April 3, 2025

The West and inconvenient memory: The destruction of history

“Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past and historians are the people who produce it.” – Eric Hobsbawm

December 23, 2024

Netanyahu's assault on the UN

Beyond the appalling consequences of the Gaza war Netanyahu’s full scale attack on the credibility and legitimacy of the UN and its institutions is in danger of inflicting lasting damage by instilling a Western moral exceptionalism.

March 29, 2024

Everything Chinese is a national security threat to the United States

After the battles over 5G, social media and advanced microchips, Chinese electric cars are the new front line of US economic warfare.

February 21, 2024

Julian Assange and the ugly reality of war crimes

Free Palestine. Free Assange. Free the world.

November 4, 2023

Why is it so difficult to speak of peace?

War always brings problems. Even the so-called victors experience these. The world is made poorer in that the next war seems to be much closer and easier to wage. True peace on the other hand, brings only benefits.

February 3, 2023

The global climate change suicide pact

There was a time when leaders fell on their sword when they were defeated in battle or lost their core beliefs, nowadays most do not even resign their privileged positions to resist the existential danger posed to advanced life, including human civilisation. It is long past time to declare a global climate and nuclear emergency.

January 26, 2025

Dualism? Or unequivocal condemnation of evil?

Wars, like that being waged currently by the Zionist terrorist government of Netanyahu are the destructive and mindless outworking of dualism; about winners and losers.

March 18, 2023

It's good to be mean to war propagandists

Sydney Morning Herald editor Bevan Shields has published an article titled “We are not above criticism but these attacks go too far” tearfully rending his garments over criticisms his paper’s three-part war-with-China propaganda series “Red Alert” has received from former Prime Minister Paul Keating and from ABC’s Media Watch.

March 12, 2023

Postwar Ukraine will pose the hardest problems

Hopefully, behind the scenes, policymakers are well into postwar preparations for Ukraine. The conduct of the fighting naturally absorbs most attention in a war, but conflicts come to an end one way or another and often thats when the hard issues emerge. Another Afghanistan or Iraq debacle must be avoided.

March 22, 2021

Pope Francis apologises for war against Iraq, but will Australia?

During his recent visit to Iraq, Pope Francis revived hopes for deep reconciliation and renewed collaboration among the ancient religious traditions of that land, but he came as a penitent and apologised for the invasion of Iraq and the resulting despoliation over 18 years. Australia was one of the few countries to join the USA and Britain in the illegal invasion. When will Australia apologise for this criminal folly? Has no one been held to account?

January 17, 2025

Thoughts on the ceasefire deal

Israel and Hamas have reportedly agreed to a ceasefire and hostage deal, which is scheduled to take effect January 19. The deal as written is apparently virtually identical to the one Hamas agreed to last May, which Netanyahu then sabotaged with the complicity of the Biden administration.

November 29, 2024

China speaks for conscience of the world at UN over horror in Gaza

Disgraceful veto of draft ceasefire resolution by US coincides with arrest warrants by International Criminal Court for Israeli pair on war crimes.

March 4, 2024

Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The extradition of Julian Assange

As we await the UK High Court decision on Julian Assanges extradition to the US, the implications of Assanges persecution and the repercussions for human rights, journalism, peace and justice will be explored at the conference Night Falls in the Evening Lands: the Assange epic, which will be held in Melbourne on March 9.

December 29, 2023

The first and largest terrorist state

Terrorism takes different shapes and forms, and it is important always to be perceptive.

October 23, 2023

Israel will never be safe until Palestine is free

No attempt to explain, rationalise, find some counter-equivalence for, nor any attempt to see matters through the eyes and the experiences of the murderers rather than the immediate victims can justify or forgive the barbaric massacre of Israeli children, women and men by Hamas warriors after they broke out of Gaza. It does not forgive collective punishment, or the counter-massacre of Palestinians it inspired either. But one of the starting-off points for dealing with the latest upsurge of irrational violence must be the sheer enormity of what was done to southern Israelis.

March 14, 2023

Existential threat? Its China that faces the prospect of annihilation

Members of a key US House committee wanted anti-Beijing antagonism and that was what they got together with the spectre of armed conflict.

December 21, 2021

Minister, it's a minefield: is Dutton playing chicken in the Taiwan Strait?

