Latest news with #Anglosphere

Sydney Morning Herald
7 days ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Albanese is being pressured to choose Trump or Xi. Why not both?
Change can be hard to accept. Nowhere is that more evident than in what passes for much of the debate, discussion, analysis – call it what you like – relating to Australia's national security stance since Donald Trump won the US presidency eight months ago. It wasn't just America that changed when 49.8 per cent of the Americans who voted gave Trump a second turn in the White House – it was the world. A lot changed, because he promised it would, and he is in charge of the richest, most powerful country on the planet, so he can make it happen. His governing style is to treat everything like his plaything. One day he thinks this, a few days later he thinks that. Like most of his followers, he is guided by his emotions and suspicions. That is his unbreakable point of connection with them. On Tuesday, in a one-on-one phone call, the BBC's Gary O'Donoghue asked Trump if he trusted Vladimir Putin. Trump took a long pause and replied: 'I trust almost nobody, to be honest with you.' What is going on in America is not some entertaining distraction or minor diversion after which past verities will be naturally reinstated. The international order is being remade. Nowhere is this more obvious to Australians than with Anthony Albanese's visit to China, which crystallises in the Australian mind our new reality. On the one hand, we have China, an authoritarian state with whom we have few shared values, that is in our region and is our most important economic partner. We have a trade-exposed economy and one-third of our export income comes from China. On the other hand, there's America, our friend and ally for more than 80 years, which is moving quickly away from what we previously believed were a comprehensive set of shared values. Increasingly, its new administration reveals an intention to render Australia a form of vassal state via the AUKUS agreement. AUKUS has not yet reached its fourth birthday but the original signatories to the pact, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, are all gone from their posts, exiting either in disgrace or embarrassment. AUKUS was an exercise in Anglosphere hubris. Biden believed he had figuratively speared Trump and the MAGA movement through the heart at the 2020 election and that America was back on its previous post-war multilateralist path. Johnson was riding high after his Brexit victory and his smashing of British Labour's so-called Red Wall in 2019. Morrison was polling well and believed he was on a winner with his China-bashing stance. He was not concerned in the slightest that he was walking out of a deal with France to build our next fleet of submarines. Loading Crucially, he saw political advantage with AUKUS, expecting that Labor might baulk at its inclusion of nuclear subs. That would have given him the opportunity to portray Labor under Albanese as disloyal to our greatest friend, America, and in the thrall of Beijing on the way to the 2022 election. But Albanese and his senior colleagues, nervous about their election prospects, saw that coming and immediately gave AUKUS the nod. As it turned out, Morrison accused Labor of being China's puppet anyway, to little avail. More importantly, however, Labor had, by embracing AUKUS, saddled itself in office with an unworkable, decades-long security pact. If AUKUS was ever fit for purpose, it isn't now, because our relationship with America, while remaining strong, cannot go back to what it was. Much of the Australian defence establishment cannot see it that way. Many analysts, former bureaucrats, academics and the Coalition parties won't readjust their view of the Australia-US relationship as one in which our interests and America's blur into a whole. They're obsessed with the fact that Albanese has met with China's president before he's met with Trump. Somehow, the lack of a face-to-face with Trump is all Albanese's fault. What does it say about Trump that he hasn't made it happen? The large number of holdouts in the defence and security establishment who insist that the America of 2025 is the friendly and predictable America of past decades with just a few Trumpian characteristics refuse to accept the obvious. America is no longer what it used to be, via a democratic decision of its own people. It's shocking to consider that as awful as the Chinese government is, at least we know what we are dealing with. Can we really say the same about America? It is now reviewing AUKUS, although the signs are that it actually wants to renegotiate it. Last week, the Trump administration briefed out its demands on Australia to the media, chiefly that it wants reassurances that the submarines it delivers to Australia under AUKUS would be deployed to assist the US in the event of a conflict with China. This was a bit of interference with Albanese's imminent meeting with President Xi.

