Despite Iran’s frustrating tactics and stubbornness, the nation's leaders may well know they must renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. However, they are seeking a pathway that avoids simple capitulation to Trump.

Australia never once purported to exercise its right to grant diplomatic asylum despite quite exceptionally choosing to assert the existence of that right. Other countries that denied the existence of such a right nevertheless granted it in practice.

The Australian prime minister’s first foreign policy speech last week repositioned Australia as a creative middle power that seeks to develop a regional security architecture. For this he deserves credit, though the test is to realise these ambitions.

While diversification is sometimes presented as a simple fix to apparent economic over-dependence on China, no amount of hoping will make India the “next China.” And despite the risks, two-way trade with China provides the ballast when politics gets rough.

The last five years have seen a marked increase in the number of women representing Australia at senior levels in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). There are many other areas where the lessons from DFAT’s Women in Leadership Strategy can be applied.

Had the leading “centre-left” parties been willing to see Palestinian citizens of Israel as equal, they could challenge the right-wing hegemony in Israel’s national legislature. But that would be asking the impossible.

With the Sino-Russian relationship ostensibly at its best time in history, it is by no means a relationship between equals.

Seventy years since the UN Declaration of Human Rights, there still remains a way to go in addressing the root causes of sexual violence in conflict zones such as Libya. Meanwhile, Australia has a  mixed record of supporting women’s rights.

Nuclear negotiations with North Korea are developing at head-spinning speed. After his shock at the breakdown of talks in Hanoi, Kim has shifted his attention to North Korea’s traditional allies, Russia and China, but he's still on Donald J. Trump's mailing list.

The growing "bromance" between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin may be a development of world historical importance. Warmer relations may help to stabilise and unify Eurasia, long seen by some as a region of crucial strategic significance.