Category: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Amra Lee, PhD candidate in Protection of Civilians, Australian National University

Israel partially lifted its aid blockade of Gaza this week in response to intensifying international pressure over the man-made famine in the devastated coastal strip.

The United Arab Emirates and Jordan airdropped 25 tonnes of food and humanitarian supplies on Sunday. Israel has further announced daily pauses in its military strikes on Gaza and the opening of humanitarian corridors to facilitate UN aid deliveries.

Israel reports it has permitted 70 trucks per day into the strip since May 19. This is well below the 500–600 trucks required per day, according to the United Nations.

The UN emergency relief chief, Tom Fletcher, has characterised the next few days as “make or break” for humanitarian agencies trying to reach more than two million Gazans facing “famine-like conditions”.

A third of Gazans have gone without food for several days and 90,000 women and children now require urgent care for acute malnutrition. Local health authorities have reported 147 deaths from starvation so far, 80% of whom are children.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed – without any evidence – “there is no starvation in Gaza”. This claim has been rejected by world leaders, including Netanyahu ally US President Donald Trump.

Famine expert Alex de Waal has called the famine in Gaza without precedent:

[…] there’s no case of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.

While the UN has welcomed the partial lifting of the blockade, the current aid being allowed into Gaza will not be enough to avert a wider catastrophe, due to the severity and depth of hunger in Gaza and the health needs of the people.

According to the UN World Food Programme, which has enough food stockpiled to feed all of Gaza for three months, only one thing will work:

An agreed ceasefire is the only way to reach everyone.

Airdrops a ‘distraction and a smokescreen’

Air-dropping food supplies is considered a last resort due to the undignified and unsafe manner in which the aid is delivered.

The UN has already reported civilians being injured when packages have fallen on tents.

The Global Protection Cluster, a network of non-governmental organisations and UN agencies, shared a story from a mother in Al Karama, east of Gaza City, whose home was hit by an airdropped pallet, causing the roof to collapse:

Immediately following the impact, a group of people armed with knives rushed towards the house, while the mother locked herself and her children in the remaining room to protect her family. They did not receive any assistance and are fearful for their safety.

Air-dropped pallets of food are also inefficient compared with what can be delivered by road.

One truck can carry up to 20 tonnes of supplies. Trucks can also reach Gaza quickly if they are allowed to cross at the scale required. Aid agencies have repeatedly said they have the necessary aid and personnel sitting just one hour away at the border.

Given how ineffective the air drops have been – and will continue to be – the head of the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine has called them a “distraction” and a “smokescreen”.

Malnourished women and children need specialised care

De Waal has also made clear how starvation differs from other war crimes – it takes weeks of denying aid for starvation to take hold.

For the 90,000 acutely malnourished women and children who require specialised and supplementary feeding, in addition to medical care, the type of food being air-dropped into Gaza will not help them. Malnourished children require nutritional screening and access to fortified pastes and baby food.

Gaza’s decimated health system is also not able to treat severely malnourished women and children, who are at risk of “refeeding syndrome” when they are provided with nutrients again. This can trigger a fatal metabolic response.

Gaza will take generations to heal from the long-term impacts of mass starvation. Malnourished children suffer lifelong cognitive and physical effects that can then be passed on to future generations.

What needs to happen now

The UN has characterised the limited reopening of aid deliveries to Gaza as a potential “lifeline”, if it’s upheld and expanded.

According to Ciaran Donnelly from the International Rescue Committee, what’s needed is “tragically simple”: Israel must fully open the Gaza borders to allow aid and humanitarian personnel to flood in.

Israel must also guarantee safe conditions for the dignified distribution of aid that reaches everyone, including women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities. The level of hunger and insecurity mean these groups are at high risk of exclusion.

The people of Gaza have the world’s attention – for now. They have endured increasingly dehumanising conditions – including the risk of being shot trying to access aid – under the cover of war for more than 21 months.

Two leading Israeli human rights organisations have just publicly called Israel’s war on Gaza “a genocide”. This builds on mounting evidence compiled by the UN and other experts that supports the same conclusion, triggering the duty under international law for all states to act to prevent genocide.

These obligations require more than words – states must exercise their full diplomatic leverage to pressure Israel to let aid in at the scale required to avert famine. States must also pressure Israel to extend its military pauses into the only durable solution – a permanent ceasefire.

Amra Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Air-dropping food into Gaza is a ‘smokescreen’ – this is what must be done to prevent mass starvation – https://theconversation.com/air-dropping-food-into-gaza-is-a-smokescreen-this-is-what-must-be-done-to-prevent-mass-starvation-262053

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By James Giesecke, Professor, Centre of Policy Studies and the Impact Project, Victoria University

It’s tariff season again, with the next deadline looming on Friday, August 1.

Since the beginning of July, the United States has issued another flurry of tariff announcements, revising the sweeping plan announced on April 2. Back then, the Trump administration threatened to apply so-called “reciprocal” tariffs of up to 50% against many trading partners, plus an eye-watering 125% on Chinese imports.

In April, we modelled those measures, together with retaliation by trade partners. We reported they could cut more than 2.5% from US gross domestic product (GDP), reduce US short-run employment by 2.7%, and cut US real investment by almost 7%.

In the wake of those “Liberation Day” tariffs, financial markets took fright. On April 9 the Trump administration hit pause: the “reciprocal” tariffs were deferred until July 9 and replaced by an across-the-board 10% tariff increase, with a handful of exceptions.

Even so, the Trump tariff drum kept beating. Duties on steel and aluminium were doubled to 50%, and copper was swept in with its own 50% rate. Washington announced some “trade deals” with:

• United Kingdom – dropping the UK rate to the base rate of 10%

• China – cutting the tariff to 34%

• Vietnam – reducing its “reciprocal” tariff from 46% to 20%

• Japan – a 15% levy on all imports, including motor vehicles (otherwise tariffed at 25% for other regions)

• European Union – just announced at the weekend, reducing its “reciprocal” tariff from 30% to 15%.

When the first pause expired this month, a second extension pushed the start date for the “reciprocal” tariffs to August 1. But the tariff announcements keep coming, with recent threats to apply revised tariffs on imports from many trading partners, including a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil.

What do the new tariffs mean for the economy?

