A century ago, in early 1917, Australian troops had already seen heavy fighting, on Gallipoli in 1915 and even more on the Western Front in 1916, which had cost some 23,000 lives. In July 1916 nearly 2,000 men died in the overnight disaster at Fromelles and a further 8,000 in the protracted blood-letting on the Somme, at Pozières and Mouquet Farm from late July to September 1916.

Besides bringing widespread grief, these losses had already caused a crisis in voluntary recruiting in Australia and a divisive plebiscite campaign over the introduction of conscription for overseas service. Though strongly supported by Billy Hughes and practically all newspapers and churches, the proposal narrowly failed, resulting in the splitting of the Labor Party and Hughes’s eventual defection to form the Nationalist Party. Australian civilians, formally loyal to the empire’s cause, were becoming weary of the imposts of war and its effects on their lives.

While Australians in 2016 rightly remembered the sacrifices on the battlefield at Fromelles and Pozières, the war’s impact on those at home was notably absent in official commemoration. Australians today seem wary of recognising the bitterness of the conscription campaign. In 2016, while generally deploring the need for Australian troops to have been committed so promiscuously to the slaughter of the Somme, they also seem vicariously proud that these victims had been volunteers. It’s almost as if acknowledging the controversy over conscription devalues the troops’ sacrifices, rather than celebrating the triumph of a democratic referendum in wartime. Either way, despite the attention devoted to remembering the Somme, the centenary of the conscription vote (on 28 October) attracted little popular or media attention.

The year 1917 would bring even greater trauma. Internationally, with the entry of the United States into the war and the collapse of the Russian empire into revolution, 1917 would see events that would affect the world for decades to come. The French army mutinies and the Italian disaster of Caporetto, 1917 saw allied fortunes at their lowest ebb.

It would also be the most stressful and costly year of the war for Australia. Australians would fight futilely at Bullecourt (twice), at the bloody but seemingly successful offensive at Messines, and in the three-month-long ordeal of the third battle of Ypres, expressed forever in the word Passchendaele, the name of the obliterated, mud-bound village where the Flanders offensive finally ended. By the year’s end, nearly as many Australians were to die in battle as had died in the war so far – almost 22,000. More Australians were to die in 1917 than in any year in our history, and most of them violently, and arguably for little gain. Even the successes in Palestine (at Beersheba, part of the third battle of Gaza, which brought the capture of Jerusalem) were countered by the debacles of the first two attempts to take Gaza.

And as in 1916, the year brought further strife to Australians at home. While Billy Hughes gained government, now elected as a conservative Nationalist, the year saw a growing rancour as trades unions contested the war’s effects on their members’ wages and conditions. There was increasing propaganda, security surveillance and conflict, including the celebrated throwing of an egg at Hughes at Warwick, Queensland. In the winter of 1917 there were food riots in Melbourne, a growing anti-war (and not just anti-conscription) movement, and a ‘great strike’ that paralysed transport in the eastern states, a reflection of the divisions the war increasingly drove between civilians. In December, Hughes again put to the people the introduction of conscription, and once again it failed, with a larger no vote and amid greater acrimony. Australians would vote for Hughes, but they would not vote to compel men to fight in the empire’s war.

What of this story will we hear in 2017? If 2015 and 2016 are any guide, we’ll see ceremonies at Bullecourt, Messines, Beersheba and Passchendaele—and rightly, given the magnitude of suffering those names represent. We ought to recall places and events that cost or affected the lives of thousands of Australians.

But will we as a nation also recall the magnitude of the war’s effects on most Australians, at home? Will we see a ceremony in Melbourne remembering the hardship that drove women to march demanding bread (shades of St Petersburg)? Will we see ceremonies at Holsworthy recalling the imposition of internment for German-Australians, or a memorial recalling the division of the ‘great strike’? Probably not. I deplore the shortsightedness that fails to see that the world’s first ‘total war’ affected Australians at Warwick as well as Wipers; at Bathurst as well as Broodseinde.

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the most acute phase of the Suez Crisis. Diplomatic historians of mid-20th century conflicts seem agreed that the secretly planned Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in early November 1956 signalled the approaching demise of empire for Britain and an immediate loss of her great power status.

