It’s rare for an Australian Prime Minister to quote from a classical Greek text and even rarer in the context of Australia’s relations with the US and China. But in his recent speech to a prominent US think tank in Washington, Malcolm Turnbull cited the great Athenian historian, Thucydides, in warning of the heightened risk of conflict when a rising power challenges the existing international order and the position of the previously dominant state – the so called Thucydides Trap.
Read more
Dr. Jonathan Spyer is a Middle East analyst, author and journalist based at the Global Research in International Affairs Centre (GLORIA) in Israel. He discussed the upcoming Israeli elections on ABC News24 on 4 December 2014.
Read more
It’s been disappointing, and a little depressing, to see how parochial and partisan the issue of climate change has become in recent years in Australia, to the detriment of good policy and intelligent national debate. Read more
In 2015, China’s military modernization efforts and its assertive activities in the East and South China Seas dominate public discourse on China’s growing influence. While these developments are usually viewed through a military lens, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) activities should be considered and examined as an instrument of statecraft to achieve specific political outcomes as a form of political warfare.
Read more
The Chinese Communist Party’s power has long rested on four pillars: economic growth, nationalism, repression and communist ideology. The last of these withered away almost entirely as China liberalized its economy, with slogans such as “Long live the invincible Marxism-Leninism theory” replaced by “To get rich is glorious.” Now the first pillar is unstable too. Read more
Dr. Jonathan Spyer, Director of the Rubin Centre in Israel, spoke at an AIJAC function in Melbourne on the continuing instability in the Middle East. Recorded 27 August 2015.
Read more
As the long march to the presidential nomination begins, most of the likely Republican contenders are talking tough on foreign policy and criticizing the Obama administration for its evident failings in handling Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists. Read more
The Obama administration is evidently divided over how to respond to provocative Chinese actions in cyberspace and the South China Sea. Intelligence community leaders warn that unless the U.S. retaliates, it will continue to face damaging computer network attacks of the sort China appears to have carried out against the Office of Personnel Management. Yet the administration has refused even to identify China as the culprit in the theft of over 20 million sensitive personal files. Read more
Hugh White’s considered response to the questions I posed in our recent exchange in the Lowy Interpreter on the fundamentals of Australian defense strategy prods me to elaborate on my previous arguments as well as to make some counterpoints. Read more
