Labor’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a strange attraction to muddying the political waters in areas that are going well, such as its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Serious gains are already occurring in the efficiency of battery storage of electricity from solar, wind and pumped hydro sources. Bigger gains seem likely as breakthroughs in battery components reduce the need to rely on expensive lithium-ion for storage. (more…)
Category: Defence
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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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China dropped a flare near an Aussie copter in its EEZ. What’s wrong with that?
Patriotism, they say, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Judged that way, there seem to be a large number of scoundrels around within the Australia media and also the Canberra political elite. (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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Australia’s National Defence Strategy: Where ideology trumps strategy
The ‘National Defence Strategy’ is not a strategy. It is an ideology. An ideology that firmly ties Australia’s future to that of the United States. A horrifying thought. (more…)
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Americans don’t understand: China is not afraid of the US
China knows that, if it has to, it can stand alone and that it can defend itself. It knows, too, that most nations of the world, other than America (which is, despite itself, somewhat conflicted), want to do business with it; to connect with its growing confidence and with its strengthening brand of non-threatening, non-coercive, non-evangelistic power. Clearly, the Chinese are not afraid of the Americans. Just as clearly, the Americans don’t understand this. (more…)
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From imperial romance to practical security history
At the levels of public ritual and private observance, the ANZAC narrative is much about processing loss and assuaging grief. But let us recall here its nature as an imperial romance, and what that might mean for our place in the multi-polarity of the current world order? (more…)
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ANZAC Day 2024: Better balanced assimilation or war reports fatigue?
Perhaps it is my imagination, but in the days immediately preceding Anzac Day 2024, there seems to be less media exhortation to observance than has been usual in recent years. (more…)
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‘Impactful projection’, 1915 style: Lest we forget Anzac Cove
Anzac Day. We mark it respectfully. True respect demands that we also not forget the essential question about the first ‘Anzac Day’ – 25 April 1915. Why were Australian soldiers at Anzac Cove in the first place? (more…)
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Australia’s group think epidemic and the Adelaide AUKUS fairytale
The idea that nuclear submarines can be built in Adelaide under AUKUS has the characteristics of the “group think” that led to invasion of Iraq in 2003, and has been described by former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as a “bit of a fairytale”. “Some government in the future will make the obvious decision and not go ahead with the Adelaide build”, he said.
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Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence
What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. (more…)
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No substitute for US exceptionalism: Manifest destiny made manifest
Manifest Destiny, now more commonly called American Exceptionalism is a traditional and widespread view in the US. American views of its relationship with the world vary from isolationism to leadership, but the underlying base is always that the US is something special. While some may be more subtle than others, how many Americans could accept that the US must resign itself to a silver or even a bronze medal in the power race? (more…)
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The emerging spectre of American fragility: A reckoning
The United States, having learnt nothing from the 20th Century, is, quite characteristically, spoiling for a fight with one of the great success stories of our time, China, on the basis of nothing more than a doltishly unfounded fear of this success and an ever so faintly emerging spectre of American fragility. A fragility across not only its military and political power, but, as well, across its bellicose and tottering brand of democracy. (more…)
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“Seamless integration”: Japan to become sub-contractor for US aggression towards China
‘New era for alliance’ headlined the right wing Japan Times after the Japan-US summit talks in Washington this week between President Biden and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida.. But not everyone was so enthused. (more…)
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David McBride versus Four Corners
On Easter Saturday, a friend and I drove down to Mullumbimby to hear Afghan war crimes whistleblower David McBride speaking at the Mullumbimby RSL. The previous Monday, I had watched the Four Corners program about David McBride, called Rules of Engagement. My friend hadn’t seen it, so we listened to it on the iPhone as we drove along. There was one heavily ironic moment in Rules of Engagement when ABC journalist Dan Oates says he hates it when journalists make themselves the centre of the story. (more…)
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Imitation accelerates
The whole world is experiencing an “escalation to extremes” because we imitate each other to a profound degree. We should choose our models more carefully. (more…)
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Pine Gap implicates Australia as complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza
A complaint concerning the Australian Signals Directorate to the Inspector General of Security and Intelligence.
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Pine Gap supports nuclear war fighting, not monitoring arms control agreements
Richard Tanter stated in Pearls and Irritations on March 21 in regard to my piece on a former Defence Deputy Secretary, Paul Dibb on 14 February, that “Media self-censorship, and acceptance – if not cultivation – of a mystique of impenetrable opacity about Pine Gap has facilitated public acceptance of government silence, misdirection and mendacity about Pine Gap”. The inference is that I am guilty as a member of the media. (more…)
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Russia: A steel wall against the West
In 1942, a Finnish sound engineer Thor Damen, secretly recorded 11 minutes of a conversation between Finland’s Commander-in-Chief, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim and Adolf Hitler, without the latter’s knowledge. (more…)
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A terrorist state and a declining US empire wage genocide
Hamas is the excuse for the Israeli attack on Gaza. The real intent is to expel all Palestinians not just from Gaza but from the West Bank as well. (more…)
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Mystifying Pine Gap – again
Brian Toohey’s article “Untruths, the CIA, and Whitlam’s dismissal”, (Pearls and Irritations, 14 February 2024), begins by dismissing as ‘astonishing’ a recent ASPI article by former Defence Deputy Secretary Paul Dibb on ‘Kissinger’s role in avoiding nuclear war, and the key part Australia played’ – ‘astonishing because it is riddled with major errors.’ (more…)
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Universities make astounding discovery: AUKUS lacks a social licence!
A not-so-happy anniversary: Usually, a first anniversary is an occasion for all-round rejoicing and back-slapping. So, it was to be expected that there’d be universal self-congratulation on the first anniversary of Anthony Albanese’s, Rishi Sunak’s and Joe Biden’s announcement on 13 March 2023 that Australia would purchase nuclear-powered attack-class submarines from the US as part of Australia’s participation in the AUKUS agreement. (more…)
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Australia’s moment of choice: illegal war on show in 2003 Cabinet papers
What has changed since 2003? Nothing, except for the worse. Australian governments continue to accept the US enemies as their own, and shoot whoever the sheriff says. (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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“I told you so”: No Aussie subs in 2030s, total reliance on the Yanks
The sweetest words in the English language: I told you so. (more…)
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It’s a huge policy failure that Australia can’t defend itself
Not unexpectedly, the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project has run into reality as Virginia class production slows down, leaving Australia with no Defence policy. A huge strategic failure, if endorsed government assessments are believed, which has left Australia vulnerable and dependent on America. (more…)
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Unmanned ships for RAN : Here we go again – idea without a concept !
There has been significant media discussion (including P&I) of Defence Minister Marles’ recent announcement of the Surface Ship Review for the RAN – a step towards remedying the Defence procurement shambles inherited by the Albanese government and conducted by yet another retired US admiral! But there has been scant attention to the rabbit out of the hat Marles produced to provide six large unmanned ships of an as yet undecided US design – let alone a concept of how they might best be deployed. All of which has been the subject of long and often acrimonious debate in the US. (more…)
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Australia’s middle power self-image is undermining the country’s security
Australian governments routinely assert that the country is respected as a “middle power” in regional and global forums. Meanwhile scholars increasingly agree that the middle power concept is more fantasy than reality. In Australia’s case, the uncritical assumption of the middle power self-image, by many politicians and commentators, is undermining the country’s security. (more…)
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AUKUS: risks, risks and more risks
Instead of actually engaging in measures to promote peace, the AUKUS governments are feeding us a racist notion that three Anglo nations targeting China from thousands of kilometres away are needed to ensure it. (more…)
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Webs and deceit: The politics of AUKUS
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive! (more…)