Defence White Paper 2013 breaks new ground in a number of areas—but at the big picture level, the most striking aspect of the paper is its revaluation of Southeast Asia. In place of the vague …
Articles by: "Rod Lyon"
There’s been a resurgence of interest in recent years among Australian academics in the issue of US extended nuclear assurance to its Asian allies in general and to Australia in particular. I’ve written on this …
In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert Art and Robert Jervis wrote about the late Kenneth Waltz’s unique contribution to the field of international politics. One of the things Waltz brought to his research was an interest …
A quick first read of the principal ‘strategic environment’ chapters of the new White Papers (Chapters 2, 3 and 6) gives a broad feel for the document as a whole. The overall tone of the …
Spurred on by Tanya Ogilvie-White’s post on Friday, I want to add some thoughts to the mix on the current situation on the Korean peninsula. What do we know about what’s really driving decision-making in …
President Obama’s recent comments in an interview with an Israeli TV show about the Iranian nuclear program are a timely reminder that the issue hasn’t gone away. In the interview, which aired on 14 March, …
On 25 July 1969 President Nixon outlined a US strategic policy for Asia that came to be known—because of the location in which the speech was delivered—as the ‘Guam doctrine’. The Guam doctrine contained three …
The new National Security Strategy (NSS) is meant to set the context for the next Defence White Paper, scheduled for release later this year. But it falls short on one key point. While NSS provides …
On 5 September 1952, Richard Casey, the Minister for External Affairs, provided the Australian House of Representatives with a report on the first meeting of the ANZUS Council in Honolulu about a month earlier. The …
With ANZUS a core pillar of our own strategic policy, it should come as no surprise that Australians frequently turn (and return) to the subject of just how reliable that alliance is. Most of the …
Cam Hawker’s recent Strategist post, ‘Stuck in the middle with you’, suffers from five major fallacies. First, it assumes that Australia–US joint facilities predetermine the strategic relationship between Canberra and Washington. Second, it assumes that …
Mitt Romney’s speech to the Virginia Military Institute on 8 October was, as he said, his chance to lay out the ‘vision’ for US foreign policy under his presidency. But anyone living in Asia reading …