Part 2: Perhaps Australia is acting to a script agreed in Washington seeking to increase Chinas uncertainty about how the US will respond.

February 3, 2025

Will Taiwan spark World War III?

Mao Zedong once said: “A single spark can start a prairie fire!”

January 31, 2025

Gaza’s unbreakable resistance: A historical perspective on the war and its aftermath

The problem with political analysis is that it often lacks historical perspective and is mostly limited to recent events.

January 6, 2025

US helps Syria’s ruling al-Qaeda offshoot while punishing its people

The US ignores its own terrorist designation of Syria’s ruling Al Qaeda veterans, all while maintaining sanctions that devastate ordinary civilians.

December 18, 2024

Uyghur separatists claimed to be key player in Assad's fall

Wait, aren’t these the very same Uyghur separatists that the US State Department said they had “no credible evidence” existed, and that Mike Pompeo decided to remove from the US’s list of terrorist organisations in 2020?

January 30, 2024

Percy Allan: Australias prosperity relies on Chinas economic success, not its failure

If China were planning to attack US territory or takeover its neighbours like imperial Japan or Nazi Germany it would be firing up its citizens for war. Instead, its focus is on securing its existing borders, not expanding them.

January 14, 2024

Ukraine and Palestine: A double threat to US hegemony

The outcome of US-led conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia will have a profound impact on the developing world order. Washington has already lost the former, and its major adversaries are vested in making sure it loses the latter too.

January 6, 2024

We need to shift from 'Indo-Pacific' back to 'Asia-Pacific'

The difference between “Asia-Pacific” and “Indo-Pacific” is not just geographical. These are entirely different notions with entirely different economic and geopolitical implications.

December 11, 2023

Israeli/US war crimes in Gaza are orders of magnitude worse than those of Russia in Ukraine

The Biden administration has spent most of its diplomatic energy since the February 24, 2022, [on the] Russian invasion of Ukraine marshalling the world to punish the Russian Federation, to boycott its petroleum and gas, to seize assets even of private citizens in Europe and North America, and to make Russia a pariah. Russia certainly violated the UN Charter in attacking Ukraine and formally occupying part of that country, and it has extensively violated International Humanitarian Law with its indiscriminate bombings and drone attacks.

March 13, 2023

An Iran-Saudi peace deal made in China

Whilst it is certain there may be some people in the world who do not want to see a peaceful Middle East, there are many millions more, especially those who live in the region who do.

January 28, 2023

Freeing Assange?

On New Years Day 2023, John Lyons, the Global Affairs Editor of the ABC, made the extraordinary prediction that within the next two months Julian Assange would be released.

December 28, 2022

Best of 2022: Russia-Ukraine: For humanitys sake, turn down the heat

Its time we recognise the carnage of this war in Ukraine, and turn to dialogue with Russia.

December 15, 2022

11,000 children killed or maimed in Yemen: UN report

“Ultimately,” said the UNICEF chief, “only a sustained peace will allow families to rebuild their shattered lives and begin to plan for the future.”

March 25, 2024

Have we passed Peak China?

Saul Eslake, the renowned and independent economist, has updated his China chart pack which was last prepared in January 2023. The chart pack gives a birds eye view of the economic challenges China needs to address. By using the term Peak China, he does not mean that China will collapse, but that its future economic growth will be much slower than in the past.

February 5, 2024

Assanges very life at stake

Julian Assange will soon find out whether he will be granted a final appeal in the UK in his fight against extradition to the US. He may soon be on a plane to the US where he will face the full wrath of US vengeance and cruelty. The all-rights-reserved-to-revoke assurances provided by the US fail to mitigate a new risk factor in Assanges health, as the charade of the Rule of Law his own government has genuflected to throughout, nears its conclusion.

December 7, 2023

China, US offer different approaches to achieving lasting peace in Middle East

In the aftermath of the Suez Crisis of 1956, the United States replaced Britain and France as the sole hegemon in the Middle East. The Middle East has never achieved lasting peace under US hegemony; and years of war and devastation have plunged many Middle Eastern countries into great economic difficulties.

February 9, 2023

Amnesty International's submission to UN committee highlights Xinjiang

Amnesty International just made a submission to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and some of it surprised me.

