Review

We’re asking contributors to put together their own collected observations like this one – and as always, if you’ve got an idea to pitch for The Interpreter, drop a line via the…

A Marshall Plan for Ukraine?

The war must yet be won, however both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have called for a “Marshall Plan” style commitment to…

War crimes: The trial of a fallen French war hero and lessons for today

Book review: France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, by Julian Jackson (Allen Lane 2023) How might Vladimir Putin ever be tried for war crimes in Ukraine? How would a jury…

Imagining Trump’s second term

Review: Canada Alone by Kim Richard Nossal (Dundurn, 2023), and Trump’s Australia by Bruce Wolpe (Allen and Unwin, 2023) After 9/11, French newspaper Le Monde turned over its…

The decline of Europe: “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light”

Book Review: Homelands: A Personal History of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash (Bodley Head, 2023) A decade or so ago, Timothy Garton Ash might well have envisaged a memoir-cum…

AUKUS: A debate after the fact is still worth having

Book review: The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (La Trobe University Press, 2023) When Robert Menzies announced his retirement in January 1966,…

Plumbing the depths of the former East Germany’s grotesque delusion

Book review: Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990, by Katja Hoyer (Penguin 2023) Many of us only know the former East Germany (GDR) at second hand, through the eviscerating…

Boris Johnson: Does distance really lend enchantment to the view?

Book review: Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell (Atlantic, 2023) Are we better off waiting for tardy but considered analyses of our political…

A compelling voice for rethinking Australia’s national security

Sam Roggeveen’s basic storyline in The Echidna Strategy – that the China threat is grossly exaggerated, and that Australia should not, and need not, rely on America for our…

Learning Cold War lessons of espionage anew

Book review: Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West (Hachette, 2023) It’s still not known how close the world came to nuclear war in November…