Looking around in late 2016, it is hard to avoid a sense of chaotic unravelling, of rising menace in multiple places, across many categories of threat, some hard to define as warlike, while others are classical military challenges.
In the US, there is a sense of domestic disunity: race-based protests, a rising wave of armed and organised militias, cop killings, normalisation of mass shootings. The two most reviled candidates in modern American political history have just faced off in the dirtiest presidential campaign in living memory. Voters on all sides are expressing rage, frustration, and loss of faith in institutions. Over the course of the campaign both candidates, for different reasons, have moved away from free trade, globalised international norms and the western alliance system—in other words, from the very foundations of post-Cold War U.S. global leadership.
It was an immense pleasure to MC the 2016 Blamey Oration hosted by the United Services Institute of the ACT. where we explored the challenges facing Australia, the United States and the world with award-winning author Dr. David Kilcullen.
