Category: Defence

  • Why Trump should work with China on a massive infrastructure partnership

    This is an extract from an interview on CNN on the 10th November 2016 with Kishore Muhbubani, Dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. 

    Trump will have to make some painful choices, especially in regard to policy in Asia. His instinct will be to take a hawkish stance against America’s No. 1 geopolitical competitor, China, and to look for opportunities to trip China up.For example, he could continue to call out China over the South China Sea issue. He told The New York Times in March that he finds China’s building and reclamation activities there “so brazen, and it’s so terrible that they would do that without any consultation.” On the economic side, he could double down on his plan to “instruct my treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator” and to “instruct the US trade representative to bring trade cases against China, both in this country and at the WTO.” He has also warned that China would “enter the TPP through the back door … if we don’t stop it.” (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. President Trump: Foreign Policy and the Alliance

    Donald Trump’s victory has shocked America and the world. America is deeply divided. Where he might take US foreign policy is unclear. We need to redefine the Alliance relationship.

    The competition between Trump and Clinton was widely described as savage, to an unprecedented degree. It was also a competition between two candidates who polling showed they were the least liked of all time. Thus, a significant number of voters saw their decision as one of choosing between two evils.

    These are important facts about the election and the state of the US polity, but of fundamental importance in determining the outcome was that it became an election about the state of affairs in middle America: economic hardship, glaring inequality, and despair about the ability and willingness of the conventional political process to fix things.

    Significantly, these were in fact the realities to which Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had called attention, but their potentiality as candidates was negated by the Clinton machine. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Donald Trump- the billionaire outsider!

     

    But is there a possible silver lining?

    I am surprised and horrified by the election of Donald Trump as the Leader of the ‘Free World’. He is sexist, racist, xenophobic and a Muslim-basher. He doesn’t dog-whistle like our prime ministers, but speaks out bluntly on issues in ways I find offensive. Yet clearly large numbers of Americans like his populist nonsense.

    It seems that Clinton may have narrowly won the popular vote but Trump has clearly won the numbers in the Electoral College. Perhaps the system was rigged after all – but in Trumps favour!

    I have been disappointed so many times in the past in elections. It is not a new experience for me.

    The Trump victory is a repeat of what we saw in Brexit and what is developing in so many other countries around the world, particularly in Europe. Many people clearly feel that they are being left behind. Yet the populists who exploit this alienation have no credible policies in response.  In Europe in the 1930s, we saw the enormous damage that populists can play in the lives of people who feel alienated and vulnerable. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. Trumpageddon? Not quite …. not yet.

     

    Trump’s victory speech said all the right things. No talk now of putting Hillary in jail. On the contrary: gracious tribute for her hard-fought campaign. And promises to heal wounds, to be a president for all Americans.

    And new jobs. And infrastructure. And looking after all citizens, including significantly the veterans (of America’s endless wars of choice). And making America truly great again. A lot of warm fuzzy emotion from an exhausted victorious leader.

    The relative decline of a great power (relative to other contenders) does not always happen smoothly. There are discontinuities, surprises, sharp inflection points. Tonight was a major such moment in the United States’ relative decline. (more…)

  • CAVAN HOGUE. US election.

     

    It looks like a Trump victory with a Republican Congress, albeit one which contains Republicans who don’t like Trump. But it is far too early to speculate sensibly on what President Trump will actually do. There are more questions than answers.

    The problem is that we really don’t know what Trump will do and that will remain the case for some time. What lies below the hot air? Will he listen to wiser counsels? Julie Bishop has made a somewhat over-optimistic comment about how the basics of the alliance will not be affected – but that we will work with whoever is US President. However, we don’t know what he will demand of us. Certainly we may need to rethink some things and he may force a greater degree of independence on us but who knows? We are a very dependent people. Will we be forced to ask exactly how the US has assured stability in our region – if it ever has, and what will be its future role? Will Australian troops continue to be integrated into American units and will he ask us to pay for American troops in Darwin? We don’t know. Never forget that we do not loom as large in the US as they do here. (more…)

  • MACK WILLIAMS. General Macarthur, the Philippines and Australian troops in WWII.

     

    The very good Boston Globe article reminded me of two other events in Philippines history of WW11 about which so little is known in Australia. They have some relevance to the contemporary scene.

