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.
Michael's recent articles
10 April 2025
To Australia’s 'realists': Gnothi seauton (Know yourself)
In international relations, realism is a theory that views world politics as a competition among self-interested states vying for power and security within an anarchic global system, emphasising national interests and the potential for conflict.
9 March 2025
We can see clearly now: We’re closely allied to a fascist regime and so must realign
Donald Trump’s election to the presidency is a Gift. Notwithstanding that it, and his subsequent behaviour, has induced involuntary bowel movements and Acute Disorientation Syndrome throughout the policy-making establishments of the Western alliance, his advent is not, therefore, without its merits if we are the richer for it.
9 January 2025
The Varghese review of funding for strategic policy work: the triumph of the poverty of imagination
The Independent Review of Commonwealth funding for strategic policy work, conducted and authored by Peter Varghese is now published. It almost sparkles in places, but overall, it disappoints. Sadly, it delivers what was minimally anticipated.
4 November 2024
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.
12 September 2024
Australia’s colonised universities: in partibus infidelium*
Among a group of corporations which also includes Boeing and BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin is a particular target for this action. Though principled and consistent, it has proved to be a futile exercise in protest; worse, it is likely to remain so.
21 August 2024
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 a national security strongroom to which only they have the keys.
14 July 2024
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, nor are we like them. The appearances are an illusion. Worse, assuming the identity of the ally is an appropriation unworthy of a sovereign, ethical people; indeed, it is an indictment.
23 May 2024
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.
10 May 2024
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.
30 April 2024
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 abdication included the the need to be always self-critical and self-conscious. Finally, imagine that it was transactional: that, by their own disclosures the abdication was in exchange for becoming, explicitly and without shame, industrial brothel-keepers to the nations fevered national security imaginary. This is the...
17 March 2024
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.
1 February 2024
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 is to contemplate consequences too terrifying to contemplate.
19 December 2023
Hope betrayed, arrays herself in bombs
While the speechless unite, in a silent accord. Australias Geopolitical Present and Future: Bethlehem through Poetry and Literature.
23 November 2023
War with China: Babbling incoherence and missing evidence
With the expansion of all services of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) no matter that it is consistent with a defensive posture Chinas 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 is the product. Whatever China does, regardless of its context, is automatically rendered an indication of a currently hostile mindset and, quite likely, future aggression.
29 October 2023
Mimetic engulfment: The US has captured the Australian strategic mind
It is now the case that Australias 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 act not only in parallel, but simultaneously, systematically and congruently so that a single, seamless narrative emanates.
7 September 2023
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 are above and beyond the almost normalized disfigurements within the conversations on national security which already existed.
26 June 2023
The future of Australias 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 society.
17 May 2023
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 principal author of the DSR, is the current leading example.
17 April 2023
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 practice.
6 April 2023
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.
8 March 2023
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.
23 February 2023
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.
2 February 2023
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.
13 December 2022
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.
16 November 2022
AUKUS and the corruption of Australias Universities
Our universities have become the industrial brothel-keepers to the nation's fevered national security imaginary.
11 October 2022
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 Australias 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 and should, therefore, be authoritative, coherent, and unambiguous, but they arent. Indeed, what is to hand is an unedifying spectacle of the pursuit of something unfeasible and internally contradicted which defies reconciliation.
18 September 2022
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 then what will be on offer is a document infused with revelations which the common citizenry are excluded from knowing their provenance even though it is their security which is being determined by it.
9 July 2022
The tragedy and self-harm of celebrity appointments in the universities
The appointment of Chancellors, celebrity professors and even high-level management in Australias 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.
28 June 2022
Understanding the Australia-NATO chats in Madrid
Less than three years ago President Macron said NATO was afflicted with 'brain death'.
13 June 2022
The AUKUS minefield laid by the Coalition
The previous governments 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 Australias peace and security.
12 May 2022
The track record of Peter Duttons incompetence
Failing up is a common phenomenon in many organisations - not least those concerned with national defence and security.
28 April 2022
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.
19 March 2022
Russia, Ukraine, familiar refrains and reflexes
It is no exaggeration to echo Tom Paine: these are the times that try mens 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.
14 March 2022
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 Carters 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.
19 January 2022
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.
4 December 2021
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.
26 November 2021
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.
21 November 2021
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.
17 October 2021
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.
3 October 2021
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.
15 September 2021
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?
12 September 2021
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).
24 August 2021
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 reports detailing the dimensions of already existing and future failure - underscored not only the inevitability of the eventual debacle, but also the probability that it will extend for some time to come.
23 August 2021
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 Talibans victory as insurgency or counter-counter-insurgency, it is a development that will not disclose its full consequences for some time.
12 August 2021
ASPI's proposal to further militarise and securitise the University. Part 2
The Australian Strategic Policy Institutes 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.
11 August 2021
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.
9 May 2021
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.
19 April 2021
Anti-China threat porn: Antiquitys 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.
7 March 2021
ASPI, sycophancy and the deepening corruption of Australias 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 Chinese Communist Party and the domestic turmoil in the US resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.