Stop the World

It’s STW’s 100th episode, so we had to make it a good one! Enter former Biden White House adviser Mira Rapp-Hooper, one of the sharpest minds around on Indo-Pacific Strategy. Mira served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania in Joe Biden’s National Security Council. She’s the author of two books and is now a visiting fellow at Brookings. She gives her...

Shashank Joshi is the Economist’s revered Defence Editor. He has deep strategic understanding combined with a rare gift for explaining things clearly. In today’s snappy half-hour episode of STW, Shashank shares his concerns about the future of democracy in the United States, the implications for the rest of the world, and the question of any emerging “Trump doctrine” from the US President’s intern...

It’s been a hectic start to the year in international affairs: Greenland, Davos, Minnesota and more. Canada’s Mark Carney has delivered the last rites to the international rules-based order. NATO has settled back into a nervous simmer after Donald Trump escalated his demands to own Greenland only to back off. Again the question arises: can Europe strengthen itself to a point of security self-relia...

The Bondi massacre of Jews celebrating the first night of Hanukkah on Sunday was the worst terrorist attack Australia has suffered on home soil and its first mass shooting in nearly three decades. With 15 innocent people murdered, Australia’s Jewish community is in deep mourning, while the nation and the world have been jolted into a stark conversation about antisemitism. In the final Stop the Wor...

Today we continue the AI theme with a TSD Summit Sessions conversation on China and AI with Selina Xu, who leads China and AI research and strategic initiatives in the Office of Eric Schmidt.   Who is winning the AI race between the US and China? Are they focusing on the same things? Where do China’s capabilities stand today? How is AI being adopted and integrated into economies? What are the bene...

In the first Summit Sessions interview post-Sydney Dialogue, David Wroe speaks with leading global AI safety expert, Dr Roman Yampolskiy. Roman is founding director of the Cyber Security Lab at the University of Louisville, and author of many books including “AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable”. This week, ASPI convened the fourth Sydney Dialogue summit on critical technologies and s...

One of the hottest topics in the world is data centres. Demand for the computing power needed to drive modern economies and societies, especially with artificial intelligence, is climbing steeply. Cloud computing services, often provided by big tech firms known as hyperscalers, supply a lot of this power. In today’s episode, Microsoft’s regional vice president for corporate external and legal affa...

The Sydney Dialogue (TSD) is just weeks away! If you haven't yet registered, head on over and do so now: https://tsd.aspi.org.au/enquire   In the second episode of TSD Summit Sessions, David Wroe speaks to Anduril co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf. This is an episode for our defence wonks - Brian talks about the need to build capabilities quickly, affordably and in ways that mean it can be buil...

Last month, some of the world’s leading artificial intelligence experts signed a petition calling for a prohibition on developing superintelligent AI until it is safe. One of those experts was Dan Hendrycks, director for the Center for AI Safety and an adviser to Elon Musk’s xAI and leading firm Scale AI. Dan has led original and thought-provoking research including into the risk of rogue AIs esca...

Russia has more than 100 times the population of its neighbour Estonia, yet the small Baltic nation has played a clever strategic hand, wedding itself closely to NATO and the European Union, and investing in sovereign tech and security capabilities. But with Moscow pressing and testing Europe, Estonia and its neighbours are under pressure. Veteran Estonian MP and chair of the parliamentary Foreign...

What a week! And some of it was actually good news! Justin and Dave pull apart the latest events, starting with PM Anthony Albanese’s all-consuming meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House. After all the jangled nerves, it went rather well, but what does the critical minerals deal mean in geopolitical terms? Is AUKUS really safe? And just what did Navy Secretary John Phelan mean a...

In today’s episode, Natalia Solieva, former spokesperson at Ukraine’s Embassy in Washington and an expert on Russian information operations, analyses Moscow’s wartime gaslighting (and not in the sense of its dwindling energy exports to Europe.) Natalia, now a resident in the United States, has studied extensively the battle of narratives over Moscow’s war against Ukraine. She explains the Ukrainia...