    For a long time prior to the famous Macarthur landing in Leyte, the Australian Government lobbied Washington right up to the President for our 7th Division to be included in the invasion force. Macarthur steadfastly refused even when so directed by the White House. The result was that the AIF’s 7th Division was separated out of the invasion fleet and sent to Borneo (many ending up in Sandakan).  But their supply ships continued on to the Leyte Gulf which involved the largest ever naval force Australia has ever put to sea! How things could have been different!

    The only foreigners involved in the very active resistance movement against the Japanese in Mindanao were some Australians who had escaped from Sandakan through Sibutu. They set up first in the hills of Tawi Tawi ( a slightly bigger island to the north). When MacArthur despatched some American commandos by submarine to Tawi Tawi to take command the Philippines guerillas would not let them land. They told him that they wanted to work with the Australians. All the Australians who stayed on were eventually captured and executed by the Japanese.

    Mack Williams was former Ambassador to the Philippines.

  • TONY KEVIN. Is Hillary the Russia-hater a safer American choice?

     

    The final days of the US presidential campaign – a disgraceful saga at best – have been marked by a frantic race to the bottom by both sides.

    On the Trump side: an anonymous but skilfully made video is doing the social media rounds, alleging improper links between Hillary Clinton’s long-standing personal assistant and friend Huma Abedin, through her kinship connections to her powerful Saudi Arabian family, to Wahhabi Islamist extremism which supports Al Qaeda, ISIS and so on. The snide innuendo here is that the people who organised the World Trade Centre attacks have planted Abedin at the heart of Hillary’s political career. The video is thoroughly nasty. It is not clear who commissioned it.

    More overtly, Julian Assange features on a Russian news video today (by www.rt.com). He alleges that because the Clinton Foundation has accepted much Saudi and Qatari government money, and because Hillary Clinton knows both governments fund ISIS, this must mean that Hillary Clinton knowingly connives with ISIS.

    On the other side, the Clinton camp alleges that the Kremlin hacked into Democratic National Congress emails and gave the product to Assange’s Wikileaks to distribute; that seventeen US intelligence agencies have confirmed that Putin is behind this; that Trump is a puppet of Putin; that Putin is manipulating the US election to try to get Trump elected, because he knows Trump will not stand up to him as Hillary would. (more…)

  • Blowback for American sins in the Philippines – The Boston Globe.

    In this article in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2016, Stephen Kinzer points out that President Duterte’s grievance ‘is rooted in history’. President Duterte asserted that the US had unjustly seized the Philippines in 1899 and waged a horrific military campaign to suppress native resistance.

    Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, USA.  See link to article below.

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/10/15/blowback-for-american-sins-philippines/VNAmdveJWntU7f8FYnGvPL/story.html?s_campaign=8315

     

  • RAMESH THAKUR. The nuclear refuseniks: Australia follows the US again.

     

    In voting against the UN resolution calling for negotiation of a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, Australia, Japan and South Korea are swimming against the global tide of opinion and that of their Asia and Pacific neighbours, argues Ramesh Thakur. (more…)

  • JOHN TULLOH. U.S. finally starts to ease its Cold War punishment of Cuba

     

    It is astonishing that an impoverished speck on the rump of the most powerful country in the world has managed to intimidate it for more than half a century. Cuba, only 144 kms off the coast of Florida, has had to suffer Uncle Sam’s unforgiving wrath because it became a Communist regime, locked up opponents and did not hold free elections. Tough trade and travel embargoes were imposed by Washington. Residents of the land of the free for decades have been banned from going there and woe betide if you were caught with one of Cuba’s famed cigars. But in recent years there has been some forgiveness. If Hillary Clinton becomes the next U.S. president, she has promised to end the embargo. However, the last word will not be hers. It is Congress which has that authority and it is showing no sign of softening its stance. (more…)

  • JEFFREY SACHS. The fatal expense of American imperialism.

    In this article, Jeffrey D. Sachs says

    “the United States … is squandering vast sums and undermining national security. … today the United States has similarly over invested in the military and could follow a path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China.”

    See link to full article below.

