Okinawa governor Denny Tamaki has implored the UN for international backing in his opposition to the prefecture being overrun with US military bases. The Japan Times reports: “I am here today to ask the world to witness the situation in Okinawa,” Tamaki told a session of the world body’s Human Rights Council, arguing that the Continue reading »
Defence and Security
President Ranil Wickremesinghe also derided the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ as an artificial framework with an inconsistent definition. He also countered recent claims by New Delhi that Beijing was sending ships to Sri Lanka to spy on India. Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe on Monday declared the Aukus security pact between Australia, Britain and the US “a mistake” Continue reading »
NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe. “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and Continue reading »
A new US investigative report has excoriated the controversial Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program which included the USS Canberra – commissioned in very unusual circumstances with great fanfare by the US Navy recently in Sydney. Should its revelations about the manifest failures in the USN’s procurement performance – with former officers describing the LCS class Continue reading »
“War is good for business.” So reads a quote from an arms industry executive in a recent Reuters article titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” about Europe’s biggest arms show, the biennial Defence and Security Equipment International. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that Reuters does not name Continue reading »
During the disastrous Vietnam War, it was said that the US government treated the public like a mushroom farm: keeping it in the dark and feeding it with manure. The heroic Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers documenting the unrelenting US government lying about the war in order to protect politicians who would be embarrassed Continue reading »
Speaking in New York on Tuesday during the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, Foreign Minister Penny Wong called for negotiations to begin on a treaty that would halt the production of fissile material – the basic ingredient for nuclear bombs. “We all want a world without nuclear weapons,” she said, and Continue reading »
New Zealand academic Robert Patman advocates back peddling on confrontation with China to focus on fighting Russia, but both promise disaster. Robert Patman, a luminary of the New Zealand foreign policy establishment, has won applause from a surprising array of political positions for his hostility to NZ becoming involved in AUKUS. These range from former Continue reading »
China wants to expand its sphere of influence; the West, thankfully, is devoid of such base instincts. We can ignore the US’ vastly greater military budget, its 800 overseas military bases compared to China’s one, its mammoth track record of overseas interventions, and its military encirclement of China with Australia’s aid; China is the obvious Continue reading »
Australia, with fewer secrets to hide, is more compulsively secretive than the US, China or NATO. General Angus Campbell is concerned about “truth decay” and artificial intelligence, worried that eventually citizens of this country will be unable to sift fact from fiction. Countries such as Russia were using disinformation as a weapon of statecraft in America Continue reading »