John Menadue recently argued convincingly that the “AUKUS chickens were coming home to roost already”. Shortly thereafter, the Guardian helpfully reported that a “Trump pick for the Pentagon says selling submarines to Australia would be ‘crazy’ if Taiwan tensions flare”. (more…)
Richard Cullen
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Jerry Cohen: An inspiring scholar
The leading US journal Foreign Policy has just published an extended profile, written by Jonathan Landreth, of Professor Jerome A. Cohen, entitled: “The Last China Hand. Jerry Cohen will be 95 in July this year. The article lucidly explains how he “has spent a lifetime trying to understand the People’s Republic of China”. (more…)
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Can Europe dare to do the smart thing and partner with China in Africa?
Europe’s relationship with Africa encompasses significant grim history. Yet the continent is more central to how Europe’s future will look than ever. Meanwhile, China’s remarkably constructive relationship with Africa today presents a potential primary mode for substantially enhancing Africa’s prospects. This geopolitical fact also represents a crucial opportunity for Europe to partner with China and confidently shape its own future. Provided, that is, Europe hasn’t, influenced by the US, crushed its capacity to act in its own best interests. (more…)
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US’ ‘China Initiative’ would be counterproductive
The “China Initiative” was the name of a controversial program run by the US Department of Justice, which was introduced in late 2018 during the first Trump administration. (more…)
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The lawless West
The low regard in which the Global West is held is intensifying. The second Trump administration is not the cause of this. It is simply accelerating this ominous process by openly embracing a lawless, imperial contempt for primary international and metropolitan governance rules, norms and conventions in response to the persistent retreat of American global dominance. Meanwhile, the Global South clearly observes how America’s traditional allies remain overwhelmingly loyal — or silent — as the US persists in asserting its role as their exceptionally unworthy leader. (more…)
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Is America marching in the final footsteps of the British empire?
Yu-Book Lim used to head a Singapore think tank and was Executive Chairman of IMC Plantations before that. He has just published an extended, thought-provoking essay: “Xi Jinping’s “Once-in-a-Century Upheaval” Prophecy. (more…)
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How Europe is degrading Europe
The European Idea is anchored by the desire to banish war from the continent forever and foster collective development by creating a quasi-federated Europe. This idea is embodied in the step-by-step creation of the European Union (EU). That idea today looks exceptionally compromised, not least due to growing European divergence about how the EU’s best interests can be secured. Moreover, despite its fundamentally destabilising impact, American power ruthlessly shaping this outcome is compliantly welcomed by European elites. Any “Euro-tiger” image once projected by the EU in its prime has now vanished. (more…)
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Why Ukraine is losing ground
An instructive new article entitled, “Why is Ukraine losing ground? Mobilisation crisis and command failures exposed,” has recently been published online by Euromaidan Press. Its cogency is amplified by the fact that it is, fundamentally, a pro-Ukraine essay. (more…)
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China and America in 2050
In early December, 2024, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) hosted a lucid dialogue entitled: “China in 2050 – Two Perspectives”. The presenters were recognised China scholars, Professor Rana Mitter of Harvard University and Professor Daniel Bell from HKU. “What might be a realistic and desirable future for China” was a primary question addressed. Although the focus was fundamentally on China, the discussion implicitly raised the question of where the US may find itself in 2050.
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Western tourists rediscover Chinese mainland, HK
Fifty years ago, I enjoyed an overnight stay in Hong Kong while on my way from Melbourne to visit the United Kingdom for the first time. Hong Kong was already established as a “tourist and shopping paradise” by then. I remember being somewhat bewildered by the crowds of people everywhere I went. But it was still a marvellous experience, and I came away with an excellent new Japanese camera and portable cassette recorder, which cost half what they did in Australia. (more…)
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Will America ever curb its love of warfare?