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/10/30/the-fatal-expense-american-imperialism/teXS2xwA1UJbYd10WJBHHM/story.html

    Jeffrey Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. This article was first published in the Boston Globe on October 30, 2016.

  • MACK WILLIAMS. The real shipping choke point for Australia – Sibutu Channel

    Neither the Australian government nor the Australian media have informed us about the critical nature of the Sibutu Channel.

    As mentioned in this blog some time ago. the active political and media discussion in Australia about the South China Sea has continued to ignore the fact that the most critical choke point for Australia’s huge trade with North Asia is the Sibutu Channel. This lies inside Philippines territorial waters between Sabah and the southernmost Philippines islands. Nor has our media recognised that this area has long been a hot spot for the Muslim insurgency in the Philippines and more recently the radical Abu Sayyaf. The latter have an established history of kidnapping and ransom and worse – with a number of foreigners currently in their hands. (more…)

  • MACK WILLIAMS. President Duterte and high stakes poker.

    Following President Duterte’s recent trips to China and Japan he has continued to play his hand in what has become a high stakes poker game with the US and China attracting a growing number of interested onlookers. Despite the twists in his game, which have often been interpreted as wobbles or even backflips by many foreign observers, Duterte has kept his cards close to his chest and tried to stay on course to rebalance The Philippines’ relationship with the US and China. An axiom for understanding the Philippines domestic scene has always been “ thanks to a free and hyperactive media there are no secrets but the truth is always extremely difficult to determine”. That is certainly in play again now! (more…)

  • RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The present threat to global security.

     

    In the second decade of this century we are living in a greatly changed world, compared with that to which we accustomed ourselves, following the defeat of Japan and Germany in WWII in the second half of 1945.

    The international “rules based “situation of the late 40s and early mid 50s was essentially created by the US with some British and French support. It is now completely dated and out for touch with the present situation, driven as it is by the rise of China and India,and the rapid growth of the domestic economies of Indonesia,Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia.

    The apparent present insistence of the US that no other power, including China,should resist its belief in its own global supremacy, can be a serious danger to global stability.

    Also, a threat of Russian ambition,promoted by the US, is not the main threat to peace at present. As US supremacy recedes,Chinese power rises and Russia continues its recovery, it is US resistance to this tide of historic change now underway,which puts at risk,as this century unfolds both global security and the emergence of an Asia Pacific community.

    If Australia does not respond promptly,we shall find ourselves left behind.

    Richard Woolcott, Former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (1988 – 2002), Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1982 – 1988)

  • RAMESH THAKUR. Has NATO become a threat to world peace?

    NATO is endangering Earth

    This article was first published in the Japan Times on 8 September 2014.

    Have NATO leaders created a crisis to justify NATO’s continuation after its original purpose expired?

    Former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul says: “Without U.S.-sponsored ‘regime change,’ it is unlikely that … the Malaysian Airlines crash would have happened.” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, wonders why Washington is risking war with Russia. John Mearsheimer argues the Ukraine crisis Is the West’s fault. (more…)

  • DOUGLAS NEWTON. The Slide to World War I. Shades of 1914 today?

     

    Are there shades of 1914 in today’s international collisions? So much is different. Talk of ‘parallels’ is probably overstatement. But there are disturbing continuities.

    The setting in 1914

    In 1914, the ‘Hobbesian’ fatalists who believe that nation states are always natural enemies, and that warfare is more or less inevitable, held sway in many nations.

    The megafauna in the jungle of vested interests, that is, the ‘defence’ industries and their bankers, were extremely powerful. They funded the lobby groups, the ‘think-tanks’ of the pre-1914 world, the army leagues, navy leagues, universal service leagues, and so on. These were filled with sombre-faced ‘realists’, shunning ‘sentimentalism’, briefing journalists about the challenge of ‘inescapable geo-strategic realities’ to be met with ever more arms spending.

    Most decision-makers knelt before the great God Deterrence. Supposedly, only superior armed force could guarantee peace. (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. Putin is different.

     

    A special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, just published, focuses on the deteriorating US-Russia relationship. It poses the question of whether a new Cold War has started and publishes a range of relevant, articles.

    The article by Fiona Hill, Director of the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution is impressive ( thebulletin.org, volume 72, issue 3). It discusses Vladimir Putin’s origins, nature, what he has become, the nature of the state he runs, and most importantly how he views the US and other western countries.

