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Join economist and former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis for a special talk at the University of Sydney. Yanis will discuss his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, and its implications for Australia as the world enters a 'New Cold War' of geopolitical tensions between the United States and China.
The post Yanis Varoufakis, Australia & the New Cold War in the Age of Technofeudalism appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

The broad consensus among U.S. and Australian policymakers in support of AUKUS masks an ongoing debate in Australia over the wisdom and necessity of the technology-sharing agreement.There are deep divisions in the Australian Labor Party over the planned acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines from the U.S. The government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was able to shut down the dissenters at their party conference earlier this year, but opposition to AUKUS is growing as the full costs become more widely understood.Polling, meanwhile, consistently finds that public support for AUKUS remains below 50%, and that support seems likely to dwindle as the public takes into account the tradeoffs required for funding such a huge military project.There are many Australian critics across the political spectrum who question why their government is making such an ambitious and expensive commitment when it doesn't appear to serve Australian interests. One such critic is Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute, who has written an exceptional new book from a "liberal-conservative" and realist perspective challenging the conventional wisdom about AUKUS and the future of the U.S.-Australian alliance. In "The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace," Roggeveen argues that Australia does not need the nuclear-powered submarines or the closer connection with Washington that they represent, and he proposes instead a strategy aimed at discouraging possible future attacks with a focus on maritime denial and strengthening Australia's relations with Indonesia and the Pacific Island nations. Like the porcupine strategy for Taiwan to which he compares it, the echidna strategy (based on the spiny anteater-like creature) is designed to defend without provoking, and as such it has no need for military capabilities that give Australia the ability to strike at the Chinese mainland. Accordingly, he sees AUKUS as not merely wasteful, but also potentially quite dangerous by antagonizing China and putting Australia on the path to unnecessary participation in a future war alongside the United States.The goal of the echidna strategy, then, is to make Australia like the strategy's adorable namesake: "spiky, but unthreatening."Among other things, "The Echidna Strategy" is a welcome antidote to the hawkish groupthink and threat inflation that dominate the conversation about China. Roggeveen doesn't discount China's growing military capabilities, but he doesn't panic about them, either. Commenting on the push for a much larger military budget, he says, "When we examine the threat coldly, it simply does not demand that kind of effort."The same could be said of the threat that China poses to U.S. interests, and he does say that: "America's core security interests are not threatened by China's rise." As Roggeveen explains, the U.S. will not maintain its commitments in Asia over the longer term "because that order, while favorable and valuable to America, is not a sufficiently vital interest to justify the immense scale of competition required to maintain it."He acknowledges that this runs against conventional wisdom, but he expects that eventually the U.S. will recognize that the costs of its current role in Asia are unnecessary. That is why he considers a long-term bet on the U.S. in an increasingly tight alliance to be an error.Roggeveen also invokes Eisenhower's warning about military spending as theft committed at the expense of other public goods: "Even when managed perfectly, defence spending is a huge weight on a budget that could always be better used to improve the wealth and wellbeing of the Australian people." The high cost of AUKUS over the coming decades would put a massive weight on the budget, and as Roggeveen shows, it is not necessary for Australian security.The chief problems that he identifies with AUKUS are that it is unnecessary and makes Australia less secure. "Australia is embarking on its largest ever defence contract so that it can take the fight to China, yet there is no obvious reason to do so, and nobody asked us to do so. In the process, we will make Australia less secure because we give China a reason to take a more aggressive position towards us, and because we tie ourselves to a defence partner that is becoming increasingly unreliable."The only good news is that it will take so long for the main pillar of AUKUS to be implemented that "there is time for Australia to change course." Roggeveen makes a compelling case in the rest of the book that changing course is essential.One of Australia's key advantages is distance. Roggeveen urges Australia to exploit this advantage as much as possible, which is why he sees the pursuit of capabilities that enable Australia to go on the offensive against China as being so misguided. "Why compress the distance between us when we can exploit it?"He proposes that Canberra focus on defensive capabilities to counter threats as they approach Australia rather than acquiring the means to go on the attack. This is both less provocative and much less expensive, and in the end it will make Australia more secure. As he sees it, the Australian government's current course gets things badly wrong because it "incentivises China to pay more military attention to us." Restrainers in the U.S. would do well to apply the insights from this book to our own policy arguments.While he is focused squarely on Australian foreign policy, Roggeveen's book is a valuable resource for Americans as we debate our government's approach to China and Asia. Many restrainers will agree with his assessment that the current U.S. military presence in Asia isn't needed to secure vital U.S. interests. Because of that assessment, he questions the long-term reliability of the U.S. commitment to the alliance, and he assumes that Australia needs to prepare for a future in which the U.S. is not going to be there to defend it.He acknowledges that the current consensus in Washington seems to be committed to an even more ambitious role in Asia, and he allows that the U.S. might go all-in on rivalry with China, but in that case the echidna strategy will be just as valuable by keeping Australia out of a future U.S.-Chinese clash.One of Roggeveen's many excellent points in "The Echidna Strategy" is that the alliance with the United States exists to serve Australian interests and there are circumstances in which it may be appropriate to let the alliance go. As he puts it, "If refusing to participate in a war over Taiwan triggers the nullification of the alliance, then Australia would be better off without the alliance." This is a refreshingly clear acknowledgment that Australia has no compelling reason to take part in such a war, and it should force policymakers in both Canberra and Washington to rethink their assumptions about this question. One of the purposes of the alliance with Australia is to help preserve international peace and security in the Pacific. It should not be used to dragoon Australia into a war of choice. If Washington tries to use the alliance in this way, it may end up with one less ally.Roggeveen admits that the echidna strategy is not "an emotionally satisfying strategy for Australia," but as he shows throughout the book it is a much smarter and more responsible one. The strategy itself may not be emotionally satisfying, but "The Echidna Strategy" will satisfy its readers.

