Australia and the New Silk Roads
In January 1904 Sir Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, presented a paper to the Royal Geographical Society. The paper was entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In his presentation...
Australia's Foreign Policy: Time for a Rethink
On Hiroshima Day this year the recently retired Director-General of Australia’s premier spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO, Mr David Irvine, addressed a meeting organized by the Griffith University (Brisbane Asia Institute...
On Political Aspects of Economic Integration in the Asia-Pacific Region
The complexity of the situation emerging in the Asia-Pacific Region is manifested in a contradictory interweaving of political and economic regional trends, the motivation of which is mainly based on the rapid emergence of China as one of the leading...
The Trans-Pacific Partnership : A Free Trade Agreement?
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP currently nearing its final stages of negotiation purports to be about increasing trade and economic co-operation among its twelve negotiating parties. These twelve countries include...
The Schizophrenic Australian Foreign Policy
Earlier this month on 13 May 2015 David Shear, the US Department of Defence Assistant Secretary for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs addressed the US Senate Foreign Relations committee. Mr Shear...
Indonesia: A Tidbit for the ISIS
Responses to events in the Middle East have drifted all the way to Indonesia, and with such force that they have become a threat to national security. Indonesia, with a population of 250 million people, is the largest Muslim country and at the same time the youngest, judging...
Abbott's Anti-Putin, Anti-China Policy puts Australia on Crash Course
Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott's promise to shirt front Putin over MAS MH17 turned out to be a bluff, and Abbott's rejection of the Chinese chartered Asia...
About Meetings "on the Sidelines" of APEC
The latest APEC forum, held from 5 to 11 November in Beijing, confirmed two related trends, which have been emerging for a long time in opposite directions. The first is the falling of APEC itself in the role of global political processes as a regional quasi-organization...
Australia's Confusion in the Modern Regional Game
Australia is rarely mentioned in European political science journals. It’s an exotic prosperous country, a paradise for tourists, located just on the opposite side of the globe – that’s what an average European recalls of this continent-state, and all this...
Geopolitical aspects of the RIMPAC 2014 naval exercises
The world’s largest naval exercises, Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC, are currently being held in the Pacific Ocean. They began on June 26 and will continue until August 1, 2014. This year they include 49 ships, 6 submarines, over 200 planes and 25,000 military personnel from...
The Situation in Southeast Asia in light of the Crimean Crisis
The international political and expert community is just beginning to awake from the shock raised by the situation in Crimea. Independent of further development of the Ukrainian crisis on the whole, the Crimean situation in itself deserves scrutiny at political, diplomatic, military...
China and South-East Asia. Part 1
