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Raoul Heinrichs

Articles by Raoul Heinrichs (7)

  • Raoul Heinrichs 24 Jun 2015 10:55

    How Australia can strengthen the US alliance and protect against its failure

    Over at ASPI's The Strategist, a timely debate is underway on the future of Australia's alliance with the US. For Geoffrey Barker, the changing regional order is upending Canberra's long-standing alliance calculus. With the costs and risks of alliance on their way up as China rises, and with the the credibility of American assurances diminishing, it may be time, he argues, for Australia to gracefully bow out. Rod Lyon disagrees, though less with Barker's analysis than with his prescriptions.
  • Raoul Heinrichs 3 Jun 2015 14:17

    China's defence white paper is historic for Australia, and not in a good way

    Last week, China's State Council released a new White Paper on Military Strategy. Although somewhat overshadowed by heightened tensions in the South China, the document has deep long-term implications for Australian defence. For the first time since World War II, a regional state is officially developing the full suite of conventional military capabilities, and now also the doctrine, to pose a direct threat to Australia and its vital interests.
  • Raoul Heinrichs 22 Aug 2013 14:03

    The WikiLeaks Party's foreign policy is surprisingly tame

    What a difference a few years makes. When, in 2006, WikiLeaks set out to begin exposing official malfeasance from the shadowy recesses of cyberspace, it did so as a largely amorphous organisation and in relative obscurity. By the end of 2010 a string of high profile disclosures had changed much of that.
  • Raoul Heinrichs 29 Jul 2013 11:30

    China's worrying blue-water ambitions

    [youtube:HUPVW2ep4oc#] Compared with the Rudd Government's 2009 Defence White Paper, which was criticised for what many viewed as its alarmist treatment of China's rise, the most recent White Paper, released in April this year, has become known for its considerably more relaxed take on the issue. There may be good diplomatic and political reasons for this.
  • Raoul Heinrichs 7 Feb 2013 15:39

    China at sea: Wake up, Australia!

    For Australia, the principal threat posed by the growth of China's military power is not yet to its direct strategic interests but rather to the US-led order from which much of Australia's security derives. As China's ongoing accumulation of advanced air, maritime and surveillance capabilities hollows out US military dominance, hitherto the defining feature of Asia's order, the benign regional dynamics which have resulted from that order, and from which Australia has benefited for so long, are b