Writer
Ramesh Thakur
Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor, Australian National University and a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General.
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Boris Johnson’s Reticence on UK Ambassador was Responsible and Mature.
Johnson’s judicious refusal to be baited will give him the political space to begin repairing bruised relations with the White House and its tweet-prone cantankerous occupant. Continue reading »
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Professor White, the bomb can endanger but not defend Australia.
Nuclear weapons have dubious operational utility and discarding treaty obligations would leave the stench of hypocrisy. Continue reading »
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Trump’s strategic incoherence on India policy Part 2
In an editorial to mark Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent visit, The Times of India alluded to US policy incoherence in urging Washington to make up its mind between dealing with India as an ally or a frenemy. Earlier, in February Washington broke from its traditional non-committal stance on India–Pakistan skirmishes to side openly with India’s narrative on Continue reading »
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Trump’s strategic incoherence on India policy Part 1
The distance from hubris to delusion is short and the Trump administration is bent on covering it in a sprint in its India policy. Diffuse reciprocity is the diplomatic glue that holds international relationships together. A healthy and long-lasting bilateral relationship rests upon a history of shared interests and values that embody common expectations, reciprocity, and equivalence of Continue reading »
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Trump’s disdain for Japan is insulting and high-risk
In his forays abroad, US President Donald Trump increasingly resembles a bull carrying his own china shop on his back, to be set down for wrecking at diplomatic confabs. At the moment a grave crisis seems imminent with regard to Iran. As former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer notes, soon Trump will come to a Continue reading »
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Folau saga: when employers and sponsors become the thought police
Like Paul Collins, I am destined for Israel Folau’s version of hell on multiple counts of sin. Indeed I will be even deeper in it since I have repeatedly, over several decades, refused to embrace the love and salvation offered by Jesus Christ despite countless missionaries and proselytisers pleading with me to do so and Continue reading »
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Modi vs who? The question needed a clear answer in a quasi-presidential contest (The Times of India)
No Bihari political scientist can possibly understate the importance of caste and religion in shaping the electoral contest. However, there is one other factor that is of growing importance. In all parliamentary democracies across the world, including Australia, power is being centralised in the office of the PM. PMs, including Narendra Modi, increasingly resemble and Continue reading »
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Press freedoms: ‘No one is above the law’ is a slogan, not a policy
On the one hand, Australia lacks media protections of the type found in the US and Europe that enshrine free speech in human rights charters. On the other hand, we may well have more national-security and anti-terror laws than any other Western democracy, with around 70 passed or amended since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Continue reading »
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Tiananmen anniversary revisited
Readers of my generation will recall the horror story told to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on 10 October 1990 by a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl. ‘Nayirah’ claimed to have witnessed invading Iraqi troops storming a Kuwaiti hospital, ripping 15 babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor. On Continue reading »
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India’s 2019 elections
In the most polarising, toxic elections in India’s history, the voter turnout of (67.1% (604 million) was the highest ever. Fierce social media wars contributed to the nastiness. It is hard to say whether political discourse was coarsened more by PM Narendra Modi or his opponents. Continue reading »
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Labor must look in the mirror
In foreshadowing Donald Trump’s victory six months before the 2016 election, I had written: ‘Of all the candidates in both parties, Trump’s appeal seems to reach the broadest and deepest with respect to region, class, education and income… They are looking for an in-your-face champion who will stick it to the snobs (elites) and scolds Continue reading »
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Sanctions – a follow-up
Several people have written seeking clarification and explanation of some of my arguments in my previous article on sanctions, published here on Friday 10 May. The academic literature on the success and effectiveness of sanctions is in something of a mess, for a number of reasons. Continue reading »
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Killing them softly with sanctions
For three years Washington has been consumed by charges of Russian interference in the last US presidential election. In the latest sign that the Trump administration doesn’t do irony, on Tuesday Vice President Mike Pence threatened Venezuelan judges with unspecified consequences if they refused to back opposition leader Juan Gaidó, while lifting sanctions on a Continue reading »
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Australia’s China–US choice is three dimensional, not binary (Part 2)
By framing the choice as a binary one, most Australian analysts typically explain the threat from China as including its challenge to the rules-based international order. This has been true, for example, of several recent defence and foreign policy white papers. A major advantage of framing Australia’s foreign policy dilemma as three-dimensional is that Continue reading »
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Australia’s China–US choice is three dimensional, not binary (Part 1)
RAMESH THAKUR. Australia’s China–US choice is three dimensional, not binary (Part 1) As China–US tensions rise, Australia’s dilemma is almost always debated in terms of the competing gravitational pulls between China as its most important trading partner and the US as its ultimate security guarantor. This depiction of Australia’s primary current foreign policy dilemma as Continue reading »
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The next clash between India and Pakistan (Japan Times 2.4.2019)
For many years, I have argued in these pages that the Indian subcontinent and the Korean Peninsula are among the least unlikely theaters of a nuclear war. The known consequences of a nuclear war mean a deliberate policy decision to go to war is highly unlikely in either theater. But there are different dynamics at Continue reading »
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Who Will Bell the Sydney Airport Security Madness?