    Having traced Putin’s political origins in the St Petersburg government and the KGB, she defines him as “the operative as autocrat”, asserting that he is “without precedent either in Russian history, or at the top of a modern state anywhere in the world”. (more…)

  • RAMESH THAKUR. The slide to war with Russia.

    ‘God created war so Americans could learn geography’ (1)

    On 3 October, taking another step on the road to a new cold war, Russia suspended the 16-year bilateral plutonium disposition agreement with the US. Are the two countries sleepwalking into a war that could cross the nuclear threshold – remembering that those sleepwalking are unaware of it at the time?

    One possible pathway to slide into war would be to act on the growing chorus of calls in the Washington beltway for a no-fly-zone over Syria. In a bon mot often misattributed to Mark Twain that is so good it deserves to be true, God is said to have created war so Americans could learn geography. Russia–US tensions are rising again and could boil over if Hillary Clinton becomes president, which seems all but certain.

    The threat of war comes less from Russian revanchist or imperial ambitions and more from the US insistence that no other power must have the economic resilience and military capability to resist Washington’s will, anywhere. Rooted in the triumphalism of US supremacy in the post-Cold War unipolar moment, this is both unsustainable and increasingly risky as US primacy wanes against the steady accretion of economic, military and diplomatic power by China and Russia’s recovery. The fierce US resistance of the inexorable tide of history also spells dangers for Australia. (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. Russia and the US Elections

     

    The US elections campaign has set-up a deeply negative framework for the future management of US/Russia relations. If Hillary Clinton is President her past attraction to military solutions to foreign policy problems will need revision, if conflict is to be avoided.

    Speaking at the Alfred Smith dinner, in New York, on October 20th, Hillary Clinton referred to a difficulty Donald Trump had apparently encountered in his use of a teleprompter, during a campaign event. She said to Trump:

    “They’re hard to keep up with, and I’m sure it’s even harder when you’re translating from the original Russian”. The audience was, largely, amused.

    This wasn’t merely a joke. It reflected her assessment that there was domestic political mileage in hostility towards Russia and Putin and harm to be done to her opponent by calling attention to, and misrepresenting his stated preference for trying to get on with Russia, rather than fight it. Another Clinton aside illustrated further her assessment of the “Russia card”: “We all know who Putin wants to win, and it’s not me”. (more…)

  • JOSEPH CAMILLERI. The election of Hillary Clinton promises a more dangerous world.

    In a long and often exasperating presidential campaign, Americans and the world have been subjected to Donald Trump’s odious and often incoherent rhetoric, and from both sides much vitriol and endless accusations of deceit, crookedness and sexual misconduct.

    In this largely policy-free contest, Hillary Clinton’s approach to the immense challenges facing the United States has escaped serious scrutiny. Yet, how America views its place in a rapidly transforming world has far-reaching implications not only for security at home and abroad, but for the economy, financial markets, the environment and much else. (more…)

  • CAVAN HOGUE. Duterte – China and the US.

    Attitudes to the USA have varied in the Philippines since they first came in contact in 1898 when the Americans invaded the Philippines and spent 1898 to 1904 in a brutal colonial war against the Philippine Republic under President Emilio Aguinaldo. Needless to say, Americans were widely hated for depriving the Filipinos of their freedom and many never really forgave them. (more…)

  • PAUL DALEY. Why Australia Day and Anzac Day helped create a national ‘cult of forgetfulness’.

    Australia Day and Anzac Day are months away.

    But I’m getting in early. It’s beyond time Australia cast off these sturdy cultural crutches that both, somehow, define national birth, so we can discover who and what we truly are.

    Australia Day, celebrating British invasion in 1788, and Anzac Day, marking Australia’s involvement in the failed invasion of the Ottoman empire in 1915, are but relatively recent, fleeting moments of note among innumerable others in our 60,000-year continental human history. (more…)

  • ALISON BROINOWSKI. Reclaiming Australia

    ASIO Director-General is under-reported when he says anti-Islamic groups also threaten Australian security.

