Category: Politics

A little over a century ago, the world plunged into war. The call to nationalism, national identity and symbolism was carefully promoted. The conditions that created that war still echo. We see, today, an integrated global capitalism in contradiction to a powerful nation-state system. We see fears, animosities and distrust between peoples and states rise as those 1914 echoes reverberate. Once more, the seemingly benign Tasmanian landscape and population offers itself as a case-study in microcosm of global political and economic upheavals and controversies. (more…)

The most acute contemporary manifestation of the demand on China to demonstrate responsible leadership is the challenge of North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Le Hong Hiep speculated on the prospect of a grand bargain between Trump and Xi when they met at Mar-a-Lago to accommodate US concerns on its massive bilateral trade deficit and on North Korea’s nuclear program in return for meeting China’s concerns on US anti-missile deployments in South Korea. Such a deal was correctly assessed as unlikely. (more…)

China recognizes that it has been a major beneficiary of the existing international order and it has proven to be a fast learner in operating as a responsible power within that order. Its primary goal therefore will not be to perturb the order, but to gain greater influence in writing the rules and running the institutions to develop and police the global order. China is not intent on exporting its authoritarian model and has never been enthusiastic about the so-called China model of an authoritarian state, political stability and state-directed development. Rather, its main focus has been on promoting political stability and economic growth at home and securing access to resources and markets abroad. However if denied its rightful place at the top tables of global governance institutions, China has proven it has the will and the resources to set up parallel, but not alternative, institutions, for example the AIIB. (more…)

In 2015 then PM Tony Abbott sought to save the lives of two convicted heroin traffickers.  He reminded Indonesians that Australians had given $1 billion in emergency aid and rehabilitation following the 2004 Aceh tsunami, so please show mercy.

 He should have been better advised: Indonesians reacted angrily and made gestures of raising funds to repay.  Instead of softening attitudes, Abbott’s clumsy comments hardened President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s stand against what he called ‘foreign interference’. (more…)

The New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, challenged the forces of isolationism, protectionism and racism in her speech to the United Nations General Assembly.  (more…)

The recent encounter between American and Chinese warships in the South China Sea could be the fore-runner of more serious incidents unless both parties show more restraint. (more…)

The 80^th anniversary of the Munich Agreement passed without significant comment, although it was a pivotal event of the 20h Century. Perhaps it’s time for me to commit the ultimate political incorrectness and confess that I am a Municheer. I mean that if I had been there instead of a four year old in Brisbane, I would have cheered to the echo in the House of Commons as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Hitler had invited him for the fateful meeting in Munich on 27-28 September 1938. When Chamberlain brought home the Munich Agreement which ceded the Sudentenland from Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich, then it would continue, I would have joined the ecstatic Londoners as Chamberlain blathered on about ‘peace with honour’ and ‘peace in our time’. I would have approved President Roosevelt’s cable to Chamberlain: ‘Good man’.   (more…)

Among the debates that have swept the U.S. foreign policy community since the beginning of the Trump administration, alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged as one of the few fixed points. From the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry’s claim that “for seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order” to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s call in the final days of the Obama administration to “act urgently to defend the liberal international order,” this banner waves atop most discussions of the United States’ role in the world. 
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Malaysian premier is re-emerging as a strident yet pacifist spokesman for the non-aligned interests of the developing world. (more…)

“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” This tweet of March 2 set out the aims and means of Donald Trump’s trade policy.

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Westerners may believe that the growing integration and interdependence of China with the regional and international economy makes armed conflict too costly to contemplate and that the Pacific military balance is so heavily in US favour that China would not be foolish enough to challenge Washington. But what if Beijing believes that the costs to Washington would be so high that the US would back down? Along many such misperceptions and miscalculations do the bloody rivers of human history flow into the ocean of oblivion for once-great powers. (more…)

There are fears that the Trump Administration may, with the urging of America’s military/business and security complex and support from middle America, extend its trade war with China into a new Cold War. This would be unlikely to gain substantive international backing though were it to happen it would pose an uncomfortable dilemma for Australia as to how to respond – a long awaited test of national maturity.  (more…)

There have been two big geopolitical storylines thus far in this century: the US has suffered a relative decline from its dominant position at the end of the Cold War; and China has acquired impressive power in both relative and absolute terms. How China develops economically and evolves politically, and how it behaves domestically, regionally and globally, are among the most critical questions confronting the world going forward. (more…)