One of the great difficulties in assessing China’s broader aims and goals is the apparent contradiction between its uncompromising security policy and the accommodating allure of its economic outreach. While aggressively asserting its maritime claims in the Western Pacific, Beijing is simultaneously wooing the world with the seductive vision of a new Silk Road that promises benefits for all who sign up.
If the ambitious goals of Malcolm Turnbull’s just released cyber security strategy are achieved, the document could turn out to be the most important and innovative government strategy yet written.
Its great strength is that it provides a clear plan for harnessing Australia’s transitioning economy to the enabling technology of the internet, while recognising that a secure cyber space is critical to exploiting the benefits of the digital age and to protecting our interests online.
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Calibrated to take advantage of Japan’s rapidly changing political and security landscape Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s call this week for a deeper, closer strategic and defence partnership with Japan is a water shed moment in the bilateral relationship which promises to deliver significant benefits for both countries, although it won’t be risk free.
The culmination of 26 years of patient Australian diplomacy, dating back to former Chief of the Defence Force, General Peter Gration’s, ground-breaking first defence visit to Japan in 1989, Bishop has timed her initiative well. It dovetails neatly with the Abe government’s more outward looking security stance, a response to the burgeoning foreign policy and strategic challenges Japan confronts.
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The simmering strategic rivalry between the US and China is entering a new, and more dangerous phase that will recast the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific region and pose increasingly difficult policy choices for the next government.
After an extended period of policy confusion and vacillation about how to respond to China’s determined thrust into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Washington is now pushing back with surprising vigour. Blunt warnings about the unacceptability of China’s land reclamation activities in the South China Sea and desire for regional hegemony are flowing thick and fast from the Pentagon along with military assistance to Southeast Asian countries, many of which have had a contentious relationship with the US in the past.
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Dr Alan Dupont speaks with Washington Post correspondent, Simon Denyer.
“China is using its vast fishing fleet as the advance guard to press its expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea, experts say. That is not only putting Beijing on a collision course with its Asian neighbors, but also introducing a degree of unpredictability that raises the risks of periodic crises.
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The five-year, continuing civil war in Syria is the greatest crisis to have hit the Levant since World War II. According to recent figures released by the Damascus-based Syrian Center for Policy Research, up to 470,000 people have died in the war. Fully 11.5 % of the population have been killed or injured, and 45% of the population have left their homes as a result of the conflict. Of these, more than 4 million have left Syria, while 6.36 million people live inside the country as internally displaced persons. Life expectancy has dropped from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015.
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The Turnbull government has boldly proclaimed that the new defence white paper “is the most rigorous and comprehensive in Australia’s history”. This is not just rhetoric. The white paper articulates a viable strategy for the Australian Defence Force that is potentially transformational and should ensure the ADF is properly equipped to deter and defeat the multiplying defence and security challenges confronting the nation.
What sets this white paper apart is the muscularity of the envisaged defence force, which bears all the hallmarks of Tony Abbott’s persona and hard-nosed approach to defence and national security.
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ISIS is no longer expanding in the Middle East, according to analyst Dr. Jonathan Spyer. But he warns that may cause the radical Islamic group to spread out more into international terrorism. Interview on CBN News.
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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.
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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.
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