Obama, The Post-American President

    

During the 2012 presidential debates, Obama scorned Mitt Romney for having identified Russia as one of America’s geo-political adversaries: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Obama used to be a funny man, or at least the guy who wrote his one-liners was. But the joke is over and America needs a new Ronald Reagan more urgently than ever. His resolve in the 1980s to station Cruise and Pershing II missiles in the Federal Republic of Germany put paid to Brezhnev’s SS-20 prospective game-changer. A few years later Mikhail Gorbachev was signing off on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) and all but conceding defeat in the Cold War. That’s how fast things can move when you have the absolutely right – or totally wrong – person pulling the levers of power.

To continue reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/03/obama-first-post-american-president/

The Downfall of Obama's Middle East Policy

Hard-nosed geopolitical thinkers such as George Friedman – CEO of Strafor, the private intelligence and forecasting company – argue that al-Qaeda’s furtive attack on September 11, 2011, demonstrated not its strength relative to the United States but the Islamic terrorist organisation’s impotence. Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21^st Century (2009), which I reviewed in the October 2009 edition of Quadrant, presumed Uncle Sam’s uncontested geopolitical supremacy ruled out any genuine threat to the Pax Americana in the twenty-first century, apart from the slow-burning fuse of Mexifornia. Nevertheless, the ground has shifted in the five short years of the Obama presidency and old certainties are no longer assured. 

To keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/03/downfall-obamas-middle-east-doctrine/

More People Power!

The freedom-loving people of the Ukraine have seen off Vladimir Putin's puppet, President Viktor Yanukovych. After fleeing Kiev, he later reappeared in eastern Ukraine and made a brief statement on a regional television service - speaking in Russian rather than Ukrainian. Here is a link to a fascinating article in The Sydney Morning Herald written by Max Delany.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/curious-check-out-ukraine-leaders-home-20140223-hvdhl.html

Sniping From The Cheap Seats

Lone Survivor is the new film by Peter Berg that lefty critics in America love to hate. The movie is a Hollywood version of Marcus Luttrel’s Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (2006). Marcus Luttrel, as the title of his book suggests, survived a mission that went horribly wrong. In the movie, a fictional version of his four-man Navy SEAL team has to fight off a whole lot more Taliban-aligned gunmen than in Luttrel’s memoir, but that’s not why the lefties are prickly about Berg’s film.   

To keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/01/sniping-cheap-seats/

The Kaiserreich's War

"WELL, FRITZ, AND WHAT DID YOU THINK OF PARIS?"

The title of Max Hastings’ new book, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War (2013), almost says it all. An estimated 9.5 million military personnel, along with close to 7 million civilians, perished as a consequence of the First World War; and to those figures can be added 20 million wounded. Paul Ham’s 1914: The Year The World Ended (2013) is, in some aspects, no less a tour de force than Hastings’ Catastrophe. His character portraits are often interesting if one-sided, his account of the Battle of Marne detailed, and the suffering of ordinary people clearly depicted. Nevertheless, the ultimate significance of the First World War eludes him. After such horrific carnage, the hope that it would be The War to End All Wars was dashed with the Second World War’s death toll reaching somewhere between 60 and 85 million. What went wrong? According to Hastings, it was failure to understand the lessons of 1914, a problem that haunts us still, an astonishing one hundred years later.

To keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/kaiserreichs-war/

2013: From Woe to Wilson

Prime Minister Gillard’s 2013 New Year’s missive to the nation was brimful of hope. Her administration, thanks to “strong public finances”, could get on with what it did best, helping to “modernise our country” and providing “welcome” assistance to ordinary Australians. The new School Kids Bonus meant that in 2013 the “typical family” was going to be $760 a year better off, while an injection of federal funds into education would ensure a Labor-governed Australia continued to become “a world leader in school education”. The PM even had a plan for electricity prices that would “hold bills down by up to $250 a year.” By July 2013 the Gillard government would be ready to launch the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). No wonder the upbeat finish: “So let's say Happy New Year to each other in a spirit of confidence and optimism.”

To keep reading the article, click this link:

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2013/12/2014-woe-wilson/ 

Boris the Wizard of Oz - Salisbury Review, Winter 2013-14

The redoubtable Boris had just won over the locals, extolling the merits of Melbourne, as he delivered the keynote speech at the 2013 Melbourne Writers Festival: a city of “dynamism and openness and generosity” and “blessed like London with a superb climate, public bicycles, free museums, and a brilliant Oystercard system called the Myki whose complexities I have yet to fathom.” Maybe it was his unbridled enthusiasm that prompted Sally Roycroft, an Australian teacher, to acquaint the Mayor of London with her story. Possessing an Australian passport rather than a EU one, she informed him, had brought an abrupt end to her career as an educator in London.