In this column I am going to use three of the current top news stories to illustrate the disconnect that is everywhere in the Western mind. Let us begin with the family separation issue. The separation of children from immigrant/refugee/asylum parents has caused such public outcry that President Trump has backed off his policy and…
“Further into the Afghanistan mission, after multiple deployments, soldiers began to refer to members going ‘up the Congo’.” — Chris Masters, The Sydney Morning Herald, Jun 9, 2018 They operate with impunity in areas already deemed lawless by their civilising superiors. Afghanistan, derided as a country of anarchic sensibilities, was never going to be a…
All bets are off on the outcome of India Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s potentially ground-breaking meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this Friday and Saturday in Wuhan. Things have not exactly started in auspicious mode. After a meeting in Beijing of foreign ministers represented at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), India, once again refused to support…
In early April, reports began emerging that China was seeking to build a military base in the Pacific. Are these reports “fake news,” or are we witnessing the early stages of a regional showdown between Western powers and China? The unsubstantiated rumor of a Chinese military base in the Pacific was first reported on by…
Of late there have been quite a number of know-it-all ‘academics’ ‘political analysts’ dollar earning civil society coming forward promoting the displacement of Buddhism enshrined in Article 9 to be replaced with a ‘secular’ constitution in Sri Lanka. They love to quote extensively how West is secular. If readers were wiser they would look for…
In 2005 Japan raised the possibility of a separate grouping of four nations, Australia, India, Japan and the United States, as a potential counterweight to the growing power of China. It was an ill-considered notion then, and nothing has happened since then to make it a better idea. If anything, it is a worse idea…
