The right hand man’s right hand man

libertarian tech titan Peter Thiel helped make JD Vance. The Republican kingmaker’s influence is growing

The wrong answers to the right questions

New York Times columnist David Brooks once remarked that Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right questions—a sentiment that captures the core challenge facing US policy in East Asia.

Trump’s Pacific own goal

The second Trump administration’s gutting of key international development agencies has severely undermined its ostensible goal of combating Chinese influence in the Pacific, so what can it do to repair its regional strategy?

Enough is enough

Australia has bent over backwards to survive the Trump 2.0 whirlwind, but at some point we’ll have to stand tall.

Backsliding into tyranny

The United States is moving dangerously close to authoritarianism as the second Trump administration shows no regard for law, democratic processes or political freedoms.

A letter to America

Donald Trump’s quest to ‘make America great again’ is measured only in money and is destroying the values which made America great in the first place.

Tornado Trump

Trump seems determined to take the “Hugo Chavez” option in wrecking a national economy through ideological zeal while holding on to power through a combination of repression and targeted patronage for loyalists.

Trump the tyrant

America’s slippery slide into authoritarianism is now fully entrenched. Not content with dismantling civil liberties and political rights, electoral integrity, eroding the checks and balances of legislative governance within its borders, Donald Trump’s America has declared war on its allies.

The Voldemort effect

The international and economic calculations behind Australia’s budget were shaped in the shadow of the Voldemort-like figure in the White House.

Enough is enough?

As Donald Trump and his administration seem determined to antagonise or completely abandon their allies, middle powers like Australia will have to decide when enough is enough.

One people, one realm, one leader

In what might have been the longest presidential address to Congress in American history—an hour and forty minutes without intermission—President Donald Trump delivered a performance on Tuesday night that was simultaneously grandiose, confrontational, optimistic and revealing of the direction in which he intended to take his administration and his country.

Betrayal

Has any nation squandered its diplomatic capital, plundered its own political system, attacked its partners and supplicated itself before its far weaker enemies as rapidly and brazenly as Donald Trump’s America?