Yearview Mirror 2025

A recap of some of my best writing from 2025

Sunrise over Åland

As I’ve picked up some new subscribers and followers over the year – and for anyone else who may have missed an article that would interest them – I thought I’d provide a recap of some of my best writing from 2025. I spent a bit less time physically darting around the world this year compared to last year, but I still managed to be on the move content-wise.

My initial great loves in international affairs were India and Canada. I’ve been dragged away from both countries in recent years, but Donald Trump’s threats to make Canada “the 51st state” offered me an opportunity in January to write about the practical obstacles to this for The Interpreter. Canada hides its light under bushel, but its internal organisation is deeply weird and fascinating and would make the country incredibly difficult for the U.S to annex.

Since I’ve been dividing my time between Australia and Sweden the past few years I’ve also found myself becoming the unofficial welcoming committee for Swedish students studying in Melbourne. This role combined with Australia’s current housing crisis to have me sleeping on the couch as I took in a pair of students struggling to find accommodation. This allowed me to write about housing a foreign policy issue for The Interpreter, and the foreign policy gains to be made when civil society steps up to compensate for government failures.

It was also a lesson in how opening doors opens doors. I gained a new family up in Stockholm, with one of the girls’ family providing a room for me while I was visiting the city, as well as taking me out to their cabin in the woods. While I would regularly meet up with the other girl in Malmö for tea, as she is studying international relations and keen to discuss current affairs and career options.

The first major essay I published this year was on the shift in global archetype. Since the early 1990s we had been living in the world of “Davos Man” – the globally connected, cosmopolitan, technocratic tinkerer. I argued that Davos Man is now being challenged by DARVO Man. Drawing from the work of Jennifer Freyd and her concept of Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. This is a set of behavioural patterns she observed studying interpersonal abuse, but which also clearly describes the behaviour of our new major political figures and movements.

As a revolutionary movement, the Trump Administration obviously provides a series of new ideas that require scrutiny. As well as being classic DARVO cases, the administration has also dispensed with the traditional economic ideas of the Republican Party. So I wrote about understanding the relationship between economic change and social change as the driver of the Trump Administration’s fondness for tariffs.

American politics in general is batshit crazy. It seems almost no-one is capable of understanding any issue solely on its own merits. Instead everything is filtered through a hyper-polarised media environment and psychological affliction. Thinking about this I theorised that it has been a little bureaucratic detail like picking a party affiliation when you register to vote that has created these conditions. This is what has what has transformed support for a political party into an identity. It is what enabled these two parties to own people’s souls.

Being very keen on democracy, in the lead-up to the Australian federal election in May I wrote an essay on the Community Independents Project, which I think is the most interesting democratic movement in the world at the moment. I had hoped that an article on how a grassroots political movement – that is a model of political organisation, rather than a party – can gain traction in a Western democracy would be of interest to The Atlantic. But it was deemed too niche.

Which probably says more about the U.S at the moment than the quality of the piece. With the country experiencing major democratic backsliding, but still unwilling to look outside of itself for any ideas or examples that might help arrest this backsliding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Still on Australia, I wrote a piece on the meaning of the Australia idiom “she’ll be right”. The positive things it says about the country, but also the complacency that it breeds. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life trying to get away from Australia, but I think this year I may have started to recognise that there are actually some interesting things about the country. Especially with the national character.

Thinking about this became even more important following the Bondi Shooting in December and how Australia needs to foster greater social cohesion (which is strong, but there is no ceiling). I wrote two pieces for The Diplomat following the shooting – one on having a holistic understanding of social cohesion, and the other on thinking clearly about hate speech laws.

In total, I wrote 48 articles for The Diplomat last year mostly on various aspects of Australian foreign policy and domestic issues. With a few articles on New Zealand and the Pacific Islands as well - given my remit is the publication’s Oceania section.