To find out, we reran our global economic model with the US tariff schedule as it stood on July 28, again allowing trading partners to retaliate proportionally (excluding Australia, Japan and South Korea, which have ruled out retaliation). This table compares the April projections with the updated results.

Damage to the US economy is less severe, but still substantial. In 2025, the falls in: real (inflation-adjusted) consumption narrow from a decline of 2.4% to 1.6%; real gross domestic product (GDP) from a fall of 2.6% to 1.7%; and real investment from a slide of 6.6% to 5.1%.

For the US, lower tariffs on the EU, UK, Japan, Vietnam and especially China, mean less disruption to short-run employment and long-run capital markets, lower efficiency losses in product markets, and less punishing retaliation from abroad.

Beijing also benefits from Washington’s climbdown. Short-run losses in Chinese real consumption shrink from 0.4% to 0.1% in 2025, and the GDP loss all but disappears. Cutting the US tariff on Chinese goods to 34%, and the corresponding pullback in China’s retaliatory duties, explains most of the improvement.

Australia is still a winner – but less so

Australia remains a beneficiary, but to a lesser degree. In April we projected short-run gains of 0.6% in consumption and 0.4% in GDP. These are now more modest, with a gain of 0.3% and 0.2% respectively. Two forces lie behind the downgrade:

1. Australia’s relative tariff treatment has narrowed. In April, Australia faced a 10% base tariff while many of our trade competitors in the US market confronted much higher “reciprocal” rates. Many of those have now been cut, eroding the relative price advantage of Australian products in the US market.

2. The global investment diversion is smaller. When investment contracts in the US and in regions relatively hard-hit by US tariffs and retaliatory action, some investment is reallocated to more lightly hit economies.

Because the projected fall in investment in the US and other regions is now milder, the corresponding investment inflow to Australia weakens, with our forecast boost to Australian investment dropping from 2.9% to 2.1% in the short-run.

What should Canberra do?

For the moment, the tariff outcomes still tilt slightly in Australia’s favour. That hardly argues for rushing into concessions in a bilateral “deal of the week” with Washington, let alone making unilateral concessions outside of any bargaining framework. This is especially true when US policy continues to appear reactive, volatile and unreliable.

However, the source of Australia’s edge is fragile.

As the US pares back its own tariff threats against other countries, the relative price advantage Australia enjoys of being subject only to the 10% base rate will diminish, and so too will the investment diversion effect.

Hence, a further US retreat from high and differentiated tariffs may yet expose Australia to net economic harm. That point has not arrived, but it may be on the horizon as US tariff policy evolves.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. As Trump has pulled back from the highest tariffs, this chart shows the economic shock has eased – https://theconversation.com/as-trump-has-pulled-back-from-the-highest-tariffs-this-chart-shows-the-economic-shock-has-eased-261846

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Professor (Practice), Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University

In Australia, there is growing recognition that children and young people are not just witnesses to domestic, family and sexual violence, but victim-survivors in their own right.

While we are getting better at understanding how coercive control operates in adult relationships – particularly where men use it against women – much less attention has been given to how children experience this kind of abuse, especially when it comes from a parent or caregiver.

New research interviewing teenage victim-survivors reveals how parents can coercively control their children under the guise of parental discipline.

What is coercive control?

Coercive control is a pattern of abusive behaviours used to instil fear, dominate or isolate someone over time. It can include:

• physical violence

• sexual abuse

• surveillance

• threats

• humiliation

• limiting access to money

• technology-facilitated abuse

• animal abuse, among many other abusive tactics.

Focusing largely on adult victim-survivors, research has found experiences of coercive control can have cumulative and long-lasting negative impacts.

Studies of children show how coercive control can erode a child’s mental health, self-esteem and sense of safety.

Fear, guilt and manipulation

For young people, within the context of the family, coercive control may be perpetrated by parents, step-parents, caregivers, siblings and other family members. The tactics used may mirror those seen in adult contexts.

But there are different circumstances at play for children. They are typically dependent on their caregivers, still mentally developing, and often have limited access to external support.

My new report, Silence and Inaction, released by the South Australian Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, draws on interviews with 53 young people aged 13–18 who have experienced different forms of domestic, family and sexual violence in that state.

In this study, young victim-survivors spoke of rules imposed by abusive adults in their family to control their friendships, communication, bodily autonomy and emotional expression. These were often enforced through fear, guilt or manipulation. One child told me:

I kicked the wall when I was eight, and my parents came in and they stripped my entire room bare, just got rid of everything […] I was either in my room or was at school […] I got water brought to me, food brought to me three times a day […] they said, “You have abused this home. It was a loving place, and you’ve abused it so when people do things wrong, they go to prison”. I was very fearful of my parents.

Several young people described experiences that reflect the dynamics of coercive control, even if they did not use that language themselves. They spoke of environments where control, surveillance and isolation were constant, and where resistance or independence was met with punishment.

Experiences of gaslighting

Several young victim-survivors interviewed described being made to feel “crazy” or “overdramatic” when they challenged the behaviour they were experiencing. Others were punished for asserting boundaries or seeking help.

A number of young people described experiences of gaslighting – being told their memories or feelings were wrong or exaggerated.

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Read more:
Explainer: what does ‘gaslighting’ mean?

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This was particularly apparent among young people who had tried to speak up about the violence they were experiencing. One young victim-survivor told me:

I was very much gaslighting myself, and then also was being gaslit for years prior by my father and not made to feel that I could ever tell anyone.

Some young victim-survivors described beginning to question their own perceptions or feeling responsible for the harm they experienced. One young person said:

I always have a fear in my head that everything I’ve said and done [is] just a massive lie, which is why I documented a lot of things […] I have photos and videos of things that have happened […] it kind of keeps me a little bit sane.

For the young people interviewed, the dynamics of coercive control were further compounded by their legal and financial dependence on the person using violence.

Young people described having limited avenues to escape or resist the abuse, and having little access to alternative sources of care or trusted adults for support.

Discipline or control?

Many of the young people I interviewed said the abuse they experienced was explained away by parents as “discipline”.

Reasonable parenting involves setting boundaries and enforcing rules through clear communication and respect for a child’s emotional and physical safety. What the young people in the study described went well beyond that.

The young people interviewed described being physically punished – through beatings, slaps or threats – as a way of “correcting” behaviour or “teaching respect”.

