The great ambition of post-Soviet Poles has been to put as much distance between themselves and all things Russia as possible. That grim history has emphasised the truth of the old maxim, 'If you want peace, prepare for war'. That’s why Warsaw is doubling defence spending, building Europe's most powerful armed forces and rejecting the EU demand that it accept massive immigration

Sport should be about good sportsmanship, as the AFL's Matthew Nicks demonstrated on the weekend after a goal umpire's ridiculously inept call robbed his team of a berth in the finals. The Crows' coach had every right to explode, but restrained himself for the sake of the code. If only the AFL's wallahs of wokery, starting with CEO Gillon McLachlan, displayed the same concern

If Australia is able to forge close military ties with Japan, Korea and India—and to that we can add the Philippines and Taiwan, not to mention the more ambiguous cases of Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, PNG, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia—then the decision to be a founding AUKUS member is something rather more than, as a sneering Paul Keatring puts it, serving as America’s regional proxy

Xi Jinping would like nothing better than for trans-Atlantic bonds to be loosened and for France—and the rest of Europe—to be more independent from the US. Meanwhile, Beijing has no intention of allowing Europe (or the European Union) to end up independent from the PRC. The question we have to ask is whether Macron ,speaks for all of Europe

After the Soviet Union's fall, Putin pragmatically abandoned Marxism-Leninism, leaving him in want of a rationale for his loathing of the West and a pathway for restoring Russia greatness. His great mistake -- one of them -- was persuading himself that Ukrainian nationalism was not genuine but, rather, evidence of a conspiracy for which the remedy was short, sharp military action. Oh, how wrong he was

The former director of the CIA and Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021 makes the case in his memoir, Never Give an Inch, that the Trump administration, sometimes despite Trump himself, adhered to a philosophy of 'peace through strength'. Unlike the foreign policy pursued by his Oval Office successor, that approach mostly worked

We can see, in retrospect at least, that the likelihood of a new incarnation of the Cold War increased as Putin began to contemplate his place in the textbooks of future generations of schoolchildren. The grandiloquence of this one man, served by the lethal but compliant siloviki, casts a terrible shadow over the world

We are days away from the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, which hasn't gone as Vladimir Putin would have wished. What that failure to achieve a rapid and total victory signalled was the emergence for all the world so see of killers and brutes garbed in the uniforms of soldiers

Cardinal Pell's death should be a moment to reflect on the good works of a good man, but that's not how things will play out. The dead, you see, can't sue, so it will open season for those so galled by the High Court's declaration of his innocence. How it came to that -- the lies, leaks and campaign of character assassination by the press and VicPol -- are laid out in Keith Windschuttle's book