Australia’s strategic circumstances over the next few decades will mean we cannot afford to be without a submarine capability. But that’s an area in which we are terribly vulnerable. Serious concerns have been raised over …
Articles by: "Hugh White"
Many people believe that Australia would never need to defend itself unaided. Even if US support cannot be taken for granted in the future, they think that we needn’t ever stand alone, because we have …
In How to defend Australia, I argued that if we are to take our defence seriously, we need to prepare to defend Australia from a major Asian power independently. That is necessary, I said, because …
Could Australia defend itself independently from direct military attack by a major Asian power like China? That’s the key question I set out to answer in How to defend Australia. My answer was a cautious …
It’s a strange and poignant juxtaposition of anniversaries. On 24 July 1969 President Richard Nixon, just seven months into his presidency, was 1,500 kilometres southwest of Hawaii aboard USS Hornet to welcome the Apollo 11 …
You don’t have to be as pessimistic as I am about the future of American power in Asia to start seriously thinking about what we should do if it falters. You only have to accept …
Paul Dibb, in his recent Strategist post, writes that America’s strategic position in Asia would be fatally undermined if it didn’t go to war with China if China attacked Taiwan, and that Australia’s alliance with …
What would we say if Washington asked to base nuclear-armed missiles, aimed at China, on Australian territory? It’s not an entirely hypothetical question. Amid all the talk of a new cold war with China, the …
Almost a year ago, Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith wrote an important ASPI paper in which they acknowledged, for the first time, that China’s growing power and ambition constitutes a major shift in Australia’s strategic …
Andrew Davies and Rod Lyon have had an interesting debate here recently about nuclear weapons. Andrew has argued that we need to take the risk of nuclear war more seriously and that we should therefore …
If you wanted to sum up America’s (and its allies’) military-strategic posture towards China in Asia today in a sentence, you’d say that we aim to deter China from using force in situations like Taiwan …
Australia’s problem with China is bigger and simpler than we think, and thus harder to solve. It isn’t that Beijing doesn’t like Julie Bishop, or that it’s offended by our new political interference legislation, or …