After meeting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris recently, US president-elect Donald Trump called for an immediate ceasefire in the Ukraine war, according to a report in The Guardian, adding that, “Ukraine would like to make a deal” to end its war with Russia. Newsmax reported that at about the same time, Trump wished to end “the madness” in Ukraine through negotiation. (more…)
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Manufacturing consent with a pivotal signifier
Most of the world believes, today, that the Western use of the term, terrorism, is wilfully warped to advance a destructive political agenda. This same manipulative usage remains indispensably effective in the West, however. It fundamentally underpins, for example, the monstrous process lately identified by Stuart Rees as the “normalisation of atrocity.” (more…)
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Chomsky is right says Professor Walt
The wide-ranging political views of the exceptional, international public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, have recently been searchingly assessed in the journal, Foreign Policy, by Professor Stephen M Walt, in an article entitled, “Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right”. (more…)
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Western democracy now finds itself in a parlous state
In 1947, former British prime minister Winston Churchill famously observed that: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” (more…)
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Foolish anxiety in the global west
Around 18 months ago, The Economist applied uncommon energy to advance the narrative that the US economy was in outstandingly good shape. Very recently, we have been instructed by the same influential British weekly that, “America’s economy is bigger and better than ever” [paywall]: Which makes one wonder, what primary anxieties are prompting these distinctive, recurrent expressions of avid admiration? (more…)
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“An integral part of China”: America, Taiwan and Elon Musk
The outcome in the recent US presidential election may yet push Taiwan in directions at variance with those advocated in a new article published in the America journal Foreign Affairs, which argues that: “China’s Gray-Zone Offensive Against Taiwan is Backfiring”. (more…)
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Remarkable Australian comparative analysis supports BDS
A very long line has been drawn between two dots: Israel and China, across what looks like a credibility chasm, by the vocal Australian Coalition MP Barnaby Joyce. But his recent interesting Israel-China comparative analysis implicitly lends robust support to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement directed against Israel, though this may not have been intended. (more…)
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Lessons for Hong Kong from Australia’s remarkable international education sector
One crucial policy initiative outlined by Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee Ka-chiu, in his latest annual Policy Address is the project to establish the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as an international tertiary education hub.
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When the White House goes to war
Michael Hirsh, a prominent columnist for Foreign Policy has just published an instructive review in that journal (partial paywall) of Bob Woodward’s forceful new book “War”. The review is entitled: “What a New Book’s Explosive Revelations Tell Us About Biden, Trump, and Putin”. Curiously, the Hirsh book review rounds out to its Biden-elevating, JFK-comparison without referring to John Mearsheimer’s directly relevant seminal article “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault”.
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Sanitising genocide
The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) has just published “The Most Moral Army”- an excoriating review of Israel’s continuous reliance on deceitful medical imagery to disinfect its horrific abuse of power in Gaza. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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From Guernica to Gaza
The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, in Spain, in 1937 “heralded a terrible new age of warfare” that, almost 90 years later, remains graphically notorious as a “wanton man-made holocaust”. Over the last twelve months, Israel has made exceptional progress towards crafting a similar enduring understanding of the hellscape it has created in Gaza. (more…)
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The extraordinary warring states history of the global West
History confirms how the present, destructive militaristic culture of the US-led Atlantic alliance stands on the shoulders of well over a thousand years of Western immersion in extraordinary levels of horrific warfare. (more…)
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The impact of China’s rising soft power
A recent article in the US journal Foreign Affairs, written by Daniel Mattingly of Yale University argues persuasively that: “China’s Soft Sell of Autocracy is Working”. (more…)
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Suppose Australia was more independent and less dumb
Look at how favourably situated Australia is in the world. As the foundations were put in place for the Asian Century, most profoundly by China, Australia was in the right place at the right time and it benefitted inordinately. Looking forward, as the rise of China continues and a range of Asian countries, including India, Indonesia and Vietnam, look set to follow suit, further marvellous opportunities beckon. And our response: Australia is now turning itself into a massively militarised American satellite state. How did we let this happen? (more…)
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Look at who is running Israel
In a recent significant article in the US journal, Foreign Policy, David E Rosenberg, the economics editor of Haaretz, clarifies how a minority of religious extremists have come to wield so much power in Israel today. It is a chilling, informative read. (more…)
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Tucker Carlson and Jeffrey Sachs confirm mainstream Western media mostly a shabby cabaret
A recent, comprehensive social-media interview has provided an acute reminder of how hard it now is to imagine certain flagship, Western current affairs programs drowning their cherished war-drums in a lead weighted bag and applying themselves to investigating pivotal geopolitical challenges with intelligent thoroughness (as Four Corners can still manage (see:Inside Iran: The proxy war on the brink of erupting | Four Corners). (more…)
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American reflections on global hegemony
Some US commentators are advocating a recalibration of America’s full-spectrum global posture, while others, including Condoleezza Rice, energetically beg to differ – naturally for the good of the world. (more…)
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Israel’s perilous decay
Stephen M Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, recently published an article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, entitled: “The Dangerous Decline in Israeli Strategy”. He argues that Israel, the US and their supporters are wedded to long-honed, conspicuously bad policies, which “is a prescription for unending trouble, if not disaster”. (more…)
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Shocking news: China is kicking more global goals
Is China mired in economic misery while bogged down by old habits- or very successfully developing its exceptional manufacturing prowess as it expands and consolidates its influence across the Global South (and well beyond)? Never mind any apparent contradiction, one leading global weekly answers yes and yes to these two questions. (more…)