From the ASIO DG’s Lowy speech: www.lowyinstitute.org/2025-lowy-le...

Out of interest what is the WOTR melodrama? (I’ve been looking for some explanation as to why it has changed in the way it has)

Little blast from the last there, I think I can remember you proposing that WOTR should have footnotes way back when it was first established.

Good luck!!

Just Security? Lawfare? Both more law-focused though. I would have said The Strategy Bridge if still around.

They were a brilliant publication for many years, but this year (and probably building up earlier) it has felt like they exist in a different reality.

Yeah, and this paragraph was just a rant of “realist warriors being sidelined by bean-counting managerialists”, which is such a widespread cliche that I saw almost the exact same claim being made a day a two earlier in an article by MLR Smith and someone else in Military Strategy Magazine.

That was what I initially hoped the article would be!

Oh that’s a good article, much more grounded.

I tend to resist “they’ve sold out” as explanations for intellectual changes. But their identity has noticeably changed in a way that, say, Lawfare’s hasn’t. And their articles often indeed tend to feel like they have a far weaker relationship with reality than before.

“‘Post-liberal‘ is not a synonym for authoritarianism“, as if it’s a purely a thought experiment and it’s forbidden to mention anything Trump’s actually doing.

Also, unless I’m missing something (downloaded the the brief but not the dataset), the T2V data doesn’t code for ideological leanings. Which undermines the “use T2V rather than CSIS data” argument. It’s less “our data shows CSIS data is wrong” than “our data shows CSIS data could be wrong”.

The criticism I’m most sympathetic to is that the CSIS report had too few cases to make any forecasts, which is a point @jessmarindavis.bsky.social made at the very beginning.