Global Outlook

The Dr. H.V. Evatt Foundation publishes the Evatt Journal. Volume 21, published in April, was a special issue on ‘90 Seconds to Midnight’, referencing the famous Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, edited by Casey Thompson and Huw Phillips. The Toda Peace Institute’s Senior Research Fellow, Professor Ramesh Thakur, who contributed a chapter, was a panellist at the launch of the journal in Canberra on Thursday 1 June. This is the text of his initial remarks.

If Yoon continues to struggle to find a sensible balance between values and the national interest and to open a new horizon for crisis management and preventive diplomacy, his national security policy and foreign policy seem doomed to fail.

if the US and China were to set aside their national egos and stop playing power politics, together they might be able to take a giant step toward saving tens of thousands of lives and preventing further destruction of Ukraine.

How to deal with China? The Western industrialised countries have been trying for some time to find a convincing China strategy. The seven major economic powers that make up the G7 agree that it is not a matter of de-coupling economically from China, but of avoiding risks and reducing dependencies. This strategy is now referred to by the catchy Anglo-Saxon term "de-risking".

Dramatic changes in a regional order take place as the result of large wars between great powers or internal political changes to these powers, like revolutions. What strikes me as so peculiar is that the Indo-Pacific strategy—first proposed by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then elaborated by US Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden—and the resulting new order in the region have emerged as a predominant paradigm in such a short time, even as the previous Asia-Pacific order remains intact.

In January this year President Yoon Suk-yeol became the first incumbent South Korean president to raise the possibility of an indigenous bomb for South Korea. But going nuclear would likely hurt rather than enhance South Korea’s global prestige.