China’s economic leverage: perception and reality

Perceptions of Australia’s vulnerability to Chinese economic pressure are exaggerated. Some individual sectors are more vulnerable than others but this does not extend to the economy as a whole. Economic pressure that would have the biggest impact on Australia, notably through the iron ore trade,...

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The Trump presidency and Australia’s security: don’t panic, don’t relax

Future US international policy has become uncertain, with the unpredictability of President Trump and deep divisions in political and public opinion. Security competitors will severely test US resolve and power, while allies will seek to hedge against US unpredictability as well as against Chinese...

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Did Obama have a grand strategy?

While campaigning for President in 2008, Barack Obama proposed a new direction in American strategy that would reverse the erroneous foreign policy choices of his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Senator Obama designed a strategy to ostensibly rewrite the United States’ relationship with the...

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Xinjiang and the Trans-nationalization of Uyghur Terrorism: Cracks in the “New Silk Road”?

President Xi Jinping’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” strategy has magnified Chinese concern for the security of its long restive northwestern province, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Xinjiang, as Owen Lattimore argued, throughout much of recorded history constituted (along with...

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The U.S.-Australia Alliance in an Era of Change: Living Complacently?

U.S. primacy is both a strategic choice and an empirical condition, and thus analysis regarding the future of U.S. primacy should focus on both ideational (i.e., policy choices) and material variables (i.e., relativities of power).1 We are now witnessing significant shifts in the realms of U.S....

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US Grand Strategy and National Security: The Dilemmas of Primacy, Decline and Denial

The foreign policy crises that the USA has confronted under the administration of President Barack Obama have generated profound uncertainty about whether the USA can maintain what has been its consistent grand strategy since the end of the Cold War: primacy. The authors argue, drawing on a...

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"Denial in Australian Strategic Thought"

Although denial has been at the centre of Australian strategic thought for decades, it has frequently been used as a broad catch-all term. This article shows, however, that there are two distinct denial traditions in Australian strategic thought: anti-access denial and area denial. Despite the...

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The Impact of Ethnic Minorities on China’s Foreign Policy: The Case of Xinjiang and the Uyghur

This article argues, through a case study of the evolving impact of the Xinjiang and Uyghur issue, that the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) ethnic minorities have been a significant factor in Beijing’s foreign relations throughout its history. Since the end of the Cold War in particular, China’s...

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The Evolution of Southeast Asian Regionalism: Foreign Power Support for Regional Initiatives, 1947-77

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Donald Trump and the Traditions of American Foreign Policy: The Return of the Jacksonian Tradition

This article examines the wellsprings of Donald Trump’s nascent foreign policy program. It argues that the locus of the Republican president’s foreign policy agenda is found within the Jacksonian tradition of American foreign policy identified by Walter Russell Mead. Here, notions of “national...

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