The Age
7 days ago
- Politics
- The Age
Albanese is being pressured to choose Trump or Xi. Why not both?
Change can be hard to accept. Nowhere is that more evident than in what passes for much of the debate, discussion, analysis – call it what you like – relating to Australia's national security stance since Donald Trump won the US presidency eight months ago. It wasn't just America that changed when 49.8 per cent of the Americans who voted gave Trump a second turn in the White House – it was the world. A lot changed, because he promised it would, and he is in charge of the richest, most powerful country on the planet, so he can make it happen. His governing style is to treat everything like his plaything. One day he thinks this, a few days later he thinks that. Like most of his followers, he is guided by his emotions and suspicions. That is his unbreakable point of connection with them. On Tuesday, in a one-on-one phone call, the BBC's Gary O'Donoghue asked Trump if he trusted Vladimir Putin. Trump took a long pause and replied: 'I trust almost nobody, to be honest with you.' What is going on in America is not some entertaining distraction or minor diversion after which past verities will be naturally reinstated. The international order is being remade. Nowhere is this more obvious to Australians than with Anthony Albanese's visit to China, which crystallises in the Australian mind our new reality. On the one hand, we have China, an authoritarian state with whom we have few shared values, that is in our region and is our most important economic partner. We have a trade-exposed economy and one-third of our export income comes from China. On the other hand, there's America, our friend and ally for more than 80 years, which is moving quickly away from what we previously believed were a comprehensive set of shared values. Increasingly, its new administration reveals an intention to render Australia a form of vassal state via the AUKUS agreement. AUKUS has not yet reached its fourth birthday but the original signatories to the pact, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, are all gone from their posts, exiting either in disgrace or embarrassment. AUKUS was an exercise in Anglosphere hubris. Biden believed he had figuratively speared Trump and the MAGA movement through the heart at the 2020 election and that America was back on its previous post-war multilateralist path. Johnson was riding high after his Brexit victory and his smashing of British Labour's so-called Red Wall in 2019. Morrison was polling well and believed he was on a winner with his China-bashing stance. He was not concerned in the slightest that he was walking out of a deal with France to build our next fleet of submarines. Loading Crucially, he saw political advantage with AUKUS, expecting that Labor might baulk at its inclusion of nuclear subs. That would have given him the opportunity to portray Labor under Albanese as disloyal to our greatest friend, America, and in the thrall of Beijing on the way to the 2022 election. But Albanese and his senior colleagues, nervous about their election prospects, saw that coming and immediately gave AUKUS the nod. As it turned out, Morrison accused Labor of being China's puppet anyway, to little avail. More importantly, however, Labor had, by embracing AUKUS, saddled itself in office with an unworkable, decades-long security pact. If AUKUS was ever fit for purpose, it isn't now, because our relationship with America, while remaining strong, cannot go back to what it was. Much of the Australian defence establishment cannot see it that way. Many analysts, former bureaucrats, academics and the Coalition parties won't readjust their view of the Australia-US relationship as one in which our interests and America's blur into a whole. They're obsessed with the fact that Albanese has met with China's president before he's met with Trump. Somehow, the lack of a face-to-face with Trump is all Albanese's fault. What does it say about Trump that he hasn't made it happen? The large number of holdouts in the defence and security establishment who insist that the America of 2025 is the friendly and predictable America of past decades with just a few Trumpian characteristics refuse to accept the obvious. America is no longer what it used to be, via a democratic decision of its own people. It's shocking to consider that as awful as the Chinese government is, at least we know what we are dealing with. Can we really say the same about America? It is now reviewing AUKUS, although the signs are that it actually wants to renegotiate it. Last week, the Trump administration briefed out its demands on Australia to the media, chiefly that it wants reassurances that the submarines it delivers to Australia under AUKUS would be deployed to assist the US in the event of a conflict with China. This was a bit of interference with Albanese's imminent meeting with President Xi.


