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…)
Richard Cullen
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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…)
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The great reversal: Britain and China
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He recently spoke about his important new book, “The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400 Year Contest for Power” (Yale University Press, 2024) with Richard Cullen. A fundamental reality, which this stimulating book stresses, is how significant British interaction with China pre-dates the British takeover of Hong Kong Island, in 1842, by around 250 years. The British colonisation of Hong Kong was an important turning-point during the 400-year contest captured in the title – but not more than that. (more…)
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AUKUS submarine deal will damage Australia’s interests
The now-notorious AUKUS agreement was secretly conceived between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States prior to being publicly announced in September 2021 by the Morrison government in Canberra. It was aimed at eventually allowing Australia to acquire at least eight nuclear-powered submarines at an exceptionally high, initial estimated cost of up to A$368 billion ($249.1 billion), with the joint assistance of the US and the UK. (more…)
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What China could teach America
Some years ago, the internationally respected, American academic, Professor Joseph Weiler, argued that there are three types of governance legitimacy: process or input (democratic) legitimacy, performance or output legitimacy, and vision legitimacy. Now a prominent Harvard academic has employed a related analytical framework to compare the contemporary operational performance of the US and China, especially with respect to foreign policy. (more…)
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America’s anti-China psyop programs a 24/7 menace to the Philippines
Major Western news outlets are currently reporting how the Pentagon ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign in order to undermine China’s life-saving COVID vaccination programme in the Philippines – and beyond – from the spring of 2020 to mid-2021. (more…)
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Could the rise of China eclipse the enlightenment
According to the dominant Western narrative, the history of the entire modern world has been prodigiously shaped by Western historical turning points beginning with the Renaissance and running through the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the science-driven, first Industrial Revolution. A recent, US-published book, “China’s Age of Abundance: Origins Ascendence and Aftermath” by Professor Wang Feng, from the University of California, argues that the Rise of China needs to be added to this revered Western turning-point list. (more…)
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Israel’s Gaza hallucination
One reason Israel is constantly criticised, even from within its obedient posse of Global West backers, is that it has failed to articulate what it has planned for the “day after” the completion of its Gaza-cleansing, genocide project. The respected historian, Adam Tooze, recently revealed that future planning for “Gaza 2035” has, however, been a focus of intense, surreal Israeli attention. (more…)
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Washington’s hope: will rabid penguins eat the BRI?
China keeps building infrastructure in other countries that is needed by those other countries. Surely this is sinister. But all is not lost. As Joe Biden wonders if cannibals may have eaten his uncle Ambrose during World War II, Washington discovers remarkable new instruments in its geopolitical tool kit. (more…)
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The New York Times explains how gangsters now govern Israel
The rather timid headline for a recent aggressive story in the New York Times (NYT) introduced a detailed investigation by that newspaper of how the governance of Israel has been captured by brutalised backers of apartheid. (more…)
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War is Peace
“War is Peace” was an anchoring concept within the astonishing dystopia portrayed in George Orwell’s “1984”. This extraordinary, ground-breaking novel was a warning to the world, which drew on Orwell’s deep understanding of Stalin’s USSR. But even Orwell, in 1984, did not conceive of a Nobel Peace Prize recommendation pivoting on active preparations for a new war. For that instructive breakthrough, we are, in 2024, in debt to America. (more…)
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Washington’s new man in Manila eases the burden on Canberra
In an essay entitled “Australia’s Choice” published in Australian Foreign Affairs in 2022, the leading Singaporean commentator on international relations, Kishore Mahbubani, highlighted how Australia needed to choose whether to be “a bridge between East and West in the Asian Century – or the tip of a spear projecting Western power into Asia” It transpires that certain events may have eased this pressure to choose. (more…)
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China: Beyond socialism and capitalism – LSE Economist Keyu Jin explains the Middle Kingdom
The Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis in the US recently hosted the leading economist, Professor Keyu Jin, from the London School of Economics, where she spoke insightfully on where China has come from – and why – and where it is headed – and why. (more…)
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America bombs while China builds
It is sometimes said that America bombs while China builds. What’s the evidence, and where are the statistics? (more…)
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Shielding the dollar by bashing China
Ian Bremner argues convincingly that the American Dollar remains embedded as the global reserve currency since: “you can’t replace something with nothing”. Nevertheless, intensifying US misuse and abuse of the dollar’s standing has expanded the worldwide search for one or more “alternative somethings”. Now an intriguing argument has been advanced that a central reason Western scolding of China remains so incessant is to help protect the vulnerable dollar. (more…)
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Morally damaged America still wagging its righteous finger
Very recently, the leading British daily, The Guardian, ran remarkably informing side-by-side stories covering official United States perspectives on the Gaza genocide. (more…)
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Geopolitical grand larceny and its risks
One of the Ten Commandments says, with awkward bluntness: Thou Shalt Not Steal. Predictably, some are inclined to read certain qualifications in to this prohibition. As it happens, this sort of adaptive-thinking underpins arguments made in a recent article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy. (more…)
