From Brexit to the rise of China, the deterioration of the special relationship with the United States and the return of war to Europe in Ukraine, this chapter will explore how the UK’s position in the world has faced both challenges and opportunities over the last fourteen years. The analysis will focus on how different Conservative premierships used or wasted these global changes, and how it has affected UK foreign policy and Britain as a whole (particularly Brexit’s influence on domestic policy and politics).

At the start of 2006, two schools of thought contended over the future of Australia’s defence and strategic policy. On one side stood those who believed that Australia’s principal strategic risks and challenges over the following decades would come from instability on the margins of the international order – from weak and failing states, and from non-state actors, especially terrorists. On the other side stood those who believed that bigger and more important strategic concerns arose from the possibility that the core of the international order would be disrupted by the stresses flowing from changing economic relativities. This was especially true in Asia, as China and other Asian states’ economies grew.

Writing at the beginning of the 1990s on Australia’s disarmament and arms control policies and achievements, Trevor Findlay noted that, although a relative latecomer to the field, Australia had soon become ’an assiduous, well-respected participant ... sporting a range of considered, often imaginative policies and initiatives’. In the main, however, these efforts and initiatives were concentrated in the international arena, with little cross-over into Australia’s domestic political domain. As Findlay described it: ’There is a sense in which Australia has so far tackled, and in most cases accomplished, all the "easy" arms control tasks – those initiatives which can be taken both unilaterally and with relatively little cost to Australia or the government.’ He further added that ’apart from its technical input in the CW area, the Defence Department has so far played only a minor role in shaping Australian disarmament policy,’ and speculated that ’[t]his could change as the international disarmament agenda broadens to include conventional and high-technology weapons that Defence has or plans to acquire’.

As 2001 opened, security and defence issues were already more central to Australia’s national agenda, both domestically and internationally, than had typically been the case over the previous three decades. Only a few weeks before the start of 2001, on 6 December 2000, Prime Minister John Howard had tabled in Parliament a new Defence White Paper. Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force committed his government to a new and more expansive conception of Australia’s strategic interests and military objectives and to substantial and sustained increases in defence funding. These decisions were in part a prudent policy response to long-term strategic and fiscal trends stretching back a decade or more. But the tone and style as well as the content of the White Paper clearly showed that, for Howard, security was also at the centre of the government’s political agenda at the start of what was certain to be a federal election year.

Between 2006 and 2010, the bilateral relationship between Australia and Japan blossomed in new and important directions. Most significantly, Australia and Japan mobilised bilateralism into regional and global spheres, representing a balancing of relations in the areas of politics and security to complement the hitherto robust history of trade and investment. In an era of new security challenges and shifting geopolitical circumstances in the Asia–Pacific region and beyond, Australia and Japan included each other in their evolving regional diplomatic strategies. At the same time, political leaders in both countries dealt with the vexed issue of Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean by playing to the charged emotions prevalent in their respective domestic constituencies, while simultaneously sending a ‘business as usual’ message between officials. The disconnect between policy-makers’ pragmatism concerning the political situation in the partner nation, on the one hand, and popular outrage stoked by media reports and official statements, on the other, undermined the momentum achieved in the broader bilateral relationship.

As Australian prime minister from 1996 to 2007, John Howard faced 11 tumultuous years of foreign, defence and domestic security policy challenges. As a political leader interested primarily in domestic economic issues, he faced a steep and sometimes rocky learning curve. Not surprisingly, his foreign policy legacy was mixed: partly durable and desirable, partly dubious and potentially damaging to Australia’s longterm interests. In this legacy, he is little different from his predecessors. Howard strengthened ties with the United States, adroitly avoided tensions with China, and gradually repaired relations with important Southeast Asian neighbours, including Indonesia, after periods of strain. He was also defined by his willingness to dispatch troops to foreign trouble spots, to enact far-reaching anti-terrorism legislation at home, and to substantially expand military spending on advanced new weaponry. Yet Howard largely quarantined international trade and economic interests from controversy – at least until the Australian Wheat Board Iraq bribery scandal exposed Australia’s trade policy duplicity late in the life of his government.

Over the period 1996–2000 the handling of ’Asia’ as a theme in Australian foreign relations altered radically. The change could not have been easily predicted at the beginning of the tenure of the Coalition government in 1996. The new administration agreed with the previous one in insisting that the ’Asia Pacific is the region of highest foreign and trade policy priority’ for Australia, and predicted that East Asia would become ’even more important to Australia in trade and investment terms’. In addition to this, the new government ministers who were concerned with Asian relations – the Foreign, Trade, and Defence ministers – were obviously diligent in the way they set about their business in the region. Although there were a number of differences in emphasis between the new government and its predecessor, some offering genuine advantages, former prime minister Paul Keating himself noted the continuities, and these continuities remained predominant until 1999.

The period 1996–2000 was a relatively difficult and turbulent time for Australia’s defence decision-makers. They had to deal with a number of unforeseen events and crises, adjust their policies and practices to changing political and social expectations, defend themselves from criticism from a range of quarters, and continue to do ’more with less’. The department was forced to acknowledge that it did not have the resources to complete its existing, let alone planned, equipment-acquisition program. And the Australian public was both entertained and appalled by a series of incidents and events that attracted unusual, and increasingly critical, media attention. These included a protracted public brawl between the Minister for Defence and his politically appointed civilian head; continuing revelations of sexual harassment and other misdemeanours within the armed forces; accounts of departmental ineptitude; and the spectacle of the current Secretary of Defence publicly lambasting his department and some of its senior officials.

The capitulation of Japan in September 1945 marked the end of war in which more Australians had been directly involved than on any previous occasion. The Army had fought in the Middle East and South-East Asia against Germans, Italians, Vichy French and Japanese. The Air Force had contributed also to the defence of Britain and the war in Europe. The Navy had been engaged in the North Sea and the Atlantic, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Some 15 per cent of the population had enlisted in the defence forces, and many more were engaged in munitions production and other civilian war work. For the first time in its history, the continent had suffered aerial bombardment and naval shelling, while nearly six thousand Australians had died in the defence of the Australian Territory of Papua, the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, and adjacent islands. In addition, Australia was host to refugees from South-East Asia, to substantial Dutch forces, and to many hundreds of thousands of American servicemen.

In retrospect, the dominant feature of the period 1966–70 was the virtual withdrawal of one of Australia’s great-power protectors, Britain, coupled with the new uncertainty over the long-term role of the other, the United States. By 1970 it was accepted that Australia faced a novel strategic situation, though there was no agreement on the appropriate response, nor had the debate on the implications of the new situation been very searching.

This chapter introduces military sexual violence (MSV) as an international problem. It outlines the core research question of the book and situates the book and topic within wider debates.

This chapter draws out the main conclusions of the book and the overarching contributions it makes to broader debates about rape culture.

This chapter focuses on the US military and includes an overview of the history of sexual violence in the US and the main narratives that emerge in media coverage of sexual violence in the US.

This chapter draws out key recommendations for militaries, media outlets, and governments with regard to addressing military sexual violence.

The PRC’s foreign affairs power had, briefly, been described in the previous chapter, together with the power in the realm of defence. These powers impose together important and at times anxious limitations on Hong Kong’s autonomy, not just on Hong Kong’s external affairs and foreign treaty relations but also on the judicial function of the courts. In the ‘Twelve Points’ which became the Joint Declaration, the sixth was that Hong Kong will manage its own affairs except in defence and foreign affairs. That qualification is often forgotten or dismissed, but it cannot be so easily brushed aside.