LONDON – The proposal by the United States and Russia to hold a diplomatic conference to end the carnage in Syria deserves a less skeptical …

GENEVA – As delegates from 189 countries gather to prepare for the next Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, due in 201…

LONDON – It is difficult to separate some of my personal memories of Margaret Thatcher – mundane but revealing – from the sweeping judgments…

MELBOURNE – There is nothing like exposure to smart and idealistic young people to make jaded and world-weary policymakers and commentators …

CANBERRA – North Korea’s latest nuclear test is bad news, both for Northeast Asia and for a world that needs to reduce its reliance on nucle…

CANBERRA – Japan is again alienating its neighbors and driving its friends to despair over the issue of accepting responsibility for its war…

CANBERRA – If we were hoping for peace in our time, 2012 did not deliver it. Conflict grew ever bloodier in Syria, continued to grind on in …

CANBERRA – The wisest words on the Second Gaza War may have come from an Israeli living in a kibbutz near the Gaza border. “If you want to d…

NEW YORK – One of the worst atrocity crime stories of recent decades has barely registered in the world’s collective conscience. We remember…

SINGAPORE – US President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy landscape is littered with deflated balloons. Soaring speeches, high hopes, and great…

CANBERRA – Sometimes countries arrive at good policy only after exhausting all available alternatives. So it has been with Australia’s belat…

CANBERRA – The South China Sea – long regarded, together with the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula, as one of East Asia’s three major …

GENEVA – The trouble with brinkmanship of the type now being played out over Iran’s nuclear program is that it is so easy to fall over the c…

CANBERRA – You wouldn’t expect much interest beyond the United States, or even beyond his own state, when an 80-year-old conservative legisl…

CANBERRA – Perhaps it is going too far to say, as someone did after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill two years ago, that most Americans want a p…

CANBERRA – Despite the United Nations Security Council’s belated endorsement of UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan’s peacemaking mission in Syria, …

CANBERRA – Last month, the Doomsday Clock’s hands were moved a minute closer to midnight by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the respe…

NEW YORK – Ten months ago, the United Nations Security Council, with no dissent, authorized the use of “all necessary measures” to protect c…

CANBERRA – Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident turned president, and North Korean despot Kim Jong-il might have lived on differ…

CANBERRA – For grand strategy buffs, this has been quite a month, with several events looking like the kind of turning points that will cons…

NEW YORK – Good news not only sells less well than bad news, but also often seems harder to believe. Reaction to Harvard psychologist Stephe…

MELBOURNE – Shortly before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist in November 1995, I met him…

CANBERRA –As China gets closer to overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economic power, and its disinclination to accept US mi…

MELBOURNE –At a time when the horrific events in Norway remind us how much murderous bigotry there still is in the world, perhaps a story fr…

CANBERRA – As a British court weighs whether Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden, and American prosecutors weigh the criminal char…