Joe Biden

**The ABR Podcast**

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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‘Rejecting the system it created’: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations

by Rebecca Strating

This week on the ABR Podcast, we feature Rebecca Strating’s commentary ‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’. While the second Trump administration presents a challenge for Australian policy makers, it also provides an opportunity for Australia, explains Strating, ‘to develop greater self-reliance in foreign policy and deepen relationships across Asia’. But what are leaders across Asia concerned about and how are they responding to the Trump administration? Strating provides a survey, noting that ‘most Southeast Asian nations have so far opted for hedging strategies that maintain relationships with multiple partners’.

Rebecca Strating is Director of La Trobe Asia and was this year awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in recognition of her contributions to the fields of strategic defence and international relations. Her most recent book, Girt by Sea: Re-imagining Australia’s security, was published by Black Inc. in 2024. Here is Rebecca Strating with ‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’, published in the June issue of ABR.

Recent episodes:

The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by Gabriel Debenedetti

by Varun Ghosh •

January-February 2023, no. 450

Varun Ghosh reviews 'The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama' by Gabriel Debenedetti

Since crossing paths nearly two decades ago, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have forged one of the more potent partnerships in modern American politics – winning three of the last four presidential elections between them – and have built an enduring friendship. It is all the more remarkable for its rarity. The pressures of the White House, overlapping ambitions, and competing loyalties have soured the relationship between most presidents and their deputies (think of Richard Nixon’s notorious bitterness towards Dwight Eisenhower or the froideur between Al Gore and Bill Clinton).

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This is America

The ABR Podcast

The events of January 6 shocked the world. In this episode of the ABR Podcast Samuel Watts reads his article 'This Is America' and offers a historical perspective. As Watts notes, 'To view the assault on the US Capitol as the climax of a dramatic, but brief, period of authoritarianism in the US is a potentially dangerous mistake. This attack was just the latest iteration in a long-lasting tradition of anti-democratic, white supremacist violence that has plagued the Republic since, at least, the Civil War.'

Samuel Watts’s article ‘This Is America’ is one of a series of commentaries funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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This Is America

by Samuel Watts •

March 2021, no. 429

Trump supporters marching on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (TapTheForwardAssist/WikimediaCommons)

On the morning of 6 January 2021, President Donald Trump addressed a crowd of his supporters outside the White House for more than an hour. The president urged protesters who had already begun gathering along the National Mall to go to the Capitol Building where both houses of Congress were about to start the process of certifying the results of the electoral college, formalising Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election. The election had been stolen, Trump told them: it was time for them to take it back and march on Congress: ‘You will never take back our country with weakness,’ said the president.

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