Johnson’s judicious refusal to be baited will give him the political space to begin repairing bruised relations with the White House and its tweet-prone cantankerous occupant.

Australia’s options for defending itself are in the news with the release of Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia. Will it shake up thinking or is there is no appetite for change?

Hugh White should be praised for getting Australians to think the unthinkable and alerting them to our deteriorating strategic situation, the unreliability of US security assistance and the need to get on better with our neighbours.     

Despite greater unity on the concept of the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue may suffer from many of the same problems as its predecessor.

The development of a de facto alliance between Moscow and Beijing, driven by their increasing anti-Western alignment, could mark the return of the “old-fashioned” great power alliances between equals.

Track Two dialogues, like the recent Asia-Pacific Roundtable (APR), transverse the barriers between official and unofficial and allow participants to shed official mantles and embrace much-needed free and frank conversation.

If Facebook was an experiment in creating a true “marketplace of ideas,” the results are disappointing, naively utopian and sometimes dangerous. Yet the platform has no easy solution for the daunting problem of moderating its two billion subscribers.

The “Avia law” is presented as a victory of the French state over Facebook, but it’s unclear if it primarily combats online hate speech or the power of American multinationals.

Hugh White’s new book, How to Defend Australia, recommends Australia double defence spending and consider nuclear weapons. Both are highly problematic, as is Australia’s insular and opaque military and security decision-making.

In this week’s episode, Allan and Darren discuss Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's recent foreign policy speech, the results from the latest Lowy Institute poll of the Australian public’s attitudes towards foreign policy and international affairs and, finally, the seemingly gloomy outcomes of the G20 Leaders’ Summit, although Darren seeks a glimmer of optimism from game theory.