A discussion of the most important news and issues in international affairs through a uniquely Australian lens. Hosted by Darren Lim, in memory of Allan Gyngell.
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This episode Darren goes full academic, using Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s recent Allan Gyngell Lecture as the starting point for a broader discussion of Australian grand strategy. Wong takes up Allan’s conception of foreign policy as a means of expanding Australia’s international space, increasing its options and maximising its choices, and sets out her “Four Rs” framework of region,…
Stephen Dziedzic of the ABC returns to catch up on a remarkable month in Australian foreign policy. The conversation begins with China’s submarine-launched ballistic missile test into the South Pacific. Stephen and Darren ask who Beijing was really signalling, what the test says about China’s nuclear deterrent, and why Pacific governments responded much more strongly than they did to China’s 2024…
Darren is back at the mic after a month away and, again, back on the Iran/Hormuz story. The deal he spent an hour analysing in June is dead inside three weeks, the two sides are fighting again, American soldiers are dying, important infrastructure has been destroyed across the region, and a fresh ceasefire proposal is circulating even as Washington weighs a much larger campaign alongside Israel.…
Darren is back to do (yet another) solo episode on Iran. This week, the United States and Iran did a deal, Trump put pen to a physical copy at Versailles, and the war looked like it might be — in a narrow sense— over. At least, this is what Darren sought to analyse when he first recorded on Saturday 20 June. But before he could publish the following day, Iran had announced the Strait of Hormuz was…
Stephen Dziedzic of the ABC joins Darren to catch up on something besides Iran and the (still-closed) Strait of Hormuz. The conversation begins with the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where Stephen was on the ground. They discuss the mood in the room, the relative absence of Iran from the public discussion despite its obvious relevance to maritime security, and the broader regional anxiety…
Eleven weeks into the U.S.-Iran war, the news cycle is relentless, but the strategic position has barely moved. Darren looks to step back from the weekly churn to lay out the five durable lessons of this conflict — the things that were becoming visible in March, that have held through April, that are still true in May, and that may well remain true for some time yet. The episode begins with a…
Eight weeks into the US-Israeli war against Iran, the ceasefire is about to expire and the second round of negotiations is supposed to be happening this week in Islamabad. Darren uses the framework of “war-as-bargaining” to make sense of an extraordinary three weeks—the threats, the ceasefire, the collapse of the first talks, the blockade, Iran's brief reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and its…
In the second episode of the week recorded just 48 hours after the last one (around 12pm on Wed 1 April), Darren is joined once again by Stephen Dziedzic of the ABC to talk through what, again, has been a wild few days. In two Truth Social posts barely twelve hours apart, President Trump threatened to destroy Iranian desalination plants — a move legal experts describe as a war crime — and then…
Now in its fifth week, the Iran war may be about to enter its most dangerous phase. In a shorter update this episode, Darren assesses what he sees as four important dynamics as President Trump’s new extended 6 April deadline approaches: (1) the collapse of negotiations and the simultaneous buildup of U.S. ground forces in the region; (2) why seizing Kharg Island or Iran’s enriched uranium may be…
Three weeks into the US-Israeli war on Iran, Darren looks to international relations theory — particularly the bargaining and war termination frameworks associated with James Fearon — to explain why this conflict is so resistant to ending. He organises his thinking around two conditions for war termination: the existence of a mutually acceptable deal, and a credible mechanism for enforcing it.…
Two weeks into the US-Israeli war on Iran, Darren uses Robert Pape's cost-benefit framework to assess where things stand. The tactical achievements are real — two-thirds of Iran's missile launchers destroyed, its navy sunk, its leadership decapitated — but the probability of converting those gains into durable strategic outcomes is low, and the costs are mounting fast. On the military side,…
