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 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 »
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Ukraine – US Brzezinski’s ghost and the goading of the USSR
Back in 1998, in an interview with the French news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted how the US national security establishment had laid the groundwork for the eventual Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Continue reading »
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A mutual suicide pact: Australia’s undeclared nuclear weapons strategy
As the world’s nuclear arsenals build even more killing power, the need for Australia to abandon this perilous defence arrangement only increases. Continue reading »
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One word can sum up our government today: kakistocracy
Kakistocracy is government by the least competent — its hallmarks are ineptitude and corruption. This will ring true for many Australian voters. Continue reading »
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Patronising, populist and ignorant: another Morrison election speech
The prime minister’s recent comments to an Australian-Indian audience displayed either an ignorance of history or a willingness to brush over inconvenient truths. Continue reading »
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The inaugural ASPI Sydney Dialogue is a national embarrassment
The ‘summit’ was compromised by complicity between DFAT,ASPI , the presence of Narendra Modi, and Meta’s sponsorship.But our anti-China media lap it up. Continue reading »
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Will we ever get those nuclear submarines?
Chronic problems in US Navy shipyards and questions over the future viability of attack submarines in their current roles cast doubt on the Morrison government’s controversial defence decision. Continue reading »
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New language, new national future: Australia is now an AUKUState
Move over “digger”, “dinkum” and “ocker”, a new Australian term is to be added to the English language at the highest levels of national discourse: the new verb, AUKUStrate and proper noun, AUKUState. Continue reading »
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Five Eyes intelligence failure in Afghanistan, or something worse?
If corruption was central to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, and US intelligence ignored it, what should become of the Five Eyes alliance? Continue reading »
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ASPI complicit in US and Australia’s Afghanistan deceit
The Taliban victory in Afghanistan and the ensuing debacle of the Western withdrawal from Kabul was always going to test the conscience of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Continue reading »
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Making sense of Afghanistan in fragments: part 2: the present and the future
The deluge of images carried by the mass media are in realty merely an overburden of a disaster foretold. Their precedents were freely available long before the Western forces entered Afghanistan but they were brought into sharp relief as soon as that happened. Albeit less drastically, the documentation since then – specifically, the voluminous, now declassified Continue reading »
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Making sense of Afghanistan: If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied.Part 1
Whatever took place in the last several days in Afghanistan, be it the Taliban’s victory as insurgency or counter-counter-insurgency, it is a development that will not disclose its full consequences for some time. Continue reading »
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ASPI’s proposal to further militarise and securitise the University. Part 2
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s recent proposal to enrol the science, technology, engineering and mathematics areas of the research universities as part of a national security establishment along the lines overseen by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is a regrettable initiative. Continue reading »
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ASPI’s proposal to further militarise and securitise the university – Part 1
It is now unambiguously clear that certain influential centres of government advice and government policy hold the university-as-institution in contempt. Continue reading »
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Anti-China Threat Production in Australia: A redundant, out-of-control industry
Australia cannot lay claim to being the sole, or even senior author of its defence strategies and policies. Continue reading »
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Anti-China threat porn: Antiquity’s antidote to its sophistry
If China is a threat to international peace and security, then the relationships outlined below approach the crime of trading with the enemy. Continue reading »
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ASPI, sycophancy and the deepening corruption of Australia’s strategic mindset
Last month, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute announced that its Executive Director, Peter Jennings, had warned another ostensibly independent think tank, the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, that China may trigger a major military crisis over Taiwan in the coming year. The catalysts are held to be twofold: the forthcoming centenary of the Continue reading »
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For the Prime Minister, sovereignty is reduced to possessing 70 fighter jets
Prime Minister Scott Morrison appears to be suffering from the neurological condition visual agnosia – the inability to recognise certain objects for what they are. It is a condition popularised the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, is his book on the condition, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Continue reading »
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Sleepwalking into a fascist alliance
Those critically engaged in understanding and debating the future of Australian defence and national security strategies should pass two votes of thanks: the first is to former President Donald Trump; the second to the recent political-strategic proclamations of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Continue reading »
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It’s time to decommission ASPI
The time has come – indeed, is well past – for those responsible for giving the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) its Length Of Type Extension to decommission it in the manner of a ship of the line, or submarine, whose usefulness to the fleet has demonstrably expired and cannot under any circumstance be regarded Continue reading »
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Hamlet’s glass and the Brereton Report: the radical reality of Australia’s security culture
It is almost an invariable rule that the citizens of nation-states in their generality, and Australia in particular, are obsessed with security and fascinated with violence; equally, they are illiterate in understanding their own traditions and practices. And when they ostensibly honour international law, rules-based orders, add peace, they require a more suspecting glance than Continue reading »
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The Brereton Report: the failure of political and military leadership
Our political leadership will never be the subjects of the Office of the Special Investigator or the Australian Federal Police, nor, therefore, will they ever be charged. Indeed, in their exaggerated innocence they will display only the inevitable hypocrisy of the failed war-maker: a passion for condemning others and a total unwillingness to accept responsibility Continue reading »
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Australia and the United States: the opposed fantasies at the heart of the alliance relationship
One of the refrains among those defending Australia’s alliance with the United States is that arising out of their pasts, sharing a core set of moral and ethical values, political and economic arrangements, and visions of the desirable world order. Continue reading »
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Pathological philanthropy in the Australia-US Alliance
With confirmed coronavirus cases in excess of two million, the number of new, confirmed cases across the country approaching 45,000 per day for most of the last ten weeks, and resultant deaths in excess of 126,000 (and climbing), the decisions made across the United States to open the economy should not surprise. Continue reading »
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Accelerating securitisation and militarisation in Australian politics: symptoms of democracy in decline.
As though these trends are not worrying enough in themselves, in the present, they need to be understood as effects rather than causes. And the causes are even more frightening. Continue reading »
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: Surveying Australia’s future submarine debate and finding that it doesn ’t start with Australia. Part 5 of 5.
In the course of studying the arguments for and against the decision to acquire the Shortfin Barracuda submarine to replace the Collins Class boats the sense has emerged that almost every aspect of the debates was concerned with the need to please strategies determined elsewhere. This applies, moreover, to both the bureaucratic inarticulacy of government Continue reading »
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: Questions which should have preceded the decision on the future submarine. Part 4 of 5
The enemification of China and Russia in US, and thus, alliance statements and documents on international security can now reasonably be described as an idée fixe: a persistent preoccupation which has become a delusional idea that dominates all proceedings and is demonstrably and firmly resistant to any attempt to modify it no matter the dangers Continue reading »
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: Substituting the Strategic Dreamtime for the Berthold Brecht Principles of Strategic Analysis. Part 3 of 5.
Sometimes important strategic issues and questions are made more intelligible and transparent when viewed from the perspectives not normally associated with national security and defence policies. Now is one of those times. Continue reading »
