Dr. Peter Layton is a Visiting Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane Australia; a Royal United Services Institute Associate Fellow; London and a Fellow of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group Canberra. He has extensive aviation and defense experience. His research interests include grand strategy, national security policies particularly relating to middle powers, defence force structure concepts and the impacts of emerging technology. He is the author of the book “Grand Strategy” and co-author of “Warfare in the Robotic Age.” Advances in robotics are profoundly reshaping the world but so are any other things and not all of them are technological. The character of warfare will be different in the robotic age but the nature of warfare remains Clausewitzian, that is war is waged for political objectives. Robots may be considered as machines able to perform four basic tasks: sense, think, act and communicate.

Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, highlights the need to focus on the Rule of Law rather than Rule of War. The United Nations, although it is not perfect, is the only international organization that brings together countries of the world to deal with nuclear proliferation, climate change, human trafficking, poverty, hunger, empowering women, and scores of other challenges. Currently, there are about 13,000 nukes controlled by 9-nuclar power states. Many countries are moving to expend trillions of dollars to modernize their nuclear stockpiles, which will add to the proliferation . Given that the US and Russia have withdrawn from several major international treaties, this creates an even more dangerous world. The danger is even more severe when the Russian president denies the sovereignty of Ukraine and the former U.S. president basically ignored or violated international laws and treaties. There is a lack of trust among the nations.

John Feffer, author of Splinterlands and current director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, summarizes how Donald Trump pursued illiberal internationalism versus liberal internationalism of Joe Biden. Trump was semi-isolationist, cavorted with authoritarian leaders, and wanted to militarize the border between the US and Mexico. Biden’s emphasis was to engage the US in the world through involvement in the UN, WTO and other multilateral institutions. The Israeli-Hamas War has resulted in over 30,000 deaths and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. Biden has pushed for a two-state solution, working with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. It was alleged that 13 of the 13,000 employees of UNRWA collaborated with Hamas, which has prompted an automatic reaction of the US and some other funders to withdraw their financial support. On another front, Republican Speaker of the House Johnson has refused to bring up a bill funding assistance to Ukraine.