Defence and Security
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WALTER HAMILTON. Stand off in the East China Sea
About eighteen months ago, while talking with a policy analyst at Japan’s Defense Ministry in Tokyo, I asked how the confrontation with China over the disputed Senkaku (or Daioyu) Islands in the East China Sea was affecting morale in the Self-Defense Forces. ‘I recently visited Sasebo,’ he replied, referring to the southern base of Continue reading »
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RICHARD BUTLER. Nuclear disarmament – Australia’s Profound and Cynical Failure.
In 1995 Prime Minister Keating established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. He did this because he was appalled at the intensity of the, mainly US/USSR, nuclear arms race. He wanted to find a safe way in which nuclear weapons could be eliminated, to which international agreement might be given. The Continue reading »
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ANDREW MACK. ‘National security’ and the Ausgrid bid
On 19th August Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison confirmed his earlier decision to block the NSW government’s planned lease of 50.4 per cent of the New South Wales Ausgrid electricity distribution network to two Chinese companies: the Chinese government-owned State Grid Corporation of China and Hong Kong listed Cheung Kong International (CKI). Morrison based his Continue reading »
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RICHARD BROINOWSKI. The Battle of Long Tan turns Fifty
Some excitement was generated in the Australian press around 15 August when it was reported that the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan would be commemorated by Australians at the site of the battle at a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy Province. So it was – by a small and subdued Continue reading »
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DAVID STEPHENS. How we commemorate our wars in other people’s countries.
‘We need to talk about how we commemorate our wars in other people’s countries – and our own’, Honest History, 18 August 2016 “How would we feel if 1,000 Japanese turned up in Darwin wanting to celebrate the bombing of 1942.” Apart from the Frontier Wars against Indigenous Australians, all of Australia’s wars, from New Zealand in Continue reading »
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BRIAN TOOHEY. The quality of intelligence advice.
A former top US intelligence official David Gompert has issued a sober warning to those who want to lock Australia into any future war with China. Speaking on Monday, Gompert said a war between the US and China could be so ruinous for both countries and the world that it might seem unthinkable, yet Continue reading »
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CAVAN HOGUE. Handing over our Defence to a foreign country.
The Government has refused to allow a Chinese firm to invest in electricity because it is seen as a threat to our security but it has no difficulty in handing over our defence to a foreign country. Australian defence forces are so integrated with the US that it is hard to see how we can Continue reading »
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RICHARD BROINOWSKI. Merchants of Death – the Weapons Trade
According to Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in The Untold History of the United States (2012), North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye persuaded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1934 to investigate the enormous profits made by American weapons makers during the Great War. Amplifying public indignation, Fortune magazine ran an article in March of Continue reading »
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SPENCER ZIFCAK. Counter-terrorism and human rights.
I am presently in Paris. Along with many other countries, France faces a terrorism threat. France is grappling with the problem of how democracies can best handle threats of terrorism. In light of that I am reposting an earlier article from the Policy Series, by Spencer Zifcak, on human rights and combatting terrorism. John Menadue Continue reading »
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WALTER HAMILTON. Japan’s Diminishing Returns.
Japan, in my nearly forty years of observing and reporting on that country, has never been so delicately and dangerously poised. Australians, who have long relied on it as an economic powerhouse and ‘common interest’ partner, need to be paying close attention. Continue reading »
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JON STANFORD and JOHN MENADUE. The submarine confusion continues. Is the way being prepared for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines?
REPOST In an interesting development relating to Australia’s new submarine acquisition, Peter Jennings, Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has written a piece in The Australian (7 June 2016) that is clearly at odds with the Institute’s previous public stance. Jennings says that while conventional power for Australia’s submarines has previously been Continue reading »
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The South China Sea, China, Philippines, Australia and the US.
I was surprised the Opposition did not differentiate itself from the Australian Coalition Government’s strong support for the US and the Philippine position on the South China Sea issue. It can be argued that it was misleading to state in public that the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) judgment in favour of the Philippines was Continue reading »
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. What Chilcot doesn’t say.
Comprehensive though the Chilcot report is, and 12 volumes long, its promised revelations about how Britain went to war in Iraq and the lessons to be learnt are incomplete. What’s missing is particularly important for Australia, which has yet to hold such an inquiry, and where public pressure for one is mounting. Continue reading »
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ANN TULLOH. Terrorism in France and a sense of hopelessness by many young people.
I was brought up on the ABC news coming from the sitting room loud enough to cover the house as Dad got himself going every morning. This was in the 50s and any terrible overseas news was so far away that I didn’t feel concerned. (I much preferred a programme around 8am when songs were Continue reading »
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GREG WOOD. “Only a fool…” Australia, Iraq, and other such wars.
