The Dangerous Divide: Australia’s Two Voices on the China Challenge

01/29/2026 By Robbin Laird November 2025 articles published in The Australian reveal a troubling disconnect at the heart of Australian policy toward China, one that raises fundamental questions about how democracies should respond to authoritarian pressure while maintaining essential economic relationships. The contrast between Foreign Minister Penny Wong's carefully calibrated diplomatic messaging and the stark, unvarnished warnings from Australia's intelligence chiefs… Read more »

Beyond Professional Forces: The Imperative of Whole-of-Society Defence

01/28/2026 By Robbin Laird My latest book on Australian defence has focused on the significant challenge facing liberal democracies to develop credible defense in depth capabilities that extend far beyond traditional force structures to encompass whole-of-society considerations. The contemporary security environment demands a fundamental reimagining of how nations prepare for, deter, and respond to existential threats. The lessons learned from ongoing… Read more »

John Blackburn and the Resilience Challenge

01/27/2026 John Blackburn, Air Vice Marshal (Retired) of the Royal Australian Air Force, stands as a leading Australian figure in advancing the discourse on national resilience, from traditional defense concepts to critical infrastructure protection and energy security. His journey, professional background, major published works, and founding of the Institute for Integrated Economic Research Australia (IIER-A) have collectively shaped a new paradigm… Read more »

Trump’s Transactional New World Order

01/26/2026 By Nick Dowling In 2016, on a stage at Ohio State, I was asked to debate Donald Trump’s foreign policy. My answer was blunt: there wasn’t one. Trump wasn’t a neoclassical realist. He wasn’t an isolationist. He wasn’t anything you could diagram in an IR textbook. He improvised. And it was risky. Nearly a decade later, the fog has lifted.… Read more »

Fleet Redesign in the Age of Maritime Autonomous Systems

01/23/2026 By Robbin Laird The traditional architecture of naval power centered on capital ships projecting force through manned platforms is approaching obsolescence. Western navies stand at an inflection point where incremental adaptation will no longer suffice. The emergence, proliferation, and rapid development of maritime autonomous systems (MAS) demands nothing less than fundamental redesign of how we conceptualize, organize, and employ naval… Read more »

Venezuela, Energy Warfare, and the Global War in Ukraine

01/22/2026 By Robbin Laird The January 3, 2026 U.S. operation in Venezuela can be understood not as an isolated hemispheric intervention, but as a deliberate strike against Russia's external energy ecosystem and sanctions-evasion machinery, designed to erode Moscow's war-fighting capacity in Ukraine over time. What is being reordered is not merely a hostile regime in the Western Hemisphere, but the geography… Read more »