Since the start of the Pacific war in 1942, Australia has relied on the military capacity of the United States to underwrite its security. Our alliance with the US is our key strategic partnership and the central pillar of our national security policy. It makes sense, therefore, to keep an eye on developments in US...

This report uses the record of the US president's speeches and remarks to explore what might be called the 'Obama doctrine' —a set of interconnected views about US leadership, the use of military force, and the future of US primacy in the 21st century. For over sixty years, Australia has done well out of a...

The nuclear arms control agenda currently enjoys a prominence that it has not had since the first half of the 1990s. This report explores a range of issues, including President Obama's Prague commitments, the looming Global Nuclear Security Summit, and the scheduled Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference.

This report argues that it's time for Defence to more fully incorporate domestic disaster assistance tasks as part of its core business. Defence is likely to be used more frequently in the future to assist in domestic disaster management. There will be larger and more frequent extreme weather events due to climate change; increased vulnerability...

The latest formal statement of US defence policy, the QDR, plays down sweeping ambition in order to remain focused on the tasks immediately at hand—Iraq and above all, Afghanistan. And it sees a future of ‘hybrid’ warfare, likely to involve a diversity of actors and to blur the traditional distinction between inter-state conflict and protracted...