Is it possible that pranksters with a perverse sense of humour are in charge of security procedures at Sydney International Airport? Perhaps they are trying to test the limits of traveller tolerance. If so, they might be close to succeeding with me. I am slowly approaching the tipping point where either I will break and Continue reading »
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New Zealand’s Loss of Innocence (Project Syndicate, 17 March 2019)
Like the assassination of Olof Palme in Sweden in 1986, the 9/11 attacks in the US, and the murderous rampage of Anders Breivik in Norway in 2011, March 15 will mark the day New Zealand lost its innocence and entered the age of postmodern mass terror. Fortunately, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response has so far Continue reading »
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India’s General Election: A Preview
This article previews India’s forthcoming general election on three dimensions. First, I describe India’s election machinery and logistics, something that Australia could learn a lot from if it were not for the embedded subconscious racism that rejects the very possibility of an advanced white democracy learning from a poor Asian developing country. Second, I outline Continue reading »
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India’s Trifecta of Failure (Project Syndicate).
With a general election approaching, India’s government is planning a further extension of caste-based quotas in schools and public-sector jobs. This is typical of the two main parties’ tendency to choose the path of least political resistance and defer deep reforms. Continue reading »
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Trump-Kim summitry a work in progress (Japan Times, 1 March 2019)
CANBERRA – The cameras are gone, the lights have dimmed, the scribes have filed their reports and returned home and Hanoi has faded from host of a potentially life-and-death summit to being merely the capital of a booming Southeast Asian country. Attention will now turn fully to the simmering crisis in Kashmir. Continue reading »
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What’s next in India and Pakistan flareup ( Interview on NPR)
NPR’s Steve Inskeep speaks with Ramesh Thakur of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University about the latest conflict between India and Pakistan. Continue reading »
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Thinking aloud: Imagine if the reservations mania extended to the selection of Team India (The Times of India).
In 1990 British politician Norman Tebbit proclaimed his cricket loyalty test: In a match between England and their country of origin, whom did immigrants support? Alas, like most Indians in Australia and England, I would comprehensively fail the Tebbit test. Continue reading »
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Reasons for cautious optimism in Hanoi (The Japan Times).
Americans seem to be afflicted by a curious historical amnesia. The facts are indisputable. The number of non-nuclear countries to have been attacked and invaded by the United States since 1945 is legion. Conversely, not one country with the bomb has been attacked. This equation, more than any other, drives the decision-making calculus of countries Continue reading »
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Being The Australian means never having to say sorry
For a paper that is quick to moralise about the failings of competitors, critics and ideological opponents, The Australian seems remarkably reluctant to admit to any errors, shortcomings or moral failings of its own. Continue reading »
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Canada, China, the US and the Rule of Law – A Postscript
It will be recalled that on 1 December, Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huwaei Technologies, was arrested at Vancouver airport by Canadian authorities at the request of US prosecutors seeking her extradition to face charges of breaching sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump on Iran.I argued earlier that the mantra of ‘the rule of Continue reading »
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Arrested Diplomacy (Project Syndicate).
The Japanese and Canadian governments have failed to manage effectively the reputational, economic, and geopolitical implications of the legal cases against Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn and Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. And, in a globalized world, the risks posed by such cases are likely to grow. Continue reading »
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When ‘rule of law’ becomes a slogan, not a policy The Huwaei saga- A repost
On 1 December, Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huwaei Technologies and daughter of its founder, was arrested at Vancouver airport by Canadian authorities. In October, Cuba’s ambassador to Japan and a colleague were refused rooms by the Hilton hotel in Fukuoaka in western Japan. As a US-based firm, a company official explained, Hilton is Continue reading »
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Nuclear arms: A year of living dangerously
Last January, the Doomsday Clock was moved to two minutes to midnight — the closest it has ever been, matching the acute sense of crisis of 1953. The primary explanation for the heightened threat alert was disturbing developments in the nuclear realm. Continue reading »
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RAMESH THAKUR and MICHAEL KIRBY. The 2018 decision merits a rich tribute for its transformative constitutionalism (The Hindu 30.12.2018)
Trapped in a frozen political process amidst heightened public passions, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was out of sync with contemporary values on gender orientation. It is the courts that have been used as the key to unlock social progress. In a historic judgment, in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018), the Continue reading »