Though it’s on the opposite side of the world, Europe is vital to Australia’s security, not just because of our shared values but also because of the continent’s role in supporting Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s aggression—arguably the test case for future global order.   Today, senior European Union diplomat Paola Pampaloni tells Stop the World about progress on the EU’s Indo-Pacific strat...

Is artificial intelligence a “normal” technology like electrification, computing and the internet, or is it a new entity unlike anything we’ve ever created? The question makes all the difference to how we approach AI policy. Today on Stop the World, David Wroe speaks to Alice Friend, the Global Head of AI and Emerging Tech Policy at Google. They tackle the big questions including the nature of AI,...

For some, Greenland might have only entered their consciousness when US President Trump offered to buy it. But there’s much more to the story, even beyond its history with the United States.  In today’s episode, Liz Buchanan gives Stop the World listeners a useful crash course on Greenland, from the mysterious disappearance of the Vikings in the 1400s, to Greenland’s pivotal role in World War II a...

The Indo-Pacific is a strategic theatre named after two oceans, but according to retired US four-star general Charles Flynn, land forces would be crucial in any conflict, including over Taiwan.   In today’s episode, David Wroe speaks with Charles, who retired last year as commanding general of the US Army Pacific, about the often misunderstood and overlooked importance of land power. They consider...

Stop the World is hosting a short series of conversations with Australian politicians that transcend daily politics and breaking news to get to the fundamental strategy and security challenges Australia faces.   In the first of the series, we speak with Shadow Finance Minister, Senator James Paterson. James shares frank views on Australia’s strategic risks, the need to deter authoritarian powers,...

In this special episode of Stop the World, David Wroe speaks with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian democracy advocate who leads a government-elect from exile. After dictator Alexander Lukashenka declared himself winner of the 2020 election despite sweeping evidence that the people had chosen Sviatlana, 1.5 million Belarusians took to the streets, sparking a brutal crackdown and Sviatlana’s...

History is littered with missed calls and downright bad predictions. Think Arab Spring, the post-2003 occupation of Iraq, the Sino-Soviet split, the fall of the USSR, Operation Barbarossa and the assumption that engagement with China would mean liberalisation. Futurist Florence Gaub’s job is to help NATO make sure it isn’t caught like a deer in headlights when events take an unexpected turn. In to...

This week, Australia made international headlines when it revealed Iran had directed at least two antisemitic attacks in Australia using local criminals as proxies. In response, the Australian Government expelled Iran’s Ambassador, the first time we have done so since World War Two.   While this sort of activity is new for Australia, it fits a growing pattern in Europe where Russia and to some ext...

Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, then with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington, then with a posse of European leaders who joined Zelenskyy as back up. Everyone was polite to one another, but as Russia expert Mark Galeotti reminds us on today’s episode, there were a lot of questions left unanswered. Mark, who hosts the popular podcast, In Moscow’s Shadows , says the best thing about th...

Donald Trump famously called him “little rocket man”. Xi Jinping just thinks he’s a punk. But North Korea’s delphic leader Kim Jong-un has played a savvy hand and brought his country back from the ruinous Covid era to put himself in a strong position through his deals with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Anna Fifield, long-time foreign correspondent and North Korea-watcher who is now the Washington Post...

Britain’s 2018 “fusion doctrine” was an effort to bring together the elements of national power to enhance the country’s security and strategic interests under the post-Brexit “global Britain”.    Its architect, Lord Mark Sedwill, is today’s guest. He assesses the key global trends, challenges and crises—Donald Trump’s second administration; Chinese assertiveness; Russia’s war on Ukraine and the u...

In this special episode, ASPI's Resident Technical Specialist, Jocelinn Kang, talks through hyperscale cloud and why it’s increasingly important for countries to get their policies right depending on their strategic circumstances. All countries want to protect their citizens’ data and have some sovereign computing capabilities, but what if your data centres are attacked? What if the undersea c...

Today we speak with China military scholar Elsa B. Kania about China’s military modernisation. How good is the People’s Liberation Army? Where has it progressed? Where is it still deficient? And the big ones: can it match the US and how ready is it to take Taiwan by force if Xi Jinping gives the order? Much of Elsa’s recent work has focussed on the role of technology in the PLA’s capabilities, doc...