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Report from Moscow
(Currently in Sheremetyevo airport awaiting my flights to Doha > Brisbane.) With a population of well over 20 million, fascinating history, brilliant public transport, near endless places of interest and modern facilities, Moscow is one of the world’s great cities. Moscow never seems to sleep with any number of stores, clubs, shows and restaurants/cafes open…
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Report from Kislovodsk
Ahhh, Kislovodsk. Love this place. For those unaware, Kislovodsk is approximately 1,500kms SSE from Moscow located in the Stavropol Krai region (North Caucasus) located between the Black and Caspian Seas (each about 300kms away). The resident population of about 150,000 swells to well over 200,000 during the summer holiday period. ? Temp ranges are acceptable…
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Follow the breadcrumbs
In a recent article in the Australia, Greg Sheridan wrote “How China and its allies are winning the new cold war”. To slightly paraphrase one section, Sheridan wrote: “Beijing is taking every step to equip itself to fight a major war against the US. All the authoritarian (nations) have built, or are building, wartime economies.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…