October 19, 2024

America selects green reverse gear

America was once a marketplace leader in so many areas. Now the US faces a range of pivotal global markets focused on a greener future, dominated by China, that are developing rapidly without it.

March 26, 2024

'Everyone in the world needs to see this': footage shows IDF drone killing Gazans

“There is no way they could have been considered combatants,” said one writer and analyst. “This is unreal.”

December 23, 2023

Julian Assange: The state of play at the end of 2023

All sides of Australian politics have sustained pressure on the United States to drop the charges against Julian Assange. While the Cheng Lei experience might provide an instructive lesson on how to negotiate with what is a political charge, this may have to wait until after the 2024 election.

December 17, 2022

An African view on Ukraine

As Africans, we don’t want the war in Ukraine to continue. Russia has legitimate security concerns. But instead of addressing them, the opposite has happened. NATO has been expanding its lines, NATO has been trying to consolidate its positions in Eastern Europe, up to the Russian border. What did you expect Russia to do, sit idle and watch? Would the USA or Europe accept that situation? Who in the world would accept that to happen? Writes Dr. Fred M’Membe, president of the Socialist Party of Zambia.

March 4, 2025

Alex Carey: a century of business taking the risk out of democracy

Jeff Bezos recently announced that the Washington Post would henceforth dedicate its op/ed pages to “free markets and personal liberties”. His Whole Foods business also asked the National Labor Relations Board to “set aside the results of a union election” that endorsed collective bargaining. The Australian social psychologist Alex Carey explained these interrelated events in the 1970s and 80s. We owe a debt to former Tasmanian Speaker Andrew Lohrey for making Carey’s explanation available after his premature death.

January 28, 2025

1st call between Marco Rubio and Wang Yi

Neither State Department nor MOFA is gonna like this piece.

January 20, 2025

Can Trump trump China (or vice versa)?

Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other country has the capacity to resist his predictable antagonism with the same degree of strength and tenacity, and none arouses more hostility and outrage among MAGA Republicans. In short, China is guaranteed to put President Trump in a difficult bind the second time around: he can either choose to cut deals with Beijing and risk being branded an appeaser by the China hawks in his party, or he can punish and further encircle Beijing, risking a potentially violent clash and possibly even nuclear escalation. How he chooses to resolve this quandary will surely prove the most important foreign test of his second term in office.

January 6, 2025

“Nothing like before” — China is out-competing the West on EVs

The West is accusing China of “overcapacity” to blame it for its own industrial demise.

October 10, 2024

China unveiled: how moving East shattered my Western illusions

Moving to China has opened my eyes in a way I never expected. The stories I grew up hearing, the ones I accepted without much thought, started to unravel. One of the toughest things I’ve had to face is realising that the West, where I’ve spent most of my life, might not always be the “good guys” I thought they were. This was a hard pill to swallow.

October 6, 2024

New China has much to celebrate on its 75th birthday

The People’s Republic of China has much to be proud of on its 75th birthday. Within a relatively short span of 75 years, China has made stunning progress in multiple areas of human development, and its achievement deserves to be globally recognised.

February 26, 2024

Curing Australias dependent personality disorder

I arrived in Australia with my family at the time when Malcolm Fraser was the Prime Minister of Australia. He was preceded by Gough Whitlam and succeeded by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. They were all intellectual, individualistic and humane leaders. I had never felt more secure and proud to be Australian.

January 17, 2024

Judging genocide

Australias reluctance from afar to recognise Israels genocide in Gaza is being challenged by the genocide case against Israel in the World Court.

December 1, 2023

Syria is not our enemy: why are we at war?

On 21 August 2013 there was an alleged sarin gas attack in Syria, in which hundreds of people, including scores of children, were killed. This is what led the US and its allies to threaten military strikes against Syria.

March 17, 2023

Beating Keating and losing

But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying centre of the world.

February 19, 2023

Troubled US could learn from its differences with China, rather than simply challenge them

Difference is intrinsically good, a vital force behind creativity and innovation, and an essential ingredient for international competition. It becomes a negative force only when people or governments try to impose those differences on others, and this is not something China has done.

February 7, 2023

More evidence that the West sabotaged peace In Ukraine

Days after the war in Ukraine began it was reported by The New York Times that “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia.” In a recent interview, Bennett made some very interesting comments about what happened during those negotiations in the early days of the war.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal