The Tuesday firing (or resignation) of president Donald Trump’s third national security advisor, John Bolton, was hardly a surprise. The rift between the two men had been the subject of news pieces ...

Switching for a while from fiction to fact, Amitav Ghosh has written an account of “perhaps the oldest and most powerful medicine known to man”, an “opportunistic pathogen” named opium. Opium, its ...

In late October 2025, the US quietly paid its overdue fees to the World Trade Organization. The payment indicates a shift in the administration’s attitude to the WTO, which it had blamed for allowing ...

Of all the countries on the sidelines of the Hanoi summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, few were watching more intently than China. Chinese financial and trade support effectively facilitated ...

The first Trump administration aspired to acquire Greenland; the second is now seriously increasing the pressure. Greenland, a large island in the Arctic, has been part of Denmark since 1814. Today, ...

There has been much written about Australia’s high-risk fuel security situation, noting that around 90% of the liquid fuel we use is derived from oil sourced from overseas, with most commentary ...

Recent US boardings of oil tankers linked to Venezuela have prompted claims of piracy and illegality under international law. In reality, many of these boardings rest on a sound legal basis. Boarding ...

At the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November 2025, Indonesia arrived with a pipeline of around 90 million tonnes of potential carbon credits, expecting nearly US$960 million in transactions. Yet ...

South Korea must be careful not to politicise high-level defections from the North. By politicising these defections in a democracy-versus-autocracy binary, the Yoon administration is exaggerating the ...

An expanded US military presence will benefit efforts to stand up to China. But Filipinos are wary of the social cost. Although the agreement does not allow the establishment of permanent military ...

There will be a tendency in Australia to write off the American night raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro as an isolated incident in South America with little local relevance. A ...

As Indonesia accelerates its network of Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements (CEPAs) from Europe to North America, mastering the narrative is increasingly becoming an imperative that ...