For young people, this led to confusion and self-doubt about whether what they experienced “counted” as abuse.

This mislabelling of abuse as discipline was particularly difficult for young people to challenge when it was reinforced by religious, cultural or generational norms. In some cases, violence was deeply embedded in family tradition and viewed as an expected method of parenting.

Young people interviewed expressed a strong desire for this cycle to be broken, including through education for caregivers. One young victim said:

it’s not just kids who need to learn – adults need to unlearn the stuff they were taught too.

The need for change

Several young people believed some parents may be unaware of the impacts of these forms of punishment. They called for targeted awareness campaigns and community education. One young victim-survivor suggested:

they feel that is still part of discipline, whereas they are actually going extra miles […] I think parents too need to be educated on how they treat their children.

Several young people said their experiences of abuse were often minimised or dismissed as necessary or appropriate acts of discipline by extended family, caregivers or other adults in their community.

This highlights the need to better engage families and communities to change understandings of discipline, particularly through culturally responsive, trauma-informed approaches to education.

We must develop deeper understandings of coercive and controlling behaviours as they are experienced by children and young people in families.

Without such awareness, there is a risk that controlling behaviour will continue to be minimised as “strict parenting”, or young people’s disclosures will be dismissed.

These experiences highlight the problem of the normalisation of violence in some households and the need for greater prevention and early intervention efforts, both for young people and caregivers.

Kate has received funding for research on violence against women and children from a range of federal and state government and non-government sources, including Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), South Australian Government, ACT Government, Australian Childhood Foundation, and 54 Reasons. This piece is written by Kate Fitz-Gibbon in her role at Sequre Consulting, and is wholly independent of Kate Fitz-Gibbon’s role as chair of Respect Victoria and membership on the Victorian Children’s Council.

– ref. ‘I was very fearful of my parents’: new research shows how parents can use coercive control on their children – https://theconversation.com/i-was-very-fearful-of-my-parents-new-research-shows-how-parents-can-use-coercive-control-on-their-children-261169

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Taliah Jade Prince, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Youth Mental Health and Neuroimaging, University of the Sunshine Coast

You’re so ugly it hurts.

Maybe if you lost some weight, someone would actually like you.

No filter can fix that face.

These are the sorts of comments teenage girls see online daily, via social media, group chats, or anonymous messages. While some may dismiss this as teasing, these comments constitute appearance-related cyberbullying.

Our previous research shows appearance-related cyberbullying is one of the most common and harmful forms of online abuse of young people. It not only hurts feelings – it changes how teens, particularly girls, see themselves.

In a new study, we’ve looked at brain images of teenage girls viewing appearance-related cyberbullying. We’ve found even just being exposed to online body shaming directed at others can activate regions of the brain linked to emotional pain and social threat.

What is appearance-related cyberbullying?

Appearance-related cyberbullying is any online behaviour that targets the way someone looks. This includes comments about their face, clothes or body. It often happens in public forums, such as comment sections or social media posts, where other people can see it, join in or share it.

The most damaging type focuses on someone’s body, such as their weight, shape or size. These messages don’t need to be long or explicit to hurt. Sometimes a single word, hashtag or even emoji is enough.

While appearance-related bullying can affect anyone, previous studies have shown teenage girls are particularly vulnerable.

During adolescence, the brain is still developing – especially the parts that shape self-esteem and help us make sense of how others see us. This means teenagers can be more affected by what people say about them.

What’s more, girls often feel strong societal pressure to look a certain way. This combination makes body shaming especially harmful.

How common is it?

In a survey of 336 teenage girls we published last year, 98% had experienced some form of cyberbullying. For 62% of them, the abuse targeted their appearance.

Most of those girls said this bullying had lasting effects on their body image and mental health, with 96% saying it made them want to change how they looked. More than 80% felt they needed to consider cosmetic procedures.

Studies from around the world have shown appearance-related cyberbullying is a strong predictor of body dissatisfaction, which is one of the biggest risk factors for eating disorders in teenage girls.

What does it do to the brain?

To understand how body-shaming content affects girls on a deeper level, we designed a brain imaging study.

First, we created a set of social media posts based on typical comments teenage girls see online. Some posts were neutral, while others included body shaming comments.

More than 400 girls rated how realistic and emotionally powerful these posts were. This helped us validate the content so it could be used in current and future studies on how young people respond to body shaming online.

We then invited 26 girls aged 14 to 18, from the Longitudinal Adolescent Brain Study – a five-year research project at our university seeking to better understand how the teenage brain develops and how this relates to mental health – to take part in a brain scan study.

We used functional MRI, a technique that shows which areas of the brain are more active during certain experiences. Alongside the scans, participants completed questionnaires about their recent experiences of cyberbullying and their body image.

When girls viewed body-shaming posts, we found certain brain regions “lit up” more than others. These included areas involved in emotional pain, self-image, and social judgement. These are regions the brain uses to interpret how others see us, and how we deal with feelings such as shame or rejection.

Girls who had recently been cyberbullied showed more activity in memory and attention regions. This suggests they were reprocessing earlier, painful experiences. Girls with more positive body image, meanwhile, showed calmer, more regulated brain responses, suggesting healthy self-image might be protective.

Girls are affected even when they’re not targeted

Notably, the girls in our study were viewing posts aimed at others – not being subjected to bullying directly. But even so, we saw changes in the way their brains reacted, and how they felt about their own bodies seemed to affect these reactions.

This tells us something important: body-shaming content doesn’t just hurt the person it targets. When appearance is constantly judged and criticised, it can change what girls think is normal or acceptable. It may also affect how their brains respond to social and emotional situations.

What needs to change?

Appearance-related cyberbullying is not just about teenage conflict. It’s a wider, societal issue. Social media platforms reward content that grabs attention, even when it causes harm.

All of this is happening during a sensitive period of brain development, where social feedback shapes how teenagers see themselves and others.

To reduce harm, we need to act on multiple levels:

• start early: while some schools offer lessons on body image and online safety, these topics are not taught consistently. Many young people say they want more support in dealing with appearance-related pressure online

• support parents and educators: adults need tools, resources and language to talk with young people about what they see online, without shame or blame

• hold platforms accountable: social media companies should strengthen reporting systems, and better moderate content that may promote appearance-related abuse such as “before-and-after” posts or other viral trends that target how someone looks

• celebrate all body types: schools, media and influencers can help by showing real people with different body types and focusing on strengths such as kindness, talent, or what bodies can do.