The Chilcot report in the UK has renewed calls for an examination of Australia’s intelligence system in the lead up to the Iraq war. Far less subject to scrutiny, but arguably more important still than the accuracy of the intelligence, was the nature of the advice provided to the Howard government by policy departments Continue reading »
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MICHAEL WESLEY. The dangerous politics of national security. (Repost from Policy Series)
In January 2013, as she launched her government’s National Security Strategy, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard proclaimed that Australia’s decade of terrorism was over. Her argument was that al Qaeda had failed to regenerate after being degraded in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and that there were other more conventional security issues, such Continue reading »
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The American alliance and Vice President Biden’s recent visit
Vice President Biden’s speech at the Paddington Town Hall on 20 July was by invitation only. I had met Vice President Biden three years ago in Washington when I was on the Board of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. He was friendly and somewhat more impressive than I had expected and certainly had very competent staff around him. Continue reading »
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STEPHEN FITZGERALD. Security in the region. (Repost from Policy Series)
Paul Keating and Gareth Evans used to claim, with justification, that by the mid-1990s Australia had become ‘the odd man in’ in Asia. This was in significant part because of the headway they’d made in Southeast Asia, with ASEAN countries, in gaining acceptance of Australia as ‘one of them’. This was no slogan. Behind it Continue reading »
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JOHN McCARTHY. Foreign Policy. Australia, the United States and Asia. (Repost from Policy Series)
In a conversation in October last year with two British foreign correspondents and a former Japanese Prime Ministerial foreign policy adviser, the subject turned to the United States. All three interlocutors argued that in recent years Australia had superseded both Japan and the United Kingdom as the United States’ closest ally. This view should not Continue reading »
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JOHN TULLOH. Shrugging off the effects of the Iraq invasion.
‘His decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president’. Professor Jean Edward Smith, eminent US presidential biographer, on George W. Bush. The other day the Sydney Morning Herald had a cartoon showing John Howard in a military uniform and holding a pop gun. Behind him Continue reading »
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ALLAN PATIENCE. Why the debates about Islam have gone off the rails
One of the persistent conceits of modern history has been the growing conviction that rational scientific enquiry will completely remove religious thinking from human consciousness for all time. Positivist fundamentalists like Stephen Hawking or so-called “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have triumphantly echoed the Nietzschean declaration “God is dead” without understanding Continue reading »
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TONY KEVIN. South China Sea dispute: a furious China challenges the high priests of international law
One privilege of being retired that one can watch ABC News24 daytime television while others are hard at work. On Wednesday 13 July around midday, I was treated to a dramatic spectacle: a Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister in an hour-long international media conference in Beijing fiercely denouncing, as a ‘scrap of waste-paper fit only Continue reading »
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CAVAN HOGUE. Australian Foreign Policy. (Repost from Policy Series)
Summary. Australian Foreign Policy is dominated by fear, defence issues, the American Alliance and the search for votes in marginal electorates. We talk about the importance of Asia but instinctively cleave to Europe and North America who are said to share our values but don’t always do so. We need to look beyond the next Continue reading »
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RICHARD BUTLER. Foreign Policy. An Independent Australian Foreign Policy (Repost from Policy Series)
Summary: For fifty years, since Australia entered the war in Vietnam in 1965, Australian foreign policy has been made increasingly subservient to a specific concept of Australia’s relationship with the United States. That concept, first enunciated by Prime Minister Menzies in 1955, was that for its survival, Australia needed ”a great and powerful friend”. All Continue reading »
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STUART HARRIS. What Australia’s foreign policy should look like. (Repost from Policy Series)
The focus in Australia’s foreign policy has shifted back and forth between the global and the regional, and between multilateralism and bilateralism in economic and political relationships, due only in part to party political differences. While some policies, such as immigration, refugees and to a degree defence, are widely debated in Australia, many are Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. It is becoming much easier to go to war.
In a post on 18 July 2016 I drew attention to the inter-twining of the Australian and US Defence and Intelligence establishments.The problem however goes much deeper than the current ‘dangerous alliance’ between Australia and the US. As Henry Reynolds has pointed out, we continually go off to fight wars in foreign lands in service Continue reading »
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In the service of empires from Fromelles to the present day.
See link below to article by Paul Daley in the Guardian ‘Australians didn’t sacrifice themselves at Fromelles, the British sacrificed them’. John Menadue. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2016/jul/19/australians-didnt-sacrifice-themselves-at-fromelles-the-british-sacrificed-them?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+AUS+v1+-+AUS+morning+mail+callout&utm_term=182252&subid=18184347&CMP=ema_632 Continue reading »
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PHILOMENA MURRAY. Nice attack brings a difficult question into sharp focus: why France?
If you live in France, you enjoy Bastille Day. There is a buzz in the air as you celebrate a day off in the middle of summer with your family and friends. You go to the fireworks. It is good to be in France and to remember the founding principles of the state – liberty, Continue reading »
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RICHARD BUTLER. Interesting Times
The so-called Chinese Curse: “ May you live in interesting times”, is apparently not of Chinese origin, but certainly apocryphal and wonderfully ironic. I think it is hard to recall more “interesting times” than those in which the world finds itself today, nor a time fraught with more danger, since the sleepwalking towards World Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Unnecessary wars in service of other people’s empires.
Australia is engaged in a long cavalcade of military commemoration. It has been advancing since the 1990’s. Government largesse has speeded it on its way. War is now widely seen as the defining collective experience. The national spirit, the argument runs, emerged in battle far from our shores. A generation of school children have been Continue reading »
