Scott Burchill is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University and is most recently the author of Misunderstanding International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
The new moral panic about ‘the China threat’, and the comparative indifference in Australia about significantly more intrusive forms of foreign interference by the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, is orientalist and often racist: China is not a member of the Western club, so it is suspect.
In a perspicacious address last November, former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby said 'today, the Australia-China relationship is at its lowest point since diplomatic relations began forty-six years ago'. At the level of official contacts, especially at heads-of-government level, Beijing has put Canberra in the deep freeze. Raby said the blame for this state of affairs is shared by both countries, though not evenly given the spate of diplomatic errors made by recent Liberal-National…
Trump, Clinton and the US national-security establishment According to investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, the CIA and other allied intelligence agencies threw their considerable political weight behind Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. She was rightly seen as more interventionist than Trump, particularly on Syria, as she had been on Libya, while her opponent seemed disturbingly close to Russia's Vladimir Putin - an approach directly at odds with Deep State assumptions of permanent hostility between…