Adolescence is a time of major change in how teenagers think, manage emotions and build relationships. What teenagers experience during these years can shape how they see themselves and understand the world.

Online body shaming may seem like just words on a screen. But if we want the next generation to grow up confident and well, we need to take it seriously.

In Australia, if you are experiencing body image concerns, you can contact the Butterfly Foundation’s national helpline on 1800 33 4673 (or use their online chat).

Daniel Hermens receives funding from the Commonwealth government’s Prioritising Mental Health Initiative and the Queensland Mental Health Commission.

Taliah Jade Prince does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘No filter can fix that face’: how online body shaming harms teenage girls – https://theconversation.com/no-filter-can-fix-that-face-how-online-body-shaming-harms-teenage-girls-261362

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Celia Harris, Associate Professor in Cognitive Science, Western Sydney University

As school returns, parents and teachers might each be faced with the familiar chorus of “I can’t find my school jumper” and “I left my hat at home”. For parents of older kids, the stakes may be even higher: lost mobile phones or laptops left on the bus.

As parents, it can be tempting to take charge by packing schoolbags yourself, or texting older children a list of things to remember at the end of each day.

However, doing everything for your child robs them of an opportunity to learn.

What’s happening in their developing brain?

Our kids, in their busy lives, are constantly using and developing their memory skills – remembering where they put things, new conceptual knowledge, and routines required for the day-to-day.

Prospective memory – which involves remembering to do things in the future – is particularly challenging.

It’s prospective memory children draw on when they set a drink bottle down at play time and must remember to pick it up later, or get a note from their teacher and must remember to show their parent after school.

Success in prospective memory involves multiple cognitive processes going right.

Children must pay attention to what is needed in a given situation (“I can’t play outside if I don’t have a hat”), and then form and store a particular intention to act in the future (“I need to take my hat with me to school”).

Then, they must bring the intention back to mind at the crucial moment (taking the hat on the way out the door).

This “remembering to remember” requires memory to spontaneously occur at just the right time, without prompts or reminders.

These processes all require a higher-order cognitive skill known as “executive function”.

This is the ability to consciously control our attention and memory and to engage in challenging thinking tasks.

Processes that rely on executive function are hard, which is why lost drink bottles and forgotten hats are such frustratingly common experiences for parents.

Even for adults, the majority of day-to-day memory errors involve prospective memory.

Executive function develops later in childhood compared with some other skills, such as language and play.

The prefrontal cortex, which underpins executive function tasks, is not mature until early adulthood.

This means forgetfulness among children is common, and a natural part of development. Chances are you were like this too when you were a kid (you just might not remember it).

Could some kids struggle even more?

Yes.

Children (and adults) vary widely in their executive function skills.

While all children get better at executive function throughout childhood, this happens at different rates; some children may be more forgetful than others their own age.

One condition particularly related to forgetfulness is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Children with an ADHD-inattentive subtype may be more likely to lose things and be forgetful during everyday activities such as chores or errands.

Children with ADHD will still develop prospective memory skills over time, but may be more forgetful relative to other children their own age.

How can I help my kid?

Do build routines and stick to them. Research shows routines help children develop cognitive skills and self-regulation. Children are best able to remember a routine when it is “automatised” – practised often enough they know it without thinking.

Do promote “metacognition”: an awareness about one’s own cognitive processes. Research suggests children are over-optimistic about their likelihood of remembering successfully. Parents and teachers can help them to notice when remembering is hard and put in strategies that help.

Do model the behaviour you want to see. For example, you might set up your own lists and strategies to help you remember daily tasks. You could also have a family routine of “bags by the door” and checking them the night before. Don’t do it for them, do it together.

Do seek professional support if you’re worried. All children will forget sometimes, and some more than others. If your child is particularly absentminded or forgetful, it could be worth consulting a GP or school psychologist. Conditions such as ADHD must be observed in more than one setting (for example, home and school, or home and sport), and specific diagnostic criteria must be met. Diagnosis can be helpful in accessing supports.

What should I not do – and why?

Don’t rely on kids being able to spontaneously self-initiate memory – that’s the hardest part of prospective memory! Instead, use checklists and memory aids. For instance, if they are consistently leaving their drink bottle at school, you could put a tag on their bag that says “where is your drink bottle?” Using prompts isn’t cheating – it’s supporting success.

Don’t sweat the slip-ups – these are normal. One study with 3–5-year-old children found incentives in the form of food treats weren’t enough to improve performance. Punishing is also unlikely to help. Instead, use instances of forgetting as teachable moments – strategise about how to adjust next time.

Don’t leave things too late. Anxiety and stress can make forgetting more likely, because children can easily become overwhelmed. Pack bags the night before, practise new routines, and avoid rushing where possible.

Don’t judge. Prospective memory failures are sometimes perceived as character flaws, particularly when they affect other people (such as when forgetting to return a borrowed item).

Understanding how memory works, however, helps reveal that forgetfulness is an everyday part of development.

Celia Harris receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Longitude Prize on Dementia.

Penny Van Bergen receives funding from the ARC, Marsden, Google, and the James Kirby Foundation.

– ref. My child is always losing and forgetting things. How can I help – without making it worse? – https://theconversation.com/my-child-is-always-losing-and-forgetting-things-how-can-i-help-without-making-it-worse-261565

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Aditya Joshi, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney

In 2018, my Australian co-worker asked me, “Hey, how are you going?”. My response – “I am taking a bus” – was met with a smirk. I had recently moved to Australia. Despite studying English for more than 20 years, it took me a while to familiarise myself with the Australian variety of the language.

It turns out large language models powered by artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT experience a similar problem.

In new research, published in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2025, my colleagues and I introduce a new tool for evaluating the ability of different large language models to detect sentiment and sarcasm in three varieties of English: Australian English, Indian English and British English.

The results show there is still a long way to go until the promised benefits of AI are enjoyed by all, no matter the type or variety of language they speak.

Limited English

Large language models are often reported to achieve superlative performance on several standardised sets of tasks known as benchmarks.

