Articles

By Paul Keating* The US, for 24 years has gone without a strategy. If you’re running the world and you’re Number 1, and you don’t have a strategy for a quarter of a century, you have a problem.

By Brahma Chellaney* Security dynamics are changing rapidly in the Indo-Pacific. The region is home not only to the world’s fastest-growing economies, but also to the fastest-increasing military expenditures and naval capabilities, the fiercest competition over natural resources, and the most dangerous strategic hot spots. One might even say that it holds the key to global security.

When it comes to walking the walk, though, Australia tends to do the ASEAN shuffle. In the words of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Australia rejects ‘any unilateral action that would create tensions and we want to ensure that freedom of over-flight and freedom of navigation in accordance with international law is maintained and the ASEANs all back that same position’. In the way the runes are read in Canberra, the foreign minister’s abhorrence of any unilateral-tension-creating-action includes the Australian navy sailing closer than 12 miles to China’s terra-formed sand castles in the South China Sea.

Questions on whether defence projects are mandated to use Australian steel, and how much, are now an almost mandatory feature of Senate Estimates hearings, but exactly how big a role does Australian steel play in these projects?

A parliamentary inquiry has recommended that the Department of Defence's financial reporting be more transparent and straightforward. The Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit,...

The original Quadrilateral Security Initiative was a proposed maritime alliance that included the United States, Japan and Australia, with India as a reluctant partner. It has been rebadged as “Quad 2.0” because India is now more active in the nascent alliance, including in the western Pacific, and much more embedded in US and Australian maritime strategic thinking on the Indo-Pacific.

On Indo-Pacific matters, the Labour Party-led Government, headed by Jacinda Ardern, will no doubt take a lead from Canberra’s maritime strategic vision, but its primary focus will continue to be on the Asia-Pacific component of the region, particularly the South Pacific.

By Donald R Rothwell* The 2018 Timor Sea Treaty signed in New York between Australia and Timor Leste on 6 March 2018 is a landmark...

Crew members of doomed World War I Australian submarine AE1 were locked in a battle to make their vessel resurface when it suffered a catastrophic failure off the Duke of York Islands in 1914, a ­report into the disaster has found. Key trim settings were changed but the attempts were complicated by the fact only one of the boat’s twin props was operating, which the report found would have been insufficient to arrest the descent once it began.

Nicole Forrest Green* speaks with Marawi ground commander Lieutenant General Danilo Pamonag, in Manila. The Marawi siege in Mindanao in the southern Philippines was recently brought to a successful conclusion after 5 months of intense fighting. (May-October, 2017).