Thankfully, Minister Smith has delivered the sort of Defence White Paper you hope for when you really don’t need a White Paper and there isn’t enough money to pay for the current plans, let alone …
Former foreign minister Hayden said, “As Labor came to office in 1972 ‘China’ had become a symbol of a broad judgment of the need for change in many areas”. Stephen FitzGerald recalled of the atmosphere …
The Strategist is giving the White Paper’s newest strategic construct—the ‘Indo-Pacific strategic arc’—short shrift. Peter Jennings suggests it still needs thinking through. Rob Ayson sees it as nothing more than a smokescreen. I’m not sure I …
Last Friday’s Defence White Paper (DWP) rightly drew a lot of praise from (most) of the analytical community and the media. Many commentators, including myself, welcomed the more cautious tone regarding China’s military rise and …
View Larger Map My favourite line about Australian strategic thinking belongs to Graeme Dobell. The ‘arc of instability’, he quipped on more than one occasion, was a polite way of talking about Indonesia. Having read …