory and Continue reading »
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AUKUS and Aotearoa New Zealand: the costs of attraction and repulsion
When the ALP Government led by Anthony Albanese came to power in 2022 it was confronted by the AUKUS minefield laid by its predecessor, the LNC Government led by Scott Morrison. Continue reading »
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Understanding the Austral-Americans
Embedded within the foreign policy debate in Australia is the claim that an epochal shift of Copernican significance is underway. So disturbing is this transformation in world politics – seemingly from light to darkness, from joy to woe – that its troubling possibilities have dissolved the sense of national self. Continue reading »
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China war pornography and hypoxia: Anticipating the Defence Strategic Review
Many government reviews or reports are leaked in part for reasons of bureaucratic politics and the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) is no exception. Continue reading »
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Anticipating the Defence Strategic Review through ministerspeak
In anticipation of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) it would be advisable to stock up on a numbing agent. Continue reading »
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The ANU has sold out to the military industrial complex
Australian universities now self-identify as deeply integrated units within the agencies of the State, the Australian Defence Force, and industry. They have become part of an encompassing strategy of Sinophobia and Australian fantasies of long-range attacks on China. Continue reading »
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AUKUS and the corruption of Australia’s Universities
Our universities have become the industrial brothel-keepers to the nation’s fevered national security imaginary. Continue reading »
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The incoherent narrative of the AUKUS nuclear powered attack submarines-SSNs
In the year since the government announced the AUKUS arrangements – especially that they involved Australia’s acquisition of a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines – the relevant communications on this centrepiece have veered from the boastful to the oracular. Ostensibly, they emanate from the inner sanctums of Defence and National Security, or those recently within them Continue reading »
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The Defence Strategic Review as strategic theology
Even though the Defence Strategic Review is not scheduled to be delivered until March next year the circumstances in which it is embedded suggest that it is already a compromised document. If the intelligence and strategic assessments which inform it are not made public – and the indications are that this will be the case Continue reading »
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The tragedy and self-harm of celebrity appointments in the universities
The appointment of Chancellors, celebrity professors and even high-level management in Australia’s universities, especially at the Australian National University, is best understood comparatively – as a template derived from the Roman Curia, and water polo – and through the application of The Generalised Iceberg Theorem: two-thirds of what determines outcomes takes place out of sight. Continue reading »
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Understanding the Australia-NATO chats in Madrid
Less than three years ago President Macron said NATO was afflicted with ‘brain death’. Continue reading »
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The AUKUS minefield laid by the Coalition
The previous government’s legacies in defence policy to the incoming Labor government from the nine years they were in power reveal a profound disregard for probity and democratic politics. They are also riven with dishonesty, a manifesto detailing the surrender of national sovereignty, and ultimately a threat to Australia’s peace and security. Continue reading »
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The track record of Peter Dutton’s incompetence
Failing up is a common phenomenon in many organisations – not least those concerned with national defence and security. Continue reading »
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The Solomons have quite simply forgotten their place
The disciplines and sub-disciples of Political Science and International Relations are frequently embarrassed by their collective inabilities to provide comprehensive understandings of events ostensibly within their purview because, as disciplines, they suffer from constrained, even constipated imaginations. Continue reading »
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Russia, Ukraine, familiar refrains and reflexes
It is no exaggeration to echo Tom Paine: “these are the times that try men’s souls.” It is an immemorial abode and custom, brought on this time by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a provocation undoubtedly deserving of outrage and indignation and just, legal, moral and ethical response. Continue reading »