The Guardian
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hustling is out, healing is in: what I learned following 400 online gurus
Some years ago, I started writing a novel. The novel satirises the world of executive coaching and, as part of my research, I began to follow some coaches and motivational speakers online. It started with corporate leadership coaches preaching banal management advice. But it slid quickly into chaos as I surrendered – with dreadful compulsion – to the algorithm. Within months I was following every kind of online coach in the Anglosphere, from divorce coaches, parenting coaches and habit-stacking coaches through to neurolinguistic programmers, flow-state TEDx gurus, money-manifestation mentors and Ponzi-style coach-coaches. I was inside a teeming ecosystem; a lawless jungle of competing advisers, all of them hawking prerecorded masterclasses. Now I'm sharing my key learnings from this confusing period – but with one caveat: I am much stupider now than I was when I started this journey. Hear me out! I implemented the one-touch rule for a tidy house recommended by a habit coach. It really helped with my household overwhelm and despair, until I stopped doing it. A wellness coach told me to give myself a gold star on a physical calendar for every day I exercised – and it worked. I was motivated. I resisted the urge to drop $399 on a pdf handbook written by the same coach; I may be desperate, but I'm not rich. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning This is especially true in the world of dodgy business coaches. Who signs up for a pricey passive-income content portal run by a seasoned grifter? Aspiring grifters. Although the offer is actually pretty enticing. Who wouldn't want to learn how to build an evergreen sales loop? Now if I were rich … Punters have grown cynical about charlatan coaches with their luxury lifestyles and super-polished Instagram feeds. In response, many coaches have pivoted hard into realness, setting up cameras to film themselves blubbering in their most vulnerable moments. 'Truth is: even after building the life I dreamed of, I STILL get impostor syndrome.' Every time I think we have reached peak internet mucus, someone ups the ante. Coaches want to be raw and real. They'll teach you to 'get shit done'' and 'unfuck the world'. My favourite example was a Denver-based wellness expert who stormed a TEDx stage shrieking, 'Time to get holistic as fuck!' Even before the pandemic, the #riseandgrind lifestyle promoted by leading Silicon Valley coaches – 5am wake-up followed by treadmill, breath work, supplements and back-to-back strategy meetings – was starting to look tired. Today self-care is ascendant. Self-discipline is for chumps. Most coaches now teach us to navigate boundaries and comfort zones, avoid burnout, process our past, regulate our nervous systems and be kind to ourselves. Tedcore reigns supreme, with its soothing blend of therapy-speak and pop-philosophy, its confusing mishmash of science and pseudoscience, its incessant pathologies and its endless cult of the self. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion This is especially big among the feminine embodiment types but also, interestingly, among the money-manifesters. And – look – I wish them well in their erotic endeavours, I really do. It's the logical conclusion of the cult of the self, after all. But it is hilarious to imagine the pre-production work that goes into their spiciest aspirational and erotic content. Imagine arranging candles, flower petals and some rented Louis Vuitton handbags around your bedroom, then pressing record to film yourself either actually wanking or delivering a breathy lecture about why it's such an enriching pastime. I'm suss on the self-care gurus who always lure me into luxurious self-pity. Is my procrastination a sign of laziness? Of course not. Coach Katy says it's just my chronic perfectionism. Or maybe a trauma response. Take me back to the biohacker guys with their growth mindsets and solemn data-driven daily protocols. Now I've finished researching, I don't need all these advisers any more. I have slowly begun to purge them from my feed, burrowing myself out of the unsavoury self-improvement hovel I've built for myself. I am emerging like a blinking mole into the daylight, an over-counselled, disoriented mole – unsure if she needs to heal or habit-stack. A post-truth mole who sniffs the air and finds her instincts totally scrambled. My nose – once keen and reliable – can no longer distinguish between TEDx horseshit and actual horseshit, let alone pseudoscience and actual science, queasy therapy-speak and solid advice. God help me. Sophie Quick is the author of The Confidence Woman (Allen & Unwin, $32.99)


India Today
19-06-2025
- Politics
- India Today
Zia-Musharraf-Munir: Why the US needs Pakistan's dictators