Arguably the biggest structural issue facing the world right now is the decline in birth rates. It is a phenomenon that will impact almost every facet of domestic and global affairs. There has been much commentary about the reasons for this decline, but one factor I believe is being overlooked is that women now have higher expectations on partnership and fatherhood and men are currently struggling to meet these new social conditions.

So I wrote an essay on the decline in birth rates as a men’s issue. It is an issue of men’s character and responsibility. About how we create social structures that will draw men away from the current negative influences that are preying upon their insecurity, which is creating a chasm between the sexes. And – maybe the most difficult thing – how men can actually come to like women.

When I first started writing on Substack my intention was to write about music. To find a concept within an album and explore it as a philosophical essay. Some examples of this have been the struggle of the Welsh language through Mwng by Super Furry Animals, the Canada-America relationship through Destroyer’s Kaputt, and the idea of courage through The Danielson Famile’s Fetch The Compass Kids.

This approach led me to write this year what I think is my best piece of writing. Luke Haines’s concept album about the Red Army Faction offered a wealth of ideas. About the terrorist group obviously, but also about Haines himself, the culture of British music, and the UK at large. All wrapped up in Georg Hegel’s concept of the struggle for recognition.

I was completely convinced that this essay would send this newsletter stratospheric. There’s a certain genre of middle-aged British man to whom it would tickle every fancy, but, unfortunately, I have no idea how to reach these men’s eyeballs. I could have pitched it to The Quietus – which is where these men now all hang out – but I couldn’t risk an editor not seeing the whole board and taking a knife to it.

The essay didn’t take off. Of course, the irony – or subtext of the piece –is my own struggle for recognition. The penultimate paragraph was a metacommentary about the piece itself as well as being about the album:

Yet a more rational pursuit of risk is to create art that has ambition and vision. To take an idea and explore its possibilities and potential. For it to be daring, clever and insightful. To push the boundaries of imagination, place it in the public realm – within the vulnerability of light – and hope that others will understand and appreciate its purpose.

I jimmy’d up the album’s Wikipedia page to link to the essay, so hopefully one day it will find its way into the corners of the internet where these middle-aged British men congregate.

In October I popped over to Finland to write a couple of articles. I managed to secure meeting with the director of the Arms Control Unit in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so I wrote a piece for The Interpreter on Finland’s withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention on the banning of landmines. With the wider problem of degradation of global initiatives designed to build a more cooperative world.

From Helsinki I hopped on the train to Turku and then the ferry to Åland, where I had the honour of being able to interview the premier and write a longer piece for The Interpreter on Åland’s unique status as a neutral, demilitarised, and Swedish-speaking autonomous region of Finland. And the complications it faces from this status.

The last major essay I wrote for the year was on the problem of our pervasive sense of emotional insecurity. I took Susan Neiman’s observation that the shift in our view of history from the victor to the victim in the 21st Century has had the unintended consequence of incentivising victimhood. I argued that this has fed the rise in identity as the driver of politics, weakening the confident individual – who is our bulwark against authoritarianism. Rather than encouraging us to learn for the brutality of the 20th Century, this shift in our view of history has created the conditions for the brutes to return.

As I mentioned in my Housekeeping post a couple of weeks ago, unfortunately, the organisation I have worked for in recent years – Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D) – is coming to a close. So I am looking around for new opportunities.

I’m aware that what I might do next may not provide me with the freedom to write. A couple of jobs I have applied for most definitely will mean ending my association with The Diplomat, and prevent me from other public writing. Which may mean pausing this newsletter, or refocusing it away from current affairs.

Although I fear I may not be hot property on the employment market anyway. My sense in Australia is that government departments tend to see public writing as a threat, rather than a demonstration of knowledge and capabilities. My CV may read like I’m a bit of a troublemaker. We will see when everyone returns to work in Australia and I start receiving rejection emails.

Ideally I would love to generate more income from just roaming the world and writing about what I find, but the structure of the publishing industry nowadays makes this impossible. Unless, of course, those middle-aged British men finally come through for me with their subscriptions.