The Suez intervention was without a doubt Britain’s most humiliating foreign policy experience; the disastrous outcome of that tripartite invasion heralded a series of other dramatic but unintended consequences, the full impact of which might not be felt for a decade or more.

The supremely self-confident, regionally ambitious and anti-imperialist Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, had announced his intention to nationalise the French-built Suez Canal in late July 1956, by which time all British forces stationed along the canal zone had already been withdrawn—at Nasser’s insistence. Although never a British colony in the strict constitutional sense, Britain had dominated Egyptian affairs since 1882, for much of that period sharing influence with the French. The British government was the major shareholder in the company that owned and operated the canal, which Churchill had described as “the great imperial lifeline”.

The secret plan to allow Israel to launch an invasion through the Sinai peninsula, with Britain and France to order a ceasefire and to send troops into the canal zone to enforce peace, was masterminded by the French and Israeli prime ministers, Guy Mollet and David Ben Gurion, and sealed in the Parisian suburb of Sevres. Anthony Eden’s late foray into reckless gunboat diplomacy was partly explained by his unhappy memories of European appeasement while British foreign secretary in the late 1930s and partly by his chronic health problems. A series of disastrous gall bladder operations and heavy reliance on amphetamines would have intensified Eden’s “pathological feelings” about the Egyptian leader.

The Sevres agreement was reached only after a series of international conferences had sought unsuccessfully to persuade Nasser to allow international supervision of the canal. The plan was not reported to the British Cabinet and both Eden and his foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, denied to parliament that any action was under preparation. The British ambassador in Cairo at the time, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, told the present writer during a later visit to Australia that his embassy had received no prior warning of the invasion.

Although the three invading forces scored early military successes, political failure and public humiliation for Britain was immediate, occasioned by Washington’s hostile and very public reaction. Both President Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had repeatedly warned Eden against armed intervention in Egypt, partly to minimise Cold War animosities, partly to avoid embarrassment to Eisenhower’s current bid for re-election to the White House, and partly because both president and secretary of state were avowedly anti-imperialist. Britain’s punishment from Washington was to be denied a much-needed major loan from the International Monetary Fund unless British and French forces immediately withdrew from Egypt. The invasion ended on 7 November. France did not suffer international humiliation to the same degree as Britain, but the invasion hastened the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the ascendancy of Charles de Gaulle in the new Fifth Republic.

Australia played a controversial supporting role to Britain throughout the dispute, driven largely by its fervently anglophile prime minister, who allowed his heart to rule his head on this issue. Robert Menzies’ mission to Cairo in September 1956, in which he represented canal user states appealing for Nasser to approve international supervision of the canal via the United Nations, was doomed from the start, especially given the sentiments he had already expressed publicly against Nasser. In Cairo, Menzies warned the Egyptian leader that Britain and France might eventually need to resort to force, and when the invasion occurred Australia and New Zealand were the only two countries to vote with the three belligerent states against the General Assembly resolution (997) calling for an immediate ceasefire. There were just six abstentions.

Nasser’s government then severed relations with Australia. The dissenting voice of Australia’s external affairs minister, Richard Casey, in Canberra had carried little weight in Cabinet, and Casey’s own department was further hamstrung by Menzies’ insistence that Anglo-Australian relations remain the exclusive responsibility of the prime minister’s own department, an anomaly not removed until 1970. New Zealand’s position is largely explained by Prime Minister Sidney Holland’s instinctive loyalty to Britain and his ignorance of what came to be called “the Sevres conspiracy”.

The flow-on effects of the Suez adventure were serious and numerous. It consolidated United States leadership of Western interests in the Middle East, especially its patronage of Israel. It distracted world attention from the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary following the revolution there in November 1956. Nasser’s triumph inspired the spread of Arab nationalism across North Africa and the Middle East, while continental Europe, encouraged by West Germany’s Chancellor Adenauer, quickened the pace of European unification with establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957.

Britain faced another other blow to its traditional sphere of influence in the Middle East just two years after Suez, when both the king and prime minister of Iraq were assassinated during that unhappy country’s first military coup. Britain had already volunteered a sharp diminution of her influence on Arab-Israeli affairs by quitting its UN-sponsored  mandate in Palestine in late 1947, but preparations for the independence of Britain’s African and Southeast Asian colonies were well under way by the time of Suez, and the government of Harold Macmillan, which followed Eden’s resignation, self-consciously avoided the rhetoric and posturings of empire. Britain’s international status did not continue to shrink, but the successful deployment of her power since 1956 has been characterised as ‘essays in exorcising the demons of Suez’.

