America and the West are more isolated from the rest of the world than at any time since WWII.

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 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.

The G7 summit of foreign ministers in Japan in mid-April sought to emphasise the need for a unified China policy. However, the diplomatic pronouncements can only gloss over the internal contradictions, but not eliminate them.

The strategic landscape of the Middle East is changing rapidly, but not in favour of the United States as the traditional powerful actor in the region. Continued adversarial US–Iranian relations and regional Arab states’ growing concerns about Washington’s reliability as an ally have widened the arena for Russia and China to expand their strategic footprints in the region.

Whatever the flag, Washington would not sell nuclear-powered boats unless it could count on them in war over Taiwan.