Stop the World

For a brief spell after the Cold War, the idea of an international community that would coordinate and intervene in conflicts for the global good felt like an aspiration on the move.

It feels distant today, but all is not lost. Comfort Ero, the President and CEO of the International Crisis Group, gives us her take on the toughest conflicts plaguing humanity in recent times. Rather than feeling dispirited and paralysed by dysfunctio...

Seasoned diplomat and politician Jüri Luik, who has one of the more impressive CVs we’ve ever seen, gives us his readout on last week’s NATO summit in the Hague and the perspective from the Baltic nations that border Russia to the north of Ukraine.

Estonia has an impressive defence spending record, currently at 3.4 percent of its GDP, with a plan to raise that to 5.4 percent starting next year. Jüri discusses shifts already underway...

In a huge week of international news, NATO members agreed to lift their defence spending to 5 percent of GDP. Today’s guest, Canadian career defence and intelligence official Raquel Garbers, has some strikingly clear views on the value of the spending increases but also the way they need to be paired with a stronger focus on economic warfare by hostile states, particularly China. 

Raquel, who is currently a visiting executive at th...

Donald Trump’s calculated gamble in bombing Iran’s key nuclear facilities sparked a series of extraordinary outbursts this week from the US administration amid conflicting assessments of the damage that the US strikes did to the regime’s nuclear program. Trump meanwhile was feted in a downright theatrical fashion in the Hague as NATO leaders gathered to agree on defence spending increases.

David Wroe and ASPI executive director Jus...

Please note, this episode was filmed as a video interview and is available on ASPI's Youtube channel here: https://youtu.be/sg32zmJKk70

In today’s episode of Stop the World, we hear from Emmanuel Bautista, a retired Philippines general who served as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces in 2013 and 2014 and who spoke at ASPI’s recent defence conference on preparedness and resilience.

General Bautista gives his frank views on the Ph...

As Iran’s government flails in response to Israel’s attacks, and with Donald Trump mulling a two-week window for Tehran to negotiate an end to its nuclear program, speculation is turning to how the dramatic events will reshape Iran’s politics, nearly half a century since the Islamic Republic was created.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a Melbourne-based academic, author and political scientist with deep expertise on Iran and the Middle East....

Please note, this episode was filmed as a video interview and is available on ASPI's YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/z3V_t8znuIM

On 4 June, ASPI was pleased to host Hon Dr Billy Joseph MP in Canberra for our 2025 Defence Conference 'Preparedness and Resilience.'

Dr Joseph is Papua New Guinea's Minister for Defence, and the Deputy Party Leader of the Social Democratic Party. 

Following his impactful speech on Pac...

Please note, this episode was filmed as a video interview and is available on ASPI's Youtube channel here: https://youtu.be/XvR4P2Ppmok

This week ASPI was delighted to host Dr Kori Schake in Canberra for our 2025 Defence Conference ‘Preparedness and Resilience’.

Kori is a senior fellow and director of foreign and defence policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s held roles in the State Department, the Pentagon an...

ASPI this week released our annual Cost of Defence report, which assesses how Australia’s investment in defence matches the strategic challenges the nation faces. 

In this special episode, ASPI’s executive director Justin Bassi runs through some of the key points of the report: how much we need to be spending, how fast, and on which capabilities. The strategic environment in which 2 percent of GDP was normalised as a benchmark is l...

Many of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence believe models that are smarter than a human in every way will be built within a few years. Whether it turns out to be two years or 10, the changes will be epoch-making. Life will never be the same.

Today’s guest Connor Leahy is one of many AI experts who believe that far from ushering in an era of utopian abundance, superintelligent AI could kill us all. Connor is CEO of the fi...

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week initiated a conversation about a security partnership with Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responded with a ‘maybe, sort of’.

To talk about this development and much more, we have Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, former adviser to two EU presidents and one of the world’s top experts on European foreign and strategic policy. Nathali...

Wars are easy to start, hard to end and are often launched with political goals that are loftier than the planning and capabilities that are committed. In today’s episode, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, talks about the “short war fallacy” and why strategists keep planning for quick victories when long and costly conflicts are demonstrably the norm.

Lawrence discusses Putin’s mi...

ASPI’s geospatial analyst Nathan Ruser reveals what he’s found by studying satellite imagery of the recent India-Pakistan clashes over Kashmir, in a special episode of Stop the World. This includes the use of images for disinformation in ways he hasn’t seen before in his years of poring over satellite pictures.

Alongside the military clashes, the Indian and Pakistani governments, and their respective supporters, have been battling i...

The war that has gripped Sudan for more than two years and cost 150,000 lives is a shifting mosaic of alliances and rivalries, lumped under two main groups. There’s the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Force, led respectively by two men who were once allies but are now locked in a titanic power struggle that has displaced 13 million people and is causing widespread famine.

Today we’re joined by Ahmed Kodouda, a humanitar...

After Pakistan-based militants murdered more than two dozen Indian tourists in Pahalgam in Kashmir, India retaliated by striking nine sites it says housed “terrorist infrastructure”. Pakistan in turn says it shot down several Indian fighter planes.

 In this special snap episode, ASPI Resident Senior Fellow Raji Pillai Rajagopalan gives us her insights on whether the two nuclear armed arch rivals will bring the crisis temperature dow...

As Australians head to the polls, David Wroe interviews two of the best minds on the intersection of Australian politics and global affairs - the ABC 7.30 program's political editor Laura Tingle and The Age's political and international editor, Peter Hartcher.

As well as their reflections on the substance of the election campaign, the conversation considers the challenges to Australia from the current global geopolitical out...

Audrey Tang is the unflappable Jedi knight of technology and democracy, who can connect with different political perspectives. Audrey was the inaugural digital minister of Taiwan and is now ambassador-at-large for cyber affairs. She came to prominence first as an open source programmer and hacker, before becoming involved in Taiwan’s successful Sunflower Movement demonstrations of 2014, and then joining the government in 2016 at ag...

The United States-China tit-for-tat tariffs have been escalating faster than the bids at a Sydney house auction in the early 2010s. ‘Trade war’ is the headline. But does Donald Trump have a strategy to decouple, or is he angling for a grand bargain? Either way, Xi Jinping is making it clear that China has a vote (even if its people don’t).

Demetri Sevastopulo, the Financial Times’ US-China correspondent, explains the possible plays...

Australian AI expert Helen Toner is the Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). She also spent two years on the board of OpenAI, which put her at the centre of the dramatic events in late 2023 when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was briefly sacked before being reinstated.
David Wroe speaks with Helen about the curve humanity is on towards artific...