Investigations of influence operations and information warfare methodologies tend to focus heavily on the use of inauthentic social media activity and websites purpose built to propagate misinformation, disinformation and misleading narratives. There are, however, a …
Countries’ 5G networks have become the subject of intense debate—and the Australian government can take some of the credit for that. Its decision to exclude high-risk vendors in August 2018 was marked by a refreshing …
Sea state Australia’s fleet of 12 new submarines will cost about $225 billion to build and maintain, according to the program’s head. Greg Sammut told Senate estimates that it would cost $80 billion to build …
For more than a century, close economic ties between China and Japan have developed in the absence of cooperative political and security relations, suggesting that the first is not a necessary precondition for the second. …
Zhou Enlai, China’s first premier, was arguably one of the best diplomats of the 20th century. Maintaining connections between the outside world and a revolutionary government that had thrown out the baby, the bathwater and …
Make no mistake about it; Hongkongers’ overwhelming vote on 24 November was a clear and unequivocal repudiation of Beijing and its appointed government here in the territory. It was a rejection of police abuses and …
This post is kicking off a series from ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre on Indigenous Australians in STEM and cyber policy. As a shy teenager growing up in Darwin in the 1980s, I was always …
There’s no shortage of books about the growing strategic and economic competition between China and the United States. Adding something distinctive and worthwhile to the literature, therefore, is no easy task. The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, …
The ‘new normal’ of Australia’s relationship with China is that it will be marked by ‘enduring differences’. That’s the outlook offered by the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Frances Adamson. It’s …
In this episode, Strategist editor Jack Norton covers this year’s Beersheba Dialogue, the annual conference between ASPI and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, named after the World War I battle. He speaks to former …
The world With Tech Geek taking a week off, this ‘Suggests’ includes more on the world. The story of Wang Liqiang, who declared that he was a Chinese spy, broke this week with reporting in …
China’s global disinformation campaign—which recently painted Hong Kong’s democracy advocates as violent and unpopular radicals—should cause concern for democracies around the world. In addition to highlighting the many ways in which technology can be used …
On 1 December, Ursula von der Leyen will finally take office as president of the European Commission. She has promised to lead a commission that will avoid a scenario in which, as French President Emmanuel …
We are in an era when the risks of major-power conflict are growing. The most likely contenders are commonly seen to be China, the rising power, and the US, the formerly dominant power that’s now …
Australian political leaders and strategic thinkers have, rightly, dedicated considerable attention to Hong Kong and Xinjiang in recent months. It’s time to expand the discussion to another self-declared ‘core interest’ of the Chinese Communist Party: …
The beat Sri Lankan police barred from leaving the country The chief of Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department has issued a directive to the country’s airports to prevent police officers from leaving without permission. The …
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has outlasted the country. For the foreseeable future, Assad will be trying to restore central government control and manoeuvring between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan over …
The choice for Australia is not the one we’re always being told we have to make—between America and China. It’s the choice between the status quo, a wilful complacency, on the one hand. And, on …
It’s difficult to see a convincing case on ‘national interest’ grounds for moving full-cycle docking of the Collins-class submarines from ASC’s Osborne shipyard to Fremantle in Western Australia. Indeed, doing so may put the navy’s …
The United States’ defence industrial base—Australia’s most significant source of military technology—is struggling to respond to a new era of strategic competition. Years of congressional budgetary instability and the US Department of Defense’s sluggish response …