Asia

Cait Storr is a lawyer, writer and academic at University of Melbourne researching Nauru and other Pacific small island states. On Saturday 8 June, Nauru held a peaceful, indeed almost cheerful, election. Votes were cast and counted and 19 members elected to form the 21st parliament of the

Jonathan Pain is author of The Pain Report and has 29 years of international investment experience. He was born in South Africa and lived in Lesotho, Swaziland, England, Bahrain and now Australia. My first memory of racism was as a young boy in a shop in South Africa. A very elderly African

Michael Green served on the US National Security Council staff from 2001-2005 and is now Senior Vice President for Asia at CSIS and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute. The pundits gave a variety of bad advice to President Obama going into the Sunnylands Summit with Xi Jinping. One

See below for important updates to this story. On the eve of the 'shirt-sleeve summit' between the leaders of the world's two biggest economies, I've stumbled on a recent Bloomberg op-ed which puts a rather different complexion on how China views its relations with the US (my emphasis): On May

Dina Esfandiary is an Iran specialist and a Research Associate in the Non-proliferation and Disarmament programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Next Friday Iran will hold its presidential election. Since 21 May, eight pre-approved candidates have been battling it out to

Jack Georgieff is the 2013 Thawley Research Scholar in International Security at the Lowy Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC. The notion of 'self-reliance' that lies at the heart of Australian defence strategy is woefully under-analysed in our national

Mark Valencia responds to Is China 'Reciprocating' US Maritime Surveillance?: I usually enjoy Rory Medcalf’s iconoclastic analyses. But this one – unless it is tongue in cheek — is quite misleading and full of wishful thinking. Of course China resents US 'surveillance' in its EEZ because

A few days ago the New York Times ran a rather breathless story about how China has emerged as the biggest beneficiary of Iraq's post-Saddam oil boom. The story prompted a bit of commentary on Twitter and a few follow-up pieces, including this one in the Washington Post which argued that China was

Nic Maclellan is co-author of La France dans le Pacifique and After Moruroa: France in the South Pacific. Denise Fisher's post on the re-inscription of French Polynesia on the UN list of non-self-governing territories underplays efforts by French diplomats to scuttle the resolution at the UN

It sounded so perfect. The hawkish Republican war hero John McCain visiting rebel-held Syrian territory to show the locals that not all US politicians are lily-livered liberals who have doubts about arming the Syrian freedom fighters. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which McCain is a

The best stories from the Shangri-la Dialogue, Asia's leading informal defence gathering, do not come from the public utterances of high-profile figures like Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Indeed, the most extraordinary thing I heard at the first full day of this year's dialogue here in Singapore

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has just finished his remarks here at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore and has left for bilateral meetings. What kind of speech was it? I ran into a couple of American journalists this morning who had seen a transcript of Hagel's speech and said there was

Usually we observe strict radio silence on weekends here on The Interpreter, but do check in with us tomorrow and Sunday for analysis and (I hope) some interviews from the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, a think tank conference that has become something of a staple in the Asia Pacific's regional

Earlier this month, Myer Melanesia Program Director Jenny Hayward Jones released a new paper, Big Enough for all of us: Geo-Strategic Competition in the Pacific Islands, challenging assumptions about what China is up to in the Pacific. Jenny's work drew on the research of Dr Philippa

One of the paradoxes of the Syrian crisis has been the way Russia and China have worked determinedly to prevent America from doing something that it clearly does not want to do. I asked a diplomat from a P5 country about this in New York a few weeks ago. He said that while it was clear Obama did

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah's speech on Sunday (which the Iranians would have you believe was watched by Obama live) merely formalised what everyone has known for a while now: Hizbullah and its chief sponsor Iran no longer believe Assad is a lost cause. During my recent trip to

In what is becoming an annual ritual after the Australian budget for Foreign Affairs and Trade has been handed down, I take a look at how DFAT's New Zealand counterpart fared in its own budget-cut fest. The NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade 'Estimates of Appropriations' usually make

The Australian Defence White Paper 2013 was not the only such document to be released recently: France's 2013 White Paper on Defence and National Security appeared the same week. But, as far as strategic perceptions of France in our region are concerned, there the symmetry ends. I looked

Danielle Rajendram is a Research Associate in the Lowy Institute's International Security Program. Today the Lowy Institute, in partnership with the Australia India Institute, has released the results of a nationally representative opinion poll on Indian attitudes towards their future in the world

This is one of those interviews that I wish could have gone longer. Former Taiwan Deputy Defence Minister Dr Chong-Pin Lin visited the Lowy Institute last week for a roundtable with China experts from around Sydney, and he was kind enough to agree to this short chat. Dr Lin has a mild-mannered