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. (more…)
Michael McKinley
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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 frightening reality of the Australian university sector under AUKUS. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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.” (more…)
-
Hope betrayed, arrays herself in bombs
While the speechless unite, in a silent accord. Australia’s Geopolitical Present and Future: Bethlehem through Poetry and Literature. (more…)
-
War with China: Babbling incoherence and missing evidence
With the expansion of all services of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – no matter that it is consistent with a defensive posture – China’s 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.
(more…) -
Mimetic engulfment: The US has captured the Australian strategic mind
It is now the case that Australia’s 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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
The future of Australia’s 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.” (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
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.
(more…) -
AUKUS and the corruption of Australia’s Universities
Our universities have become the industrial brothel-keepers to the nation’s fevered national security imaginary. (more…)
-
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 Australia’s 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 aren’t. Indeed, what is to hand is an unedifying spectacle of the pursuit of something unfeasible and internally contradicted which defies reconciliation. (more…)
-
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. (more…)
-
The tragedy and self-harm of celebrity appointments in the universities
The appointment of Chancellors, celebrity professors and even high-level management in Australia’s 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. (more…)
-
Understanding the Australia-NATO chats in Madrid
Less than three years ago President Macron said NATO was afflicted with ‘brain death’. (more…)
-
The AUKUS minefield laid by the Coalition
The previous government’s 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 Australia’s peace and security. (more…)
-
The track record of Peter Dutton’s incompetence
Failing up is a common phenomenon in many organisations – not least those concerned with national defence and security. (more…)