"The area of Pakistan is strategically the most important on the continent of India and the majority of our strategic requirements could be metby an agreement with Pakistan alone. We do not therefore consider that failure to obtain an agreement with India (Hindustan) would cause us to modify any of our requirements... We have the use of strategic airfields, primarily in Pakistan, in the event of a major war".advertisementThis extract from a Top Secret assessment prepared on 7 July 1947 by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee in Whitehall clinically stated why Pakistan and not India suited British imperial interests. The creation of Pakistan was a geopolitical coup for the departing British.A pliant state with a 909 km border with Iran, a 2,640 km border with Afghanistan, which was on the southern flank of the Soviet Union, and a short hop away from the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula, which the British called "wells of power". India's access to Afghanistan and Central Asia was severed when a British sleight of hand saw Gilgit-Baltistan, part of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, go over to Pakistan in 1948. The occupation of Gilgit-Baltistan led to the creation of a 596 km border with the 1947 assessment was prepared in the afterglow of World War 2, the US had already displaced Great Britain as the head of the informal Anglosphere — white majority Anglo-Saxon-ruled countries, the 'Five Eyes'.It also inherited British global interests, including those that created Pakistan. In 2025, US President Donald Trump, the head of his informal alliance, sits down for lunch with the most powerful man in Pakistan, Field Marshal Asim Munir. Pakistan's strategic location matters more than ever. The Israel-Iran war has been on for nearly five days now with Israeli jets overflying Iran with impunity, bombing targets including its nuclear US bombers, carrier strike groups and fighter jets are moving in for what many believe will be decisive action to destroy Iran's underground nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. The Trump-Munir lunch menu is not known, but the main course will undoubtedly be a long list of demands by both sides-assistance for the US-Israel war, the use of airfields and bases and most importantly, steering clear of a fellow Muslim country, in return could ask for advanced weapons and for US intervention in mediating Jammu & BELOVED DICTATORSThe US is the world's oldest democracy, but it loves doing business with dictators. 'He's a b*****d, but he's our b*****d,' President Franklin D Roosevelt is believed to have said of Dominican dictator Rafael was the military factor in Pakistan that brought it closer to the US. India and the US were in opposite camps during the Cold War. But Pakistan has been a willing accomplice ever since Field Marshal Ayub Khan's 1958 then, the Army, Allah and America are the three As which it is said that have guided the destiny of a rentier state which has historically rented itself out to the US. What transpires over the Munir-Trump lunch could help answer the puzzle of how bankrupt Pakistan bounced back into favour in the White House in the first six months of the Trump followed was assistance from the western-dominated IMF and World Bank and the de-listing of the FATF. For New Delhi, the US's pro-Pakistan tilt possibly explains the West's reluctance to condemn Pakistan's state-sponsored terror, the direct cause of the May 22 massacre of Indian tourists in Pahalgam, Jammu and Delhi will recall how Pakistani dictators have always leveraged global crises to their advantage. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan's dictator, General Zia ul Haq, turned his country into a frontline state in the West's proxy war against the Soviets. When Al-Qaeda struck the US on September 11, 2001, General Musharraf speedily became a major non-NATO ally against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, ironically, organisations his army actively created and murderous attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 has now culminated with Israel's direct attack on Iran. This is where Field Marshal Munir and his rentier state enter the picture. The past two engagements resulted in short-term gains for the Pakistan Army but long-term devastation for their country. General Headquarters Rawalpindi, which runs Pakistan, sees these as acceptable risks because they help in their long war against 1979, the West turned a blind eye to Zia's nuclear weapons programme because of the dictator's strategic utility. Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons in the mid-1980s when it was a Western ally. When the US withdrew after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, the Pakistan Army redirected the massive weapons stockpiles from the CIA's Operation Cyclone into Punjab and Jammu and Musharraf, it welded terrorists and strategic weapons to craft a unique strategy of nuclear blackmail — bleeding India through terror attacks and threatening nuclear weapons use if India retaliated militarily. When Pakistan's dictators are mollycoddled by the White House, they begin to develop an over-inflated view of themselves, just like the Aesop's Fable where a frog, deeply envious of an ox, begins to fill himself with could explain the startling turnaround in Gen Munir's behaviour this year, beginning with his infamous and blatantly communal 'Two Nations' speech on April 16, which led to the slaughter of Indian tourists in Pahalgam six days later, on April 22. Aesop's fable ends with the frog exploding. Munir reached that point when India unleashed a storm of missiles shattering Pakistani military bases on May 12. India put the 65-year-old Indus water treaty in abeyance, with Prime Minister Modi calling out Pakistan's nuclear blackmail and ending the distinction between state and non-state Pakistan Army called for a ceasefire on May 12, which India acceded to. Munir's salve was a Lazarus-like resurrection, anointing himself Field Marshal and declaring victory. Now in Washington, the Field Marshal is preparing himself for his big day with Trump, the star of another fairy tale — the Grimm's story of a nasty frog that turns into a handsome Prince after being kissed by a princess. Will President Trump play ball?advertisement(Sandeep Unnithan is an author and senior journalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Chakra Newz, a digital media platform)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Must Watch

The Age
18-06-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Albanese is pulling away from the US – and Australians seem to love it
That's why the sooner the institutional perception of not just Trump, but the United States, adjusts itself, the better off Australia will be. The America that Australia regarded as its great friend and protector is not what it used to be, and it is not going to come back. Americans knew that Trump oversaw a deadly, failed insurrection to overturn the result of the 2020 election that he lost, but still elected him last November. He won 31 states to Kamala Harris' 19. This suggests Albanese needs to confront some big issues within the American relationship. How willing is he to spend some of his political capital to deal with them? It's four years since the AUKUS pact was announced jointly by Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Scott Morrison – none of whose careers came to a happy end – as a way of getting the old Anglosphere gang back together to stave off the strategic rise of China. What amounts to Labor's original sin in opposition of endorsing AUKUS sight unseen is a mistake from which it will have to find a way to either extricate itself or initiate a renegotiation. AUKUS is crushingly expensive, with unreasonably long timelines, and is almost certainly undeliverable. And it did not countenance a reborn and rampant Trump. Loading There are signs that the government is at least trying to moderate its reliance on this ill-begotten agreement. It's slowly, slowly edging towards a strategic position that is less dependent on the US. When Albanese talks about 'an Australian way' of doing things and highlights his deeper engagement with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, our two northern neighbours that stand between us and China, he's signalling a slow movement out of the American orbit, or at least some hedging of bets. At the same time, the government has worked hard to normalise its relationship with China. The Labor Party, before its embrace of AUKUS, had a long history of a more independent security stance, going back to the Fisher government establishing the Australian navy before World War I, and John Curtin bringing troops back from Europe to defend Australia after the fall of Singapore in World War II. Labor also controversially opposed our involvement in the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Whether Albanese has the will and intestinal fortitude to continue to create a new path remains to be seen. But what is clear is that to some degree, he understands that his job for the next three years will be to try to ensure that neither China, our biggest trading partner and source of much of our prosperity, and the United States, our legacy security partner, do not individually paint a target on us to prove a point to each other. In other words, his main task will be to mostly play a dead bat and protect us from both of them. Albanese is right to leave open the possibility of being able to catch up with Trump next week on the sidelines of the NATO summit in the Netherlands. There are so many uncertainties about an Australian leader getting time with America's leader. That says much more about the latter than the former – and about Australia's future.