In the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs, the Lowy Institute's Sam Roggeveen makes assertions about the priorities of China's nuclear targeting of Australia, as well as what he claims will be Australia's missile targeting ...

The Labor party avoided an open stoush over nuclear weapons at last week's national conference. But it would be wrong to imagine the issue's gone away. Nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in a more ...

So far, the 2020s have been marked by tectonic shifts in both technology and international security. Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022, which brought the post–Cold War era to a sudden and violent end, ...

The real message of Falepili seems to have been missed in Australia's negotiations with Tuvaluans. While a transactional relationship is implied, this should be free in giving, not a consequence of vulnerability.

Emerging technologies increasingly make it possible for machines to innovate much faster and more efficiently than humans ever could. The Pentagon can draw some important lessons for technology competition with China by looking at the U.S.-Soviet race to develop nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

While the hot war in Ukraine continues spreading death and destruction, NATO tries to launch a new cold war with Russia, which would likely be a parody of the Cold War against Stalin and Brezhnev's Soviet Union.A few years ago, after Crimea's annexation by Russia, the proclamation of two separate republics in eastern Ukraine, and the failure of the first Minsk Agreements between Europe and Russia, I closely witnessed how the American military-industrial complex and the foreign affairs bubble in Washington immediately took the occasion to fill the void. On their behalf, the Atlantic Council, a think tank with strong connections with NATO, the Pentagon, and diplomacy, solemnly proclaimed the urgency that "the United States must provide lethal (sic) defensive military assistance to Ukraine." A few days later, the second Minsk Agreements to decentralize Ukraine and set a special status for the two republics in the Donbas were signed —without the participation of the United States, and never implemented. In the further process, Ukraine reformed its constitution to enshrine the "strategic course" of becoming a NATO member. Still in September 2021, NATO was performing military exercises in Ukraine.Putin's criminal mistake of attacking Ukraine has suited those belligerent impulses. Yet, the differences with the Red Scare about the Soviet Union are huge. Now there are no nuclear missiles directed over each other. There is no arms race but arms reduction. Russia does not occupy and controls half of Europe. Communist regimes do not rule one-fourth of the world population. There is no political ideology or intellectual penchant for confronting two antagonistic political and economic systems. There are no pro-Russian political parties with popular support in Western democracies. Local wars in Africa, Asia, or Latin America are not exacerbated by the rivalry between two great powers. The economies are interdependent in a globalized world.On one side, Russia's "most significant and direct threat," as stated by the recent NATO summit, is almost pathetic. Putin's aggressiveness is not driven by the feeling of being strong but by the fear of being weak and inferior, the dread of being surrounded by imminent danger. The Russian Empire lost nearly 20% of its population in the Bolshevik Revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union estranged 50% of its inhabitants. As compensation, Crimea and Donbas would add barely 4% to Russia's current population. Russia's army is more powerful than it would correspond to its economy and population sizes. But the old empire keeps declining, and the Ukraine war is an alibi for domestic sufferance and rhetoric of "national unity." On the other side, the rearmament of the US and its allies will be extremely limited. The United States military spending, up to 8% of GDP in the 1980s, is now below 4%. US troops in Europe are less than one-third of those during the Cold War. There will not be a display of new troops but a rotation of a few currently existing ones. The increase of military spending up to 2% of GDP in the other NATO members is just a hypothesis for successive governments and electoral cycles. All in all, NATO's new Strategic Concept looks like the opposite of warrior President Ted Roosevelt's lemma: it is speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. Meanwhile, Ukraine will continue suffering death and destruction. It will not become a member of NATO, which the summit in Madrid did not mention as a possibility, in contrast to its warm support in the 2021 summit. The Ukrainians will also keep dreaming of European Union membership, which took between eight and twelve years for other fourteen former communist countries. The candidate Ukraine is larger than all these countries and the most corrupt and poorest in Europe.We should never forget that politicians' horizon is short-term. NATO's previous Strategic Concept in 2010, which cuddled Russia as a "strategic partner," was canceled less than two years later. In 2024, there will be elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, and to the European Parliament. It is highly dubious that the war will be a relevant campaign issue by then. That year there should also be elections in Russia and Ukraine, but these are to be seen.==In Spanish in El Pais click

