In a disrupted world, how Australia manages its relationship with the dominant regional, and potentially global, power matters. China is here to stay, and no amount of Australian stridency changes that fact.

Australia’s relationships with the countries of the Pacific islands region are many and varied. This policy brief focuses on how Australia can further develop and strengthen its relationships with Pacific island countries and with the Pacific islands region more generally.

This report highlights and recognises the value of social media for the defence community — especially as a means of providing information and support for currently serving personnel and their families—by supporting the use of Facebook for those purposes by all defence units.

In a post-Covid-19 world, the India-US relationship is likely to be important, not just in the context of South Asia, but also for the Indo-Pacific region as well as globally. In recent months, Washington and Delhi have signalled that they will strengthen defence co-operation.

The Minsk agreements rest on two irreconcilable interpretations of Ukraine’s sovereignty: is Ukraine sovereign, as Ukrainians insist, or should its sovereignty be limited, as Russia demands? Instead of trying to resolve an unresolvable contradiction, Western policymakers should acknowledge the starkness of the Minsk conundrum.