A stormy year ahead for Australian foreign policy

By the end of 2019 we should be able to judge the relative success or failure of the grand plan laid out in the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper. The implementation of strategy requires skill and leadership and Federal ministers will need all three in 2019 as a volatile year lies ahead.

Assessing the Bishop era of Australian foreign policy

As time goes by, we will notice the opportunity Julie Bishop missed to make a decisive impact in charting Australia’s course during a period of historical importance.

No laughing matter: “The Death of Stalin” highlights Putin’s anxieties

Armando Ianucci’s dark comedy The Death of Stalin has caused controversy in Russia, but the official ban on the film reveals how much Vladimir Putin fears losing his iron grip on power.

All Leninist autocracies are equal, but some are more equal than others

Common threads among the Chinese, Russian, North Korean and Iranian regimes add up to a disturbing strategic challenge to Western states’ power and stability, but these states use different tactics to further their goals.

An alternative to the rules-based order?

There’s a fundamental problem in Australia’s relationship with China: China’s growth advances prosperity but menaces security. If the rules-based order construct does not suit volatile times then is there an alternative?

Australia’s global rights carry global duties

Australia has long benefited from the post-war rules-based international order. But the danger of eroding international norms demands Canberra rethinks its foreign policies rather than put this at risk.

Australia’s anti-climactic ASEAN Summit

The ASEAN Summit in Sydney offered many words but little action. If Australia wants to make Southeast Asia the ‘strategic fulcrum’ of its Indo-Pacific strategy, it needs to look well beyond ASEAN as its means.

What is Australia’s strategic plan B?

Australian strategic policy has not accounted for a failure of the post-war international order, even as the threats to it grow. Now, as elements of that order crumble, Australia has no coherent alternative to simply hoping against hope that the past will persist into the future.

Finding the right balance between China and the USA

Former Prime Minster Paul Keating argues that the much maligned Donald Trump may have found the right approach to managing relations with China.

ASEAN and Australia peer from the summit

Southeast Asia is where Australia’s geography collides with our economic and perhaps political future. Australia has always thought ASEAN a good thing – the harder question for us is what to do with it.