    ‘Incredible’ is a word over-used in the media when all they mean is ‘very’. So when something truly unbelievable happens, we have no description ready for it. In recent days, while American and Australian leaders were debating their various degrees of credibility, a revelation from the Director-General of ASIO, Duncan Lewis, was ignored by the mainstream media except the Guardian online and AAP (Reclaim Australia in Asio’s sights, intelligence chief tells senators, 19 October 2016). But what he said was close to incredible, at least for those with long memories of the domestic spy agency. (more…)

  • BINOY KAMPMARK. Des Ball: The man who sank the myth of controlled nuclear warfare

    The late Professor Des Ball of the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre came as close as any on being a public intellectual on nuclear strategy.

    While some of his counterparts in the United States felt that using nuclear weapons was feasible and sound, Ball, who died last week, issued his pieces with mighty caveats and sensible qualifications.

    Controlling the process of deploying weapons of mass extermination in an active theatre, far from being deemed obscene, was lauded by advocates. Human sense will always prevail, somehow. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. Clinton-Putin-Trump: foreign policy dimensions of the final debate.

     

    There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton trumped her contender on domestic economic and social policy issues, migration, and proper respect for women. She has neutralised the personal emails and Clinton Foundation questions. Barring the unforeseeable, she will cruise to victory next month.

    On foreign policy, her words and what she left unsaid left many important questions: and Trump more often found himself on the right side of the foreign policy argument, for those who follow these things. Such debates proceed according to a free flow of their own and important issues easily get submerged and diverted as the caravan rapidly moves on. Here are my notes for what they are worth. (more…)

  • HAMISH McDONALD. What really happens at Pine Gap.

    Hamish McDonald wrote this article in the Saturday Paper on October 1, 2016. The paper was also a tribute to Des Ball who died recently. He was the best informed and independent commentator on Pine Gap.  The following is an introduction to Hamish McDonald’s article with a full link at the end to the Saturday Paper.  John Menadue

    It’s one of two sacred sites to which you can drive from Alice Springs. The other is the red stone monolith of Uluru, said by the Pitjantjara to bring down a curse on anyone who removes a rock.

    This one, though, is the huddle of gleaming white fibreglass domes known as Pine Gap which, if penetrated by the uninitiated, could threaten the security of the West. (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. The Seeds of War, and the New UN Secretary General

     

    The sources of potential serious international conflict are expanding, as States increasingly ignore the UN Charter. Australia should support efforts by the new UN Secretary General to strengthen the Charter and join the majority of States seeking to reform the Security Council.  (more…)

  • MACK WILLIAMS. Duterte plays the China card

     

    Not surprisingly, President Duterte is proving more than a handful for US policy makers on the eve of his major state visit to China. If he achieves many of the ambitious goals set for the visit , Duterte will be strengthened in his resolve to chart policies away from the traditional Philippines dependence on the US. How far China will be prepared to exploit Duterte’s position will be critical for US (and Australian) policy in the South China Sea. But so also it will be for the Philippines’ ASEAN partners as China’s considerable soft power potential in the region will be on display. (more…)

  • ANDREW FARRAN. The legal spat in Canberra – more serious than we may think. 

     

    Legal advice on a government decision to go to war.

    The legal spat between the Commonwealth Solicitor-General and the Attorney- General is potentially more serious than it might appear.

    It is not uncommon that certain actions or proposed actions by governments raise either constitutional or international legal issues of questionable validity. In this context the Governor-General, the Parliament, the bureaucracy,  the military and others in the official sphere may seek assurance that what they or the country are being committed to do is legal. Should it not be legal there may be serious personal consequences for them.

    (more…)

  • PETER YOUNG. Unlike Jim Molan, We must not look away from the harm we are causing.

     

    Monday’s Q&A gave a good insight into the philosophy and principles behind Australia’s Sovereign Borders Policy as described by one of its chief architects Jim Molan. Most telling was his argument that the means of maintaining tight border control and supposedly saving lives at sea justified the ends of indefinite cruelty, suffering and mental harm. He showed no empathy towards the suffering imposed by the policy he authored and did not have the courage to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of the mental harm it produces resulting in mental illness, self-harm and suicide. It was clear that from the perspective of the Sovereign Borders that the continued punishment and suffering of the people in Nauru and Manus, as well as those in Australia with temporary protection visas is seen as a necessary part of the policy. (more…)