Category: Geopolitics

  • Simandou and other dark clouds

    We once proclaimed that our wealth was derived by riding ‘on the sheep’s back’. More recently, we have ridden the iron ore train but all good rides come to an end and dark clouds are gathering on the horizon. The threat to our long-term prosperity is becoming clear. Currently, China and Australia are bound together…

  • Priorities

    For most of 2022, and until the great counter-offensive broke on the Russian defence lines of Zaporozhzhia on mid-2023, it seemed that the greatest priority of the Biden administration, and most of Congress, was promoting and resourcing Ukraine’s proxy war against Russia. The problems were mounting up even before the June-July catastrophe. The NATO countries…

  • Building Hamas

    On the 8th of October, an angry article appeared in The Times of Israel.  For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces, or so ran the headline. One has to read some way into the article to discover that it was not only Netanyahu-led governments that followed the policy of…

  • Israel’s Tet Moment?

    Shortly after midnight on January 30-31, 1968, during celebrations of the Lunar New Year (Tet) , NVA and Viet Cong (VC or NLF) forces launched the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. The intel.gov site(*) includes pages on declassified Tet documents, and a 50th anniversary retrospective on the Offensive. According to the latter, 70-80,000 troops in…

  • Immutable truths and Ukraine

    In geopolitics, there are a number of immutable truths.  First and foremost, all nations act in their own best interests.  We can all point to assorted examples but the United States exercising its foreign policy can be a brutal display of self-interest.  This is magnified because the USA is (currently) the dominant force on the…

  • Aftermath

    Feel that chill in the air? If you think its frosty in your location, it is frozen solid between Russian President Putin and Wagner chief Prigozhin. And so it is that we are now one week after the “March of Justice” that saw Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group stage an uprising. But first, a few MSM…

  • Well, that was a weekend to remember

    In what was probably the most enthralling weekend since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the USSR (1991), events of this weekend again placed the Russian military, politics and intrigue squarely in front of the world. And like the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, so much could…

  • May you live in interesting times

    You already probably know Mearsheimer’s view of the conflict, at least in respect of its cause, which he largely places at the feet of the US (and NATO) and the decision of Bush Jr. to move to have Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO. He again goes over this terrain but also looks at the prospects…

  • Compare the pair

    Millions of words have been written about the creeping encroachment of NATO eastward towards the border of the Russian Federation. Recent media reports suggest the Turkey will soon drop its objections to Finland joining the bloc with only Hungary’s objections yet to be overcome.  One can only imagine the pressure Hungarian politicians will endure as…

  • A Summary of Hersh’s ‘How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline’

    Overnight, Seymour Hersh published How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. Here are the key points. The explosives were allegedly planted months earlier, during a mid-summer NATO exercise: Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three…