The majority of benchmark tests are written in Standard American English. This implies that, while large language models are being aggressively sold by commercial providers, they have predominantly been tested – and trained – only on this one type of English.

This has major consequences.

For example, in a recent survey my colleagues and I found large language models are more likely to classify a text as hateful if it is written in the African-American variety of English. They also often “default” to Standard American English – even if the input is in other varieties of English, such as Irish English and Indian English.

To build on this research, we built BESSTIE.

What is BESSTIE?

BESSTIE is the first-of-its-kind benchmark for sentiment and sarcasm classification of three varieties of English: Australian English, Indian English and British English.

For our purposes, “sentiment” is the characteristic of the emotion: positive (the Aussie “not bad!”) or negative (“I hate the movie”). Sarcasm is defined as a form of verbal irony intended to express contempt or ridicule (“I love being ignored”).

To build BESSTIE, we collected two kinds of data: reviews of places on Google Maps and Reddit posts. We carefully curated the topics and employed language variety predictors – AI models specialised in detecting the language variety of a text. We selected texts that were predicted to be greater than 95% probability of a specific language variety.

The two steps (location filtering and language variety prediction) ensured the data represents the national variety, such as Australian English.

We then used BESSTIE to evaluate nine powerful, freely usable large language models, including RoBERTa, mBERT, Mistral, Gemma and Qwen.

Inflated claims

Overall, we found the large language models we tested worked better for Australian English and British English (which are native varieties of English) than the non-native variety of Indian English.

We also found large language models are better at detecting sentiment than they are at sarcasm.

Sarcasm is particularly challenging, not only as a linguistic phenomenon but also as a challenge for AI. For example, we found the models were able to detect sarcasm in Australian English only 62% of the time. This number was lower for Indian English and British English – about 57%.

These performances are lower than those claimed by the tech companies that develop large language models. For example, GLUE is a leaderboard that tracks how well AI models perform at sentiment classification on American English text.

The highest value is 97.5% for the model Turing ULR v6 and 96.7% for RoBERTa (from our suite of models) – both higher for American English than our observations for Australian, Indian and British English.

National context matters

As more and more people around the world use large language models, researchers and practitioners are waking up to the fact that these tools need to be evaluated for a specific national context.

For example, earlier this year the University of Western Australia along with Google launched a project to improve the efficacy of large language models for Aboriginal English.

Our benchmark will help evaluate future large language model techniques for their ability to detect sentiment and sarcasm. We’re also currently working on a project for large language models in emergency departments of hospitals to help patients with varying proficiencies of English.

The research, led by Dipankar Srirag, was funded by Google’s Research Scholar grant awarded in 2024 to Aditya Joshi and Diptesh Kanojia.

– ref. ‘Are you joking, mate?’ AI doesn’t get sarcasm in non-American varieties of English – https://theconversation.com/are-you-joking-mate-ai-doesnt-get-sarcasm-in-non-american-varieties-of-english-254986

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Daswin de Silva, Professor of AI and Analytics, Director of AI Strategy, La Trobe University

We are entering the third phase of generative AI. First came the chatbots, followed by the assistants. Now we are beginning to see agents: systems that aspire to greater autonomy and can work in “teams” or use tools to accomplish complex tasks.

The latest hot product is OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent. This combines two pre-existing products (Operator and Deep Research) into a single more powerful system which, according to the developer, “thinks and acts”.

These new systems represent a step up from earlier AI tools. Knowing how they work and what they can do – as well as their drawbacks and risks – is rapidly becoming essential.

From chatbots to agents

ChatGPT launched the chatbot era in November 2022, but despite its huge popularity the conversational interface limited what could be done with the technology.

Enter the AI assistant, or copilot. These are systems built on top of the same large language models that power generative AI chatbots, only now designed to carry out tasks with human instruction and supervision.

Agents are another step up. They are intended to pursue goals (rather than just complete tasks) with varying degrees of autonomy, supported by more advanced capabilities such as reasoning and memory.

Multiple AI agent systems may be able to work together, communicating with each other to plan, schedule, decide and coordinate to solve complex problems.

Agents are also “tool users” as they can also call on software tools for specialised tasks – things such as web browsers, spreadsheets, payment systems and more.

A year of rapid development

Agentic AI has felt imminent since late last year. A big moment came last October, when Anthropic gave its Claude chatbot the ability to interact with a computer in much the same way a human does. This system could search multiple data sources, find relevant information and submit online forms.

Other AI developers were quick to follow. OpenAI released a web browsing agent named Operator, Microsoft announced Copilot agents, and we saw the launch of Google’s Vertex AI and Meta’s Llama agents.

Earlier this year, the Chinese startup Monica demonstrated its Manus AI agent buying real estate and converting lecture recordings into summary notes. Another Chinese startup, Genspark, released a search engine agent that returns a single-page overview (similar to what Google does now) with embedded links to online tasks such as finding the best shopping deals. Another startup, Cluely, offers a somewhat unhinged “cheat at anything” agent that has gained attention but is yet to deliver meaningful results.

Not all agents are made for general-purpose activity. Some are specialised for particular areas.

Coding and software engineering are at the vanguard here, with Microsoft’s Copilot coding agent and OpenAI’s Codex among the frontrunners. These agents can independently write, evaluate and commit code, while also assessing human-written code for errors and performance lags.

Search, summarisation and more

One core strength of generative AI models is search and summarisation. Agents can use this to carry out research tasks that might take a human expert days to complete.

OpenAI’s Deep Research tackles complex tasks using multi-step online research. Google’s AI “co-scientist” is a more sophisticated multi-agent system that aims to help scientists generate new ideas and research proposals.

Agents can do more – and get more wrong

Despite the hype, AI agents come loaded with caveats. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, for example, prescribe active human supervision to minimise errors and risks.

OpenAI also says its ChatGPT agent is “high risk” due to potential for assisting in the creation of biological and chemical weapons. However, the company has not published the data behind this claim so it is difficult to judge.

But the kind of risks agents may pose in real-world situations are shown by Anthropic’s Project Vend. Vend assigned an AI agent to run a staff vending machine as a small business – and the project disintegrated into hilarious yet shocking hallucinations and a fridge full of tungsten cubes instead of food.

In another cautionary tale, a coding agent deleted a developer’s entire database, later saying it had “panicked”.

Agents in the office

Nevertheless, agents are already finding practical applications.