Member of Parliament from Parramatta, home to the largest number of Indian diaspora residents, Andrew Charlton provides an engaging account of Australia-India relations comprehensively taking stock of the political, strategic, socio-cultural and economic evolution from Menzies-Nehru animosity to Albanese-Modi bromance.

An emerging "new Cold War" appears to pit democracies, led by the US, against autocracies, led by Russia and China. But the analogy between today's regime competition and that of the "old" Cold War is deceptive. China and Russia today are much more closely intertwined with Western democracies than the Soviet Union ever was. These linkages will complicate the conflict considerably. There is already growing pressure to engage in "decoupling", that is, to break these interdependencies. Research on past instances of decoupling shows that such processes often exacerbate conflict. This research offers four lessons about the general dynamics of decoupling – and little cause for optimism about today's disengagement processes.
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Matthias Dembinski



Dr. Matthias Dembinski ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Programmbereich "Internationale Institutionen" und Projektleiter an der HSFK. Er forscht zu Fragen von Gerechtigkeit in den internationalen Beziehungen, regionalen Sicherheitsorganisationen und humanitären Interventionen. Sein regionaler Schwerpunkt ist Westeuropa. // Dr Matthias Dembinski is Senior Researcher in the research department "International Institutions" and project manager at PRIF. His research interests are questions of justice in international relations, regional security organisations and humanitarian interventions. His regional focus is Western Europe.

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Der Beitrag Decoupling and the "New Cold War": Cautionary Lessons from the Past erschien zuerst auf PRIF BLOG.

Originally published on 9 August 2023. In the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs, the Lowy Institute's Sam Roggeveen makes assertions about the priorities of China's nuclear targeting of Australia, as well as what he ...

Australia's involvement in the events surrounding the tragic massacres in the northeast of Sri Lanka in 2009 raises important questions about our nation's commitment to protecting innocent Tamil civilians. The Tamil civilian population in Sri Lanka endured significant suffering due to strategic actions taken by the Sri Lankan government that infringed upon various international human […]

Australia faces the new abnormality of a long-term weather system where geoeconomics and "sloppy protectionism" predominates. Navigating the "polycrisis" will require diversification and slightly more than simply hoping Washington will steady the ship of political upheaval.

Some countries embroiled in the Cold War enjoyed pronounced and almost perfectly incessant improvements in survival from the end of the Second World War though the end of the Cold War and on to the present day. Yet the United States is struggling—all too often, unsuccessfully—to achieve health improvement from one generation to the next.
The post Who Won the Cold War? Part III appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Despite intervening economic progress and medical advance, mortality rates in America were no better for the Class of 1990 by the time they reached their late 20s than in their parents' generation, 30 years earlier.
The post Who Won the Cold War? Part II appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.