The Israeli protests against its new right-wing government have now touched on Israel’s nuclear weapons. To underline what is at stake, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak cast aside Israeli ambiguity over whether it possesses nuclear weapons to warn his compatriots that Western diplomats are worried that a Jewish messianic dictatorship could gain control over Israel’s nuclear weapons. (more…)
Category: World
-
A Kingly proposal: Letter from Julian Assange to King Charles III
To His Majesty King Charles III,
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. (more…)
-
My meeting with Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf
What the general told me about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in the early days of the Obama administration. (more…)
-
India straddles competing global concepts
India as the Chair of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) hosted the SCO Defence Ministers’ Meeting on 28 April. Largely unreported in Western media, the meeting underlined important divergences in the narrative promoted by US-centric media that suggests India and China have irreconcilable differences. (more…)
-
In a multipolar world, the ‘third pole’ is not Europe, but Global South
Ukraine war and new cold war against China have accelerated the re-emergence of the old non-aligned movement of developing nations. (more…)
-
The Ukraine war – lessons for Australia and the Asia/Pacific
We often look to history or contemporary events to help explain issues and to seek guidance. Thus Graham Allison went back millennia to explain America’s current drive to war with China in his Thucydides Trap. Recently Gregory Clark joined others in making the natural comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan. Analogies are admittedly fraught with danger – parallels are never exact, the present never fits easily into the past and superficially similar events may be essentially very different – but they can be fruitful. (more…)
-
Australia’s special responsibilities
Do some states have ‘special responsibilities’ or obligations to help solve collective action problems as a consequence of their position in the international system? Australia should. (more…)
-
The American version of “one country, two systems”
Over a period of decades, the US has refined and applied its own exceptional version of One Country, Two Systems. What is most curious is that this has materialised within plain sight yet it has largely remained undetected, as such. (more…)
-
Best not to know: how secrecy and ignorance feed AUKUS policy
Reports that Australia pays retired senior US military officials up to $7,500 a day for advice on AUKUS related defence projects, reveals a cultural cringe and taste for secrecy. Such practice is coupled to a common policy technique, of avoiding criticism by maintaining public ignorance. (more…)
-
The coming war: Time to speak up
Silences filled with a consensus of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear. War by media is now a key task of so-called mainstream journalism. (more…)
-
Australia is being goaded into war with China
John Menadue’s article in Pearls and Irritation about Australia being goaded into war with China is a must read for those Australians who desire to live in harmony and leave a legacy for our descendants to live in this lucky country of ours, in peace and prosperity with our neighbours in the Asia Pacific region. (more…)
-
Reminder: the media once bashed Trump for transgressing the One-China Policy the US now spits on
The US has been increasingly treating Taiwan like a sovereign nation with whom diplomatic relationships and alliances can be formed, in violation of its longstanding One-China policy that has kept the peace for decades. And I just think it’s worth noting that the western media who’ve lately been condoning these moves became outraged at Donald Trump just a few years ago for doing the same thing to a far lesser degree. (more…)
-
The USA and Australia fail on climate change
Nearly two years ago relief was expressed that the USA had emerged under President Biden to offer world leadership on climate change. Sadly this leadership has been a disappointment and today both the US and other high emitters such as Australia are not on track to meet the challenge. (more…)
-
$368 billion on submarines: not a chance in hell!
This week the Federal ALP Government announced a significant cutback in the number of tanks to be stationed in the north to repel whatever is expected to land there to take our beautiful country away from us. Why – because tanks just won’t do the job in future. (more…)
-
The nation state is on the skids
The 21st Century is changing much about the world that humans take for granted. Among the more shocking possibilities is that it will sound the death-knell of the nation-state as the main instrument of human self-governance. (more…)
-
Fulfilling human potential and saving the planet
Australia, and my Party too, must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and ‘telling truth to power’. Our blind adoption of irrational policies, supine and unquestioning acquiescence to anything the United States proposes must end. Our species, facing an existential threat to civilisation from climate change, is infinitely complex, infinitely precious, infinitely vulnerable, infinitely destructive, but also infinitely capable of the sublime and transcendent. (more…)
-
War prevention depends on respecting invisible geopolitical faultlines
If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding: in an imperfectly governed world, spheres of influence in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles.
-
China’s “Historic” push for multipolar world to end U.S. domination
This is a historic watershed that the world is living through right now. What China is after is true multilateralism. What’s very important to understand is that most of the world also does not want the U.S. as the global preeminent power. Most of the world wants a truly multipolar world, and is, therefore, not lined up behind the United States’ sanctions on Russia, says Jeffrey Sachs in an interview with Democracy now. (more…)
-
Japan on the path to becoming a Military Great(er) Power
Promising to double its “defence” expenditure over the coming five-year period and placing huge orders for US military equipment to help it to do so, the sometime “peace state” of Japan is moving into high gear on militarisation. (more…)
-
Soft power is the way forward
Having worked in all developing countries in East Asia and several in South Asia (World Bank definition), I am very conscious of the value of soft power. Australia is a very small country in all aspects except size and my experience has been that soft power is the best way of expressing our good intentions. (more…)
-
President Putin eliminates his critics: the latest sentence – 25 years in prison
For denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine, the brave dissident Vladimir Kova-Murza has been found guilty of treason and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. This savage punishment, the longest sentence given to any opponent of Putin, shows the Kremlin waging cruel authoritarianism as their preferred means of government. (more…)
-
National day of prayer for just peace in Mayanmar
After years of cruelty to their own people (whose safety it is their duty to protect), just after Easter, the Myanmar junta’s airforce dropped multiple bombs on a civilian gathering of several hundred people in Sagaing Region while attack helicopters strafed the crowd. Later the same day jet fighters returned to kill anyone left. (more…)
-
The emerging New World Economy
The emerging new always both frightens and inspires the fading old. History is that unity of opposites. Sharp-edged rejections of what is new clash with enthusiastic celebrations of it. The old gets pushed away even as bitter denials of that reality surge. The emerging new world economy displays just such contradictions. Four major developments can illustrate them and underscore their interactions. (more…)
-
How a ‘pathologically modest’ nation broke new ground on wellbeing
In 2015, Wales became the first country in the world to legislate for the wellbeing of future generations. The Well-Being of Future Generations Act followed an inclusive national discussion about the kind of country people want for generations to come. (more…)
-
Has Dominion spelt the end of Murdoch influence in Australia?
The alternative universe occupied by the Murdoch media and its consumers is facing a very expensive and damaging confrontation with reality. But how and whether this affect the Australian operations are another question. (more…)
-
Taiwan looking more like a pawn as US struggle against China loses steam
- US coverage of Tsai Ing-wen’s visit has been muted as China continues to make advances in peacemaking, hi-tech, de-dollarisation and economic growth.
- Whether the Biden administration has had a change of heart about China is still uncertain but it appears Taiwan has merely been a pawn. (more…)
-
The present risks to life on earth
“The splitting of the atom has changed everything, bar man’s way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes” – Albert Einstein (more…)
-
Mainstream press pounces when ‘vassals’ speak truth to power
Leaders of France, Brazil and Mexico slammed for stating the obvious that is usually ignored by the Anglo-US media industrial complex. (more…)
-
“It’s armageddon, but not as we know it”
Why are tens of millions of Christians supporting the expansion of Israel and the oppression of the Palestinians? It’s an important question because the answer has serious consequences for the stability of the Middle East. (more…)