In 2024, Telstra heavily deployed Microsoft copilot subscriptions. The company says AI-generated meeting summaries and content drafts save staff an average of 1–2 hours per week.

Many large enterprises are pursuing similar strategies. Smaller companies too are experimenting with agents, such as Canberra-based construction firm Geocon’s use of an interactive AI agent to manage defects in its apartment developments.

Human and other costs

At present, the main risk from agents is technological displacement. As agents improve, they may replace human workers across many sectors and types of work. At the same time, agent use may also accelerate the decline of entry-level white-collar jobs.

People who use AI agents are also at risk. They may rely too much on the AI, offloading important cognitive tasks. And without proper supervision and guardrails, hallucinations, cyberattacks and compounding errors can very quickly derail an agent from its task and goals into causing harm, loss and injury.

The true costs are also unclear. All generative AI systems use a lot of energy, which will in turn affect the price of using agents – especially for more complex tasks.

Learn about agents – and build your own

Despite these ongoing concerns, we can expect AI agents will become more capable and more present in our workplaces and daily lives. It’s not a bad idea to start using (and perhaps building) agents yourself, and understanding their strengths, risks and limitations.

For the average user, agents are most accessible through Microsoft copilot studio. This comes with inbuilt safeguards, governance and an agent store for common tasks.

For the more ambitious, you can build your own AI agent with just five lines of code using the Langchain framework.

Daswin de Silva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI agents are here. Here’s what to know about what they can do – and how they can go wrong – https://theconversation.com/ai-agents-are-here-heres-what-to-know-about-what-they-can-do-and-how-they-can-go-wrong-261579

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Jamilla Rosdahl, Senior Lecturer, Australian College of Applied Psychology

Last month, actor Brad Pitt stepped onto the Formula One circuit as the leading man of the high-octane film F1, backed by Apple Studios, Jerry Bruckheimer Films and Pitt’s own Plan B Entertainment.

During the publicity campaign, cameras followed Pitt at every twist and turn, beaming his heartthrob persona to audiences. The coverage was gushing, with few mentions of the 2016 allegations of physical and emotional abuse made by Angelina Jolie, the award-winning actor and Pitt’s former partner.

Pitt was never charged over these allegations, but he was under considerable public scrutiny when they first came to light.

The tone has since shifted. Now, many media outlets are focused on Pitt’s clothing, describing him as looking “effortlessly iconic” and someone who is “just trying to have fun with his style” – a seemingly polished return to the limelight.

Pitt is far from an exception. He is part of a well-established pattern of powerful men in Hollywood who rebound from scandal quickly, and with seemingly little repercussion.

Pitt’s career trajectory, bolstered by critical acclaim and PR campaigns, reveals how easily the public memory can be rewritten.

How the media protects accused men

One 2019 study that looked at coverage of rape allegations against Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo highlighted how the media helps construct narratives that favour the accused. The allegations came from American woman Kathryn Mayorga, who accused Ronaldo of raping her in 2009.

The study found Portuguese media and political leaders largely defended Ronaldo, hailing him as a “national hero”. They focused on his career and presumption of innocence, while minimising and discrediting Mayorga’s account.

When Mayorga reopened the case in 2018, alleging coercion into an earlier settlement, the coverage stereotyped her as a “gold digger”, diverting attention away from the issue of sexual violence. Reports also emphasised “collateral damages”, such as Ronaldo’s club avoiding matches in the United States.

These findings underscore how the “celebrity halo” can compromise serious coverage of allegations.

According to Karen Boyle, gender studies professor and author of the 2018 book #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism, mainstream media and celebrity culture systemically protect powerful men accused of violence against women.

Celebrity culture is fundamentally patriarchal, Boyle argues, and will centre men even when they’re found to be perpetrators. She writes:

Even when these men fall, they fall spectacularly, with all eyes on them […] Their stories dominate.

Instead of drawing attention to female survivors, media narratives orbit around the accused celebrity – including their downfall, legacy and potential redemption.

The machinery of ‘redemption’

The post-#MeToo era promised a reckoning. Survivors were to be heard, and powerful men held accountable. Yet the cultural reset hasn’t been what many supporters of the movement hoped for.

Boyle argues we must understand #MeToo in relation to an ongoing history of popular misogyny which normalises men’s abuse of women.

The #MeToo movement has faced mounting backlash since it went viral in 2017. Articles in Vox and Dame Magazine highlight how public sympathy is increasingly shifting towards accused men, recasting them as victims of “cancel culture” while sidelining survivors.

Online platforms such as Instagram, Reddit and Youtbe have also created space for public commentators to blame victim-survivors and make excuses for famous male perpetrators.

And it’s not just about attraction-leniency theory, wherein physically attractive people are judged more favourably. It’s also about race.

One 2015 study found media coverage of intimate partner violence by celebrity men was more likely to be portrayed as “criminal” when the man was black.

“Reports are more likely to include excuses for men’s violence against women when the coverage is of a white celebrity than when the celebrity is black,” said the author Joanna Pepin.

White men in Hollywood accumulate prestige, status and connections that operate like currency, buffering them from consequences that would derail the careers of others.

Ideology, power and coercive control

As a scholar who has been analysing coercive control for more than ten years, I argue power operates not just through institutions, but through discourse: through who gets to speak, who is believed, what is remembered, and what is erased.

Belief is often unconscious. The public may know violence occurred, but still act as though it didn’t. People choose to forget, to preserve the comforting fiction their favourite heartthrob is a good man.

My research argues coercive control isn’t limited to perpetrators of domestic violence, but is a widespread tactic employed by high-profile men to assert power and dominance.

It operates like a modern panopticon. Powerful men can use gendered power and social status to not only trap and discipline victims within an invisible prison, but can extend this control to entire communities.

Importantly, this control can be subtle. It is often hidden behind performative niceness – hard to see and harder to prosecute.

Shifting the lens

Gender studies scholar Judith Butler argues Trump-era politics have actively distorted public conversations about gender, power and accountability. They explain in one interview:

What we’re seeing with the Trump administration is a normalisation of hatred, of xenophobia, masculinity and misogyny that emboldens far-right groups and legitimises violence against vulnerable populations.

Moving forward, we need to collectively recognise how media narratives can contribute to our collective amnesia of violence against women.

