As Australia backed Ukraine into a catastrophic land war with Russia, serious questions about corruption, arms diversion and governance were visible in plain sight. In part 2 of his two-part series, Michael McKinley examines what was known, what was ignored, and why it mattered. (more…)
Michael McKinley
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The Russia–Ukraine war: Australia’s unanswered questions. Part 1
As the Russia–Ukraine war enters its fifth year, hard questions are overdue. In Part 1 of a two-part series, Michael McKinley examines the strategic history behind the conflict and Australia’s uncritical alignment with a US-led approach that offered Ukraine little prospect of victory. (more…)
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Beyond the ruptured alliance: an outline for Plan B
Australia’s alliance with the United States is no longer reliable, and clinging to it now risks Australia’s interests and values. The case for a deliberate, staged Plan B begins with strategic autonomy – and an overdue reckoning with extended nuclear deterrence.
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Best of 2025 – Disengaging from the dangerous alliance
When, in the course of close — some would say politically intimate — relations between allies, the dominant partner demands that the subordinate partner betray its democratic principles as a cost of receiving favourable treatment, the time has come to terminate the relationship. Such is now the state of the Australia-US alliance. (more…)
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America’s justification for attacking Venezuela: Part 2: fact and fantasy in the drug wars
From Vietnam to Mexico and Afghanistan, the United States’ wars on drugs have deepened violence, addiction and instability. Today, that legacy is edging closer to Australia.
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America’s justification for attacking Venezuela: Part 1 – a calculated insult to us all
The United States’ escalating actions against Venezuela reveal more about imperial power, criminal methods and strategic denial than any genuine concern about drugs or rule of law. (more…)
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An immodest proposal for an ideal source of strategic policy advice
In the various debates and arguments on Australia’s defence, one thing is at least is settled: the government has agreed to continue funding national security strategic policy work undertaken by a sector composed of think-tanks and university centres that is significantly compromised. (more…)
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Disengaging from the dangerous alliance
When, in the course of close — some would say politically intimate — relations between allies, the dominant partner demands that the subordinate partner betray its democratic principles as a cost of receiving favourable treatment, the time has come to terminate the relationship. Such is now the state of the Australia-US alliance. (more…)
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Speaking terrorism Part 2: Evading reality, atrocities and self-image
When the study of history, politics, and society is policed by regimes which limit, or even discourage, freedom of speech in general and academic freedom in particular — and the current wars in the Middle East, which attract criticisms of Zionism and the policies of Israel, are a few cases in point — the preconditions for quietism and scholasticide – are established. (more…)
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Speaking terrorism Part 1: The things we forget
Recent events in Australia and elsewhere have returned the word terrorism to prominence in the discourse of political violence. (more…)
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Military operations seen through Gauguin, the Colosseum and responsibility
Public policy in general, and the military operations given the titles “Swords of Iron”, “Gideon’s Chariots” (by Israel) and “Midnight Hammer” (by the Pentagon), more specifically, need to be understood in terms that transcend the purely strategic and which can be dismissed only at the risk of condoning barbarism. (more…)
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Reflections on Ukraine’s ‘Spider Web’ and other attacks on Russia: why the euphoria?
Reports by invested parties of battlefield success in most wars — and the war between Russian and Ukraine is an exemplary case — are best read when accompanied by the aphorism of the ancient Greek tragic dramatist, Aeschylus — in war, truth is the first casualty — and then following the unfolding of Newton’s 3rd Law as applied to war reportage: every claim is met with a counter-claim until something resembling an account corresponding to observable facts emerges. This, almost without exception, reduces the original version to an ambitious fable. (more…)
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A Joycean defence of Harvard (and Australia’s universities?) from Trump’s derangement Part 2 of 2
In the context of President Donald Trump’s all-embracing appetites and hatreds, Harvard being under attack by his administration should, almost reflexively, be easy to defend. (more…)
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Trump’s attacks on Harvard: Cardinal Wolsey and the prologue to an Australian encounter? Part 1 of 2
The White House is now more accurately described as an Imperial War Room: from it, President Trump directs indiscriminate attacks on whatever is enraging him. (more…)
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The need for depressive realism and a forgotten type of truth-telling
Prolonged observation of domestic and global politics reveals a world that is continually being shaped by radical contingency and surrounded by absurdity. Other conditions can be seen, but the two just mentioned are the regnant operational conditions. (more…)
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To Australia’s ‘realists’: Gnothi seauton (Know yourself)
In international relations, realism is a theory that views world politics as a competition among self-interested states vying for power and security within an anarchic global system, emphasising national interests and the potential for conflict. (more…)
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We can see clearly now: We’re closely allied to a fascist regime and so must realign
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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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.
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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…)