United States
Sticks and carrots in Biden’s Russia strategy
The Biden administration’s recent comprehensive package of sanctions against Russian individuals and organisations is probably the clearest indication yet of a US decision to use…
America and China: Imagining the worst
Book Review: Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (Penguin 2021)
The book begins with a clash in the South China Sea – an imagined conflict,…
Light at the beginning of the tunnel?
The world has had three months now – we are approaching the “100 days” – to observe the Joe Biden presidency. Have we learnt anything? Has anything changed for the outside world?
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Iran-US-Israel: Boxing out of the shadows
Just as the negotiations between Tehran and Washington appear to be making some, albeit slow, progress over the United State rejoining the nuclear deal known as the Joint…
The Quad (finally) delivers: Can it be sustained?
On 19 March, the leaders of four important democracies of the Indo-Pacific region – the United States, Japan, Australia and India – held (virtually) their first-ever “Quad Summit…
Covid recovery, in Australia and the world
In much of the world, Covid-19 infections continue apace, but the global economy is rapidly recovering from last year’s slump. World trade volumes and industrial production were…
Economic diplomacy: Global tax, education exports and Team Australia
Tax and spend
US President Joe Biden may be grabbing the global headlines by boosting world growth with his big spending and international security with his telephone diplomacy…
Closer Taiwan-US ties are stabilising the region, not the opposite
Those who’ve been reading the news in the past few weeks could be forgiven for thinking we are on the precipice of war in the Taiwan Strait. Not only do some analysts argue that…
Washington risks an unsustainable climate policy
A couple of months after the inauguration of the new Biden administration, the 18 March Alaska summit provided the first big test of US-China relations. While most of the talks…
America’s border crisis: Good intentions go south
Spare a thought for US Vice President Kamala Harris, just given carriage for the public-policy problem from hell: leading the White House response to a surge in migrants seeking…