Tag: United States

Forever Partnership, Forever War

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Alison Broinowski

Dec 2021

…if the next war is against China, over Taiwan, the South or East China Sea, or some contrived event, Australia will become involved, will be a principal target, and will lose the war. China is not the Taliban.

Trade routes or War Games?: Subs and the geopolitics behind the China threat

Arena Online

Clinton Fernandes

1 Oct 2021

Australian strategic planners are well aware that it would be absurd to protect trade with China from China… In the real world, the military build-up is about whether foreign military and intelligence activities can be conducted in another country’s exclusive economic zone.

AUKUS: It’s about Sovereignty, not Submarines

Arena Online

Binoy Kampmark

30 Sep 2021

AUKUS is also a screeching message to powers in the region that the Anglophone bloc, with its vast historical baggage, intends to police the region against a country never mentioned in the joint statement but crystal clear to all present.

The Great Game of smashing countries

Arena Online

John Pilger

25 Aug 2021

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their "allies" destroyed.

Missile Rain

Arena Online

Guy Rundle

8 Jul 2021

The United States’ enemies can no longer assume they are dealing with an erratic amateur who can be taken advantage of. Normal maintenance of a substantially extended empire has been resumed.

China Games

Arena Quarterly no. 6

Clinton Fernandes

Jun 2021

China responded to the US presence in the Bashi Channel by sending Su-30 and J-16 fighter aircraft and Xian H-6 bombers into the area, where they simulated missile attacks on the US vessels.

We Can Hear the Drums of War, But Who Is Beating Them?

Arena Online

Stuart Rollo

13 May 2021

China has now advanced to the point that it is a serious rival to the United States as both military hegemon in Asia and central pivot of the global economy. This is what the brewing war…is all about.

After Trump?: Cancel culture and the new authoritarianism

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Simon Cooper

Mar 2021

After the failed insurrection at the US Capitol building, an event irreconcilably both absurd and frightening, Donald Trump, for so long a master of the attention economy, finally got ‘cancelled’. While many of his Republican colleagues made a last-minute decision (motivated by self-interest) to dump him, the real blow for Trump was the response by corporate America. Facebook and Twitter blocked the president’s social-media accounts, Shopify terminated stores affiliated with him, YouTube removed channels questioning…

Alan Roberts Prize Essay: The Limits of Science Communication

Arena Quarterly no. 5

Chloe Ward

Mar 2021

Knowledge and scientific understanding could have been a democratic inheritance... Instead the West—that is, a powerful, liberal consensus in the West—doubled down on an elitist, technocratic politics, inattentive to social need or the growing crisis of democratic representation...

Fuelling ‘The China Threat’

Arena Quarterly no. 3

Scott Burchill

Sep 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.

When betrayal dresses up as patriotism

Arena Online

Ali Kazak

20 Aug 2020

The US, Israeli and Emirati tripartite declaration of normalisation of relations ... has nothing to do with solving the Palestine question or helping to promote peace in the Middle East, and everything to do … with supporting US president Donald Trump’s campaign to win a second term in office as well as boosting Benjamin Netanyahu’s hold on power…

Trump as political calculator, narcissism as design for living

Arena Online

Mark Furlong

13 Aug 2020

For Trump, it is better to bring the whole country down than to experience the private horror show that would be his lot if he were to be publicly rejected in the forthcoming election.