YOUNG ADULTS FROM 15 African countries see China as the foreign power with the biggest positive impact on their lives, a new survey shows. More than 70% gave the Chinese an upbeat review. This matters. By 2050, 80% of the world’s youth will be from Africa. (more…)
Category: World
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Jon Richardson: NATO and Ukraine: once more into the breach…
Professor Graeme Gill has written a detailed response to my own article in P and I on NATO and the origins of war in Ukraine. I argued the latter were to be found in Russia’s post-imperial angst and domestic authoritarianism rather than in any threat presented by NATO expansion or Western policies. (more…)
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Why invisible cultures will determine humanity’s future
A deeply flawed culture is spreading throughout the world epitomised by today’s global, technocratic and managerial elite with growing inequality and concentration of wealth and power. (more…)
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Ruan Zongze: US must stop sleep walking in the Taiwan Strait
Both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. Taiwan is part of China’s territory. Although the two sides have been politically against each other for a long time, China’s state sovereignty and territorial integrity has never been split. (more…)
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Biden’s China policy, US business and Australia
Washington’s concern about China is real and not just threat inflation, which seeks an enemy to promote military Keynesianism: the traditional method of transferring public money to private corporations in the military industrial sector. (more…)
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John F. Copper: Where are the Chinese students going?
According to recent data published in China and admission reports from U.S. universities, the number of Chinese students applying for study in American institutions of higher learning in recent months has fallen markedly. (more…)
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Caitlin Johnstone: US invades Syria, kills people, claims self-defence
The US is an occupying force who is there without the permission of the Syrian government, without having been attacked by Syria, and without any valid claim to be defending itself from anyone in Syria. (more…)
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Sixty years and twenty-seven days ago Australia sent 30 advisors to Vietnam
That war has lessons for us today. (more…)
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Canberra is a fashioned spear for the US against China.
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australia’s foreign policy approach to China. (more…)
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David Armstrong’s Asian Media this week – small step for rights
Singapore, Hong Kong rule out same-sex marriage (more…)
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The many lives of Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony. (more…)
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China–US rivalry no new Cold War
Seventy-five years ago this July, the US diplomat George Kennan published his seminal essay in Foreign Affairs introducing the idea of ‘containment’. In The Sources of Soviet Conduct, Kennan advocated for a policy of containment against Soviet expansionism. As some in Washington prepare for a new Cold War with China, the Kennan-era template is being pressed into service again. (more…)
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Ann Marie Murphy: Ukraine war highlights differences between Indonesian and US foreign policy frameworks
To many Americans who view Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an unprovoked war that must be opposed, Indonesia’s high levels of public support for Russia may be perplexing. But divergent US and Indonesian views should not come as a surprise. The United States and Indonesia tend to perceive international events — and one another — through distinct ideological and normative frameworks due to their different international positions and historical experiences. (more…)
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Questioning AUKUS. Opposition is growing
Criticism of AUKUS and serious questions about the wisdom of the agreement are coming from multiple sources. There have been many examples in P&I, some quite strident in their opposition. (more…)
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The west’s false narrative about Russia and China
The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy. (more…)
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The war you don’t see
In The War You Don’t See, John Pilger returns to the subject of war reporting and its critical role in the making of wars. This ‘drum beat’ was the theme of Pilger’s 1983 documentary Frontline: The Search for Truth in Wartime, a history of war journalism from the Crimea in the 19th century (‘the last British war without censorship’) to Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands War in 1982. (more…)
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Everett Bledsoe: The US military empire. How many US military bases are there in the world?
The Pentagon does not know how many bases it has around the world so it relies on academics to tell it. The US bases are gated communities which replicate US suburbs, shops and amenities to the exclusion of local people. (more…)
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Jon Richardson: No, NATO expansion didn’t cause the war in Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has met with opprobrium in most quarters. At the same time, commentators of diverse stripes still argue that Western policies, particularly NATO expansion, should bear part or much of the blame for these events. (more…)
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Jessica Corbett: Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan pocketed $108 billion over 20 years
Military contracting “obscures where and how taxpayer money flows,” and “makes it difficult to know how many people are employed, injured, and killed,” said the Costs of War Project report’s author. (more…)
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It’s time for India to join the U.N. Security Council permanently
China in particular should support India’s ascension to permanent membership on the Security Council, a change that would reflect India’s global influence and a world order shifting away from the West’s dominance. (more…)
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U.S.-China fight to lead planet earth will be decided “within 15 years”
The clock is ticking on which of the two superpowers will gain primacy over the planet – a lead which will last indefinitely, becoming unassailable, a stunning new study shows
U.S. leadership over the planet would lead to a colonial model as seen in recent centuries, with the west assertively pushing its values, says a book by a top London geopolitical expert
Chinese leadership will lead to a multipolar world, given China’s lack of interest in spreading its system of governance to other countries, and preference for trade over militarism. (more…)
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The Ukraine war prequel
Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.
President George H W Bush to the Ukraine parliament, August 1991. Quoted in Lawrence Freedman, Ukraine and the Art of Strategy, Oxford 2019, p53 (more…)
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Sex, lies – but no videotape
Governments love distractions and there’s a doozy gripping the people next door: A lurid tabloid tale running for five weeks and counting is keeping electors focussed on spice rather than the erosion of democracy and corruption controls. (more…)
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Wayne Hudson: The importance of creating much greater cultural dialogue between China and Australia as soon as possible
The Chinese Ambassador is trying for a reset and it is tragic that his efforts have been misunderstood and perhaps wilfully so. (more…)
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Following the war in Ukraine
To write in real terms about war is not to condone war. War is an inappropriate activity for a species calling itself sapiens. (more…)
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Ice age conditions after even “limited” nuclear war would starve billions
An important new study published in Nature Food on 15 August by Lili Xia and Alan Robock of Rutgers University together with colleagues around the globe shows just how dangerous even a “limited” nuclear war in one part of the world would be. (more…)
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Marape returned as Prime Minister in Papua New Guinea
On 9 August, with the date for the extension of writs having been extended by a week but still only 99 of the 118 seats declared in country’s recent national election, Papua New Guinea’s National Parliament met to elect a prime minister. (more…)
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Marwan Bishara: Why Israel hates the Palestinians so much
Israel’s hatred of the Palestinians is shaped and driven by three basic sentiments. (more…)
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The goading of China continues day after day. Pelosi was just the most recent deliberate provocation
The path to war in Asia – crossing the Rubicon. (more…)
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Eva Bartlett: The West is silent as Ukraine targets civilians in Donetsk using banned ‘butterfly’ mines
The use of PFM-1 explosives against civilians is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions—but this evidently isn’t stopping Ukraine. (more…)