We also need to prioritise teaching younger generations about masculine culture and the dangers of gendered violence. And when survivors speak, the focus shouldn’t be on whether they seem “credible” or “emotional enough”, but on the structures that may embolden the men they are accusing.

Jamilla Rosdahl does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The celebrity halo effect: why abuse allegations against powerful men like Brad Pitt are so easily forgotten – https://theconversation.com/the-celebrity-halo-effect-why-abuse-allegations-against-powerful-men-like-brad-pitt-are-so-easily-forgotten-261101

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

Conspiracy theories are funny things.

The most enduring ones usually take hold for two reasons: first, because there’s some grain of truth to them, and second, because they speak to foundational historical divisions.

The theories morph and change, distorting the grain of truth at their centre beyond reality. In the process, they reinforce and deepen existing divisions, encouraging hateful blindness.

US President Donald Trump is perhaps the most successful conspiracy trafficker in modern American history.

Trump built his political career by trading on conspiracy. These have included a combination of racist birther conspiracies about former president Barack Obama, nebulous ideas about the “Deep State” that conspired against the interests of regular Americans, and nods to a more recent online universe centered on QAnon that alleged a Satanist ring of “elite” pedophiles involving Hillary Clinton was trafficking children.

These theories all had their own grain of truth and tapped into deep-seated historical fears. For example, Obama does have Kenyan heritage, and his Blackness threatened many white Americans’ sense of their own power.

Revelations about disgraced financier Jeffery Epstein’s trafficking in children and the way in which that implicated the “elite” of New York seemed to confirm at least parts of the final theory. It tapped into the belief – one that does have some basis in reality – that America’s elite play by rules of their own, above justice and accountability.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump increasingly engaged with this online universe. He seemed to quietly enjoy suggestions that he might be “Q” – the anonymous leader who, according to the theory, was going to break the paedophile ring wide open in a “day of reckoning”.

Many of Trump’s perennially online supporters based their championing of him around these conspiracy theories. QAnon believers were among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021. A core section of Trump’s base continues to believe his promises that he would at last reveal the truth – about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Deep State, and Epstein.

That it has long been public knowledge that Trump and Epstein had a longstanding friendship did not impinge on these beliefs.

Conspiracy theories have swirled around Epstein since at least his first arrest nearly two decades ago, in 2006. After allegations of unlawful sex with a minor, Epstein was charged with soliciting prostitution. This elicited suggestions he was receiving special treatment because of his elite status as a New York financier and philanthropist.

That pattern continued over the next decade as accusations multiplied, culminating in his arrest in 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking, including to a private island. The allegations touched the global elite, including former president Bill Clinton, the United Kingdom’s Prince Andrew, and Trump. In August 2019, Epstein was found dead in his cell, allegedly by suicide – adding further fuel to the already intense conspiracy fire.

Epstein’s arrest and death occurred during the first Trump administration. Since then, there has been a steady trickle of accusations and revelations that have increased pressure on the administration to declassify and release material relating to the case. Many of Trump’s most loyal supporters, including a set of influential podcasters and influencers, have built their audiences around Epstein and the insistence that the truth be revealed.

Early in the life of the current administration, Attorney-General Pam Bondi – whom Trump is wont to treat as his personal lawyer – said she was reviewing the Epstein “client list”.

In the past few weeks, however, the administration has indicated it will not release the list or other materials relating to the case. At the same time, more information about Trump’s relationship with Epstein has trickled out, including more photos of the two together. It’s hard to deny the sense there is more to come.

Trump’s posting about the issue, despite his apparent wish to divert from it, seems only to compel more interest. Sections of his online conspiracy base, including vocal supporters such as Tucker Carlson, are outraged at what they see as a betrayal. Reports suggest a significant rift developing between Trump and key backer Rupert Murdoch over the issue. Democrats, rightly, sense weakness.

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Loyal Republicans seem rattled enough that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called an early summer recess, sending congresspeople home in an apparent effort to avoid any forced vote on the issue.

The obvious inference – though it is inference only – is that Trump and Republicans are so worried about what is in the Epstein material they would rather cop strong backlash from the base, looking scared and weak, than release the information. If nothing else, that is a guaranteed way to fuel an already raging fire.

Trump’s tanking approval rating and the salience of this issue lead to an obvious question: is this going to be the thing that finally scratches the Teflon president? Will his base turn on him at last?

If history is anything to go by, that seems unlikely. Trump is remarkably resilient, using crises like this to consolidate his power. Trump commands loyalty, and he has it from Bondi, Johnson and others in this weakened and increasingly ideologically driven federal government. And his conspiracy-fuelled base is in so deep that turning on the president now is not just a question of admitting error, but one of core identity.

US mainstream media has long pursued a “gotcha” approach to Trump, driven by a model of journalism that still seeks out smoking guns and dreams of Watergate. Not unlike the conspiracy theories it reports on, this framing hopes for a neat, clear resolution to the story of US politics. But politics doesn’t work like that – especially not for Trump.

From the outside, Trump’s attempts to pivot on the issue and build on his existing conspiracies around Obama and Hillary Clinton might look feeble, but they are tried and true. Trump is now focused on fanning theories around Obama and Clinton, broadening them to include accusations of “treason”. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went so far as to claim Obama had “manufactured […] a years-long coup against President Trump”. Even reporting on these claims with rightful incredulity adds fuel to the raging fire.

In the personality cult of an authoritarian leader, conspiracy is easily weaponised against enemies, perceived and real. In the febrile environment of US politics, these conspiracy theories tap into and encourage a long vein of white supremacy and racial revanchism that has shaped American politics since even before the nation’s founding.

Trump can morph and change conspiracy theories like no one else, building on fears and deepening existing divisions. He understands the power of pointing to “enemies from within”, and just how well that reinforces the narrative he has already so successfully ingrained in US political culture. We underestimate him, and the power of conspiracy theory, at our peril.

Emma Shortis is Director of International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.

– ref. Donald Trump cannot make the Epstein files go away. Will this be the story that brings him down? – https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-cannot-make-the-epstein-files-go-away-will-this-be-the-story-that-brings-him-down-261843

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Linggong Kong, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, Auburn University

China has long maintained that it does not supply arms to any party at war – a central tenet of its “noninterference” foreign policy. But in recent years, Beijing has repeatedly faced accusations of doing the opposite: providing direct military assistance to nations engaged in conflict, while publicly denying doing so and even adopting a position of diplomatic neutrality.

