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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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 »
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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 »
