After years of navigating the Trump relationship, the government now needs to move on from the most divisive US president in history.
Australia wants to convince the incoming Democratic administration to stay engaged in the Indo-Pacific region and keep a check on a rising China.
While Biden will continue with much of the Trump administration’s agenda for the region, Australia is alive to the risk that the US could – down the track – trade off its geo-strategic goals for other priorities, such as more ambitious action on climate change.
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What’s at stake?
For a number of years, Australia and its allies – particularly Japan and more recently India – have been pursuing an Indo-Pacific strategy to deal with a more assertive Beijing.
The Social Order
Don t Pardon the Intrusion: Edward Snowden s actions immeasurably weakened the United States and strengthened our adversaries
By Edward Jay Epstein City Journal
Published Dec. 24, 2020
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eye on the news
Don’t Pardon the Intrusion Edward Snowden’s actions immeasurably weakened the United States and strengthened our adversaries.
Politics and law
The most surprising thing about the failure of U.S. intelligence to discover for nearly nine months the SolarWinds penetration of U.S. government agencies, reportedly including the State, Energy, and Homeland Security Departments as well as private contractors, is that anyone is surprised. After all, the National Security Agency, responsible for protecting the communications of the U.S. government, had such a massive hole punched in its capabilities by a breach in 2013 that Michael McConnell, the former director of first the NSA and then the Office of National Intelligence, assessed “This [breach] will have an impact on our ability to do our mission for the next 20 to 30 years.”
CENTCOM manipulated and deleted data to present a positive picture of the battle against Isis and al Qaeda according to a report by the House released on Thursday. Does anyone believe it wasn’t ordered by the president and that he was kept in the dark? A general now says that it came from the president himself.
Retired Brigadier General Tony Tata appeared on Fox News with host former Governor Mike Huckabee this evening and revealed that his well-placed sources told him someone from the Office of National Intelligence who meets regularly with the president commanded a senior official in CENTCOM to quit producing products of record that showed negative intelligence that didn’t fit the narrative of the Obama administration.