That has seemingly been the case for two of China’s closest allies: Russia in its war against Ukraine and Pakistan during its recent armed standoff with India in May.

Now, Beijing is facing scrutiny over alleged military links to Iran – a country engaged in a long-running shadow conflict with Israel that recently tipped into a short-lived hot war.

After the ceasefire that followed the 12-day war in the Middle East, China reportedly supplied batteries for surface-to-air missiles to Iran in exchange for oil. Such parts are a critical military need for Tehran after its air defense network was severely damaged by Israeli missiles.

The Chinese Embassy in Israel denied the reports, stating that China firmly opposes the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and does not export arms to countries at war. But China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has yet to issue an official statement on the alleged transfer.

As an expert specializing in China’s grand strategy, I think it is highly possible that China would offer Iran military support while denying it publicly. Such plausible deniability would allow Beijing to assert military influence and showcase some of its hardware, while deflecting international criticism and preserving diplomatic flexibility.

But the tactic works only so far. As indirect evidence accumulates, as many suggest it is, such covert action may gradually develop into an open secret – leading to what scholars term “implausible deniability,” where denial is no longer credible even if it is still officially maintained.

China’s support for Russia’s war

Although Beijing has consistently said it is neutral in the Russia-Ukraine war that broke out in 2022, China has, in practice, quietly supported Russia. In part, that is because China shares the same strategic goal of challenging the Western-led international order.

Recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas that Beijing cannot afford to see Russia lose the war in Ukraine. He was said to have warned that a Russian defeat would likely bring the full force of U.S. strategic pressure to bear on China.

From Beijing’s perspective, Moscow plays a vital role in keeping the West preoccupied, offering China valuable strategic breathing room by diverting American attention and resources away from the Asia-Pacific region.

Beyond deepening trade relations that have become a lifeline for Moscow’s economy under Western sanctions, China has reportedly supplied Russia with large quantities of dual-use goods – goods that can be used for civilian and military purposes – to enhance both Moscow’s offensive and defensive capabilities, as well as to boost China’s military-industrial production. Beijing has also allegedly provided satellite imagery to assist Russia on the battlefield.

While the U.S. and Europe have repeatedly tried to call out China for aiding Russia militarily, Beijing has consistently denied such claims.

Most recently, on April 18, 2025, Ukraine formally accused China of directly supporting Russia and slapped sanctions on three Chinese-based firms that Kyiv said was involved in weapons production for the Russian war effort.

In what has become a common refrain, China’s Foreign Ministry rejected the Ukrainian accusation, reaffirming that China has never provided lethal weapons to any party in the conflict and reiterating its official stance of promoting a ceasefire and peace negotiations.

China’s quiet backing of Pakistan

Beijing has long presented itself as a neutral party in the India-Pakistan conflict, too, and has called for restraint on both sides and urged peaceful dialogue.

But in practice, China is allied with Pakistan. And the direct military support it has provided to Lahore appears driven by China’s desire to curb India’s regional influence, counterbalance the growing U.S.–India strategic partnership and protect the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, a massive bilateral infrastructure project.

In the latest flare-up between India and Pakistan in May, Pakistan deployed Chinese-made J-10C fighter jets in combat for the first time, reportedly downing five Indian aircraft.

Pakistan’s air defense relied heavily on Chinese equipment during the short conflict, deploying Chinese-made surface-to-air missile systems, air-to-air missiles, advanced radar systems and drones for reconnaissance and strike operations. Overall, more than 80% of Pakistan’s military imports have come from China in the past five years.

In what would be a far more stark example of military support if proven true, the deputy chief of India’s army alleged that China had provided Pakistan with real-time intelligence on Indian troop movements during the conflict.

When asked to respond, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they had no knowledge of the matter. They reaffirmed that China’s ties with Pakistan are not directed against any third party and reiterated Beijing’s long-standing position in favor of a peaceful resolution to any India–Pakistan dispute.

Extending ‘deniability’ to Iran?

Like with Russia and Pakistan, Iran has increasingly been seen as a partner to China.

In 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year, US$400 billion comprehensive cooperation agreement that covered trade, energy and security, signaling the depth of their strategic relationship.

The accord was indicative of the strategic value Beijing places on Iran. From Beijing’s perspective, Tehran presents a counterbalance to the influence of the U.S. and its allies – especially Israel and Saudi Arabia – in the region and helps divert Western resources and attention away from China.

But recently, Tehran’s position in the region has become far weaker. Not only has its air defense infrastructure suffered badly in the confrontations with Israel, but its regional proxies and allies – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria – have either been devastated by Israel or collapsed altogether.

Under these circumstances, it is strategically compelling for Beijing to provide support to Tehran in order to maintain regime stability.

Indeed, Beijing has frequently circumvented sanctions on Iranian energy, with an estimated 90% of Iran’s oil exports still going to China.

Although Beijing did not extend any substantive support to Iran during the 12-day war, reports have abounded since that Iran is looking to China as an alternative supplier of its defense needs. The thinking here is that Russia, Tehran’s traditional military partner, is no longer able to provide sufficient, quality defense equipment to Iran. Some influential social media posters in China have gone as far as advocating for direct military sales by Beijing.

If China does do this, I believe it is likely to follow the same playbook it has used elsewhere by denying involvement publicly while covertly providing assistance.

Doing so allows China to maintain diplomatic ties with Iran’s regional rivals, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, while simultaneously benefiting from a turbulent Middle East that distracts Washington and grants Beijing strategic breathing room.

China’s use of plausible deniability reflects a broader strategic ambition. Namely, it wants to assert influence in key regional conflicts without triggering open backlash. By quietly supporting partners while maintaining a facade of neutrality, Beijing aims to undermine Western dominance, stretch U.S. strategic focus and secure its own interests – and all while avoiding the risks and responsibilities of open military alignment.

Linggong Kong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Beijing’s ‘plausible deniability’ on arms supply is quickly becoming implausible – and could soon extend to Iran – https://theconversation.com/beijings-plausible-deniability-on-arms-supply-is-quickly-becoming-implausible-and-could-soon-extend-to-iran-261148