Lowy Institute

Myanmar has been in a state of violent upheaval since the military seized power in 2021, leading to a nationwide resistance and the collapse of vital state functions. Myanmar’s parliament recently convened for the first time in five years, with the former commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing appointed as president. Hunter Marston, Director of the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia Program, and Sean Turnell, a Senior Fellow in the Southeast Asia Program and former economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, discuss the current state of the resistance in Myanmar, prospects for the country’s economy, and what the international community can do to encourage dialogue between all parties.
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Thomas Wright, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former senior director at the National Security Council, joins Lowy Institute Director of International Security Sam Roggeveen to discuss the Iran conflict, the future of AUKUS, and what an era of alternating American foreign policies means for Australia and its allies. Dr Wright's Lowy Institute Paper, Inflection Point: Biden, Trump, and the Future World Order, is available now.
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On the eve of the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, Donald Trump's approach to China looks less like strategic competition and more like a search for a deal. In this episode, Richard McGregor speaks with Lowy Institute Nonresident Fellow and former Biden White House official, Thomas Wright, about what the Trump–Xi summit reveals, why the 2025 tariff war ended badly for Washington, and how the Democratic Party is reckoning with its own foreign policy legacy. Wright also makes the case that the world now faces not one American foreign policy, but two — and must plan accordingly.
You can access Tom Wright’s Lowy Institute Paper Inflection Point: Biden, Trump, and the Future World Order here: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/inflection-point-biden-trump-future-world-order
More episodes of the Lowy Institute's podcasts are available on your favourite podcast apps, including Spotify, YouTube and Apple.
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For years, the conventional wisdom held that the United States retained a decisive lead over China in the technologies and industries that will define the 21st century. The 2025 report of the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission to Congress challenges that view, and its conclusions make for sobering reading.
Ahead of the Trump–Xi summit where trade and technology are on the table, the Commission finds that China has not only caught up with but in multiple sectors now leads advanced economies including the United States. From electric vehicles and solar panels to quantum computing pathways and pharmaceutical supply chains, Beijing’s combination of state direction, entrepreneurial competition, and sustained investment has produced results that Western policymakers are only beginning to reckon with.
In this episode, the Lowy Institute's Richard McGregor speaks with Randy Schriver and Mike Kuiken — vice-chairs of the Commission — about what their report found and what it means. They discuss China’s model of directed innovation, the case for a consolidated US economic statecraft entity, the multiple “choke points” China now holds over industrialised economies, and what sustained engagement in the Pacific, including by Australia, must look like to be effective. They also assess the military situation around Taiwan and the second-order implications of the ongoing conflict with Iran.
Randy Schriver served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the first Trump administration. Mike Kuiken is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
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The post–Cold War international order hasn't collapsed from a single shock. It's been deliberately unwound.
Thomas Wright, a former Senior Director for Strategic Planning in President Biden's National Security Council, argues that China, Russia, and the United States have each adopted foreign policies that broke the foundational restraints holding the system together. By historical measures, what's emerged has the hallmarks of a pre-war environment.
Drawing on his time inside the White House, Dr Wright diagnoses how we got here and what may come next. From Xi Jinping's strategy of asymmetric economic dominance, to Putin's war of conquest in Europe, to Trump's redefinition of American alliances as transactional arrangements.
This event was hosted by Sam Roggeveen, Director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program, in Melbourne on Wednesday 6 May 2026.
More episodes of the Lowy Institute's podcasts are available on your favourite podcast apps, including Spotify, YouTube and Apple.
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