Next year marks the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, the British statement that paved the way for Israel’s founding in 1948, and for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as the larger Arab world, that continues today.

World leaders gathering in New York for the United Nations General Assembly probably won’t have time to discuss this perennial political challenge. But, despite all of the Middle East’s other—and seemingly bigger—problems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the lynchpin issue that will determine whether the region’s future will be one of peace and prosperity.

The conflict—whether it is resolved or not—will also help define US President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy legacy. As Obama’s second term nears its end, it is worth recalling that when he came to office in 2009, he sought rapprochement with the wider Muslim world. In his historic Cairo speech in June of that year, he described the Palestinians’ situation as ‘intolerable’ and promised to pursue—‘with all the patience and dedication that the task requires’—a policy of ‘two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.’

Obama has made very little progress on this issue since then, though not for lack of trying. During Obama’s first term, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Republicans in the US Congress united against him to derail any meaningful peace efforts. And during his second term, his secretary of state, John Kerry, led a heroic nine-month effort—involving almost a hundred bilateral meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders—that simply petered out.

Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have now both expressed a willingness to meet, in Moscow or in some other location yet to be determined. But no one seriously expects the parties to make real progress toward a two-state solution at this point.

One reason is that Netanyahu is waiting for Obama to leave office. His current priorities are to secure a massive military-aid deal with the US in the coming months, and to orchestrate a new public-relations blitz justifying his government’s current policy regarding settlements in the occupied territories, which the international community has condemned as illegal. Moreover, Abbas’s authority is slipping, and there is no mandate for a Palestinian leader to pursue serious peace efforts in today’s political climate.

Leaving office without having made progress on an issue he specifically promised to resolve would be a colossal failure for Obama. Fortunately, he still has time, and many previous US presidents have set a precedent for bold diplomacy during their final months in the White House. In late 1988, Ronald Reagan recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization and authorized the State Department to begin ‘substantive dialogue’ with PLO leaders. In late 2000, Bill Clinton published his parameters for a future peace framework. And, starting with the Annapolis Conference in late 2007, George W. Bush mediated a series of negotiations between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Now it is Obama’s turn, and he should push for a UN Security Council resolution that establishes new parameters for a future peace accord, and replaces UN Security Council Resolution 242, which dates back to the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The international community agrees that ending the conflict is in everyone’s interest—France has long argued for a new resolution, and Russia has no incentive to oppose one. Obama should start by approaching Russia, the European Union, and the UN to discuss how the resolution should be phrased.

He will need international support, because Netanyahu will certainly object to any new parameters that undermine his own increasingly apparent vision of a Greater Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Netanyahu will have American allies to run interference for him. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump doesn’t even mention a two-state solution in his platform; and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has assured American pro-Israel advocacy organizations that she opposes any new Security Council resolution to lay the foundation for a future accord.

Still, a new resolution would ideally come this November, just after the US election, sparing the next president the political costs. A Clinton administration would benefit from already having something to work with, and a Trump administration would benefit from low expectations, while being restrained from doing more damage than it otherwise could have done.

The resolution itself will have to be far more comprehensive than previous efforts by the Security Council. Indeed, Resolution 242 doesn’t even mention the Palestinians or a future Palestinian state. A far better model would be the Arab League’s 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which embodies a much wider regional perspective, and which Obama has previously said would give Israel ‘peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.’

Moreover, a new resolution should establish that the international community will recognize no changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regard to Jerusalem.

Admittedly, a resolution now would not lead to immediate peace, or even to peace talks. In fact, it might divide Israelis and Palestinians further in the near term. But if the world wants to avoid a future cataclysmic confrontation between a coming Greater Israel and a Palestine backed by a larger alliance of Arab countries, the conditions for talks leading to a stable two-state solution must be established now.

Obama is in a position to establish a framework for an eventual settlement. If he does, it would demonstrate that his Cairo speech was not in vain, and it might even justify the Nobel Peace Prize he received at the start of his presidency, when he vowed that peace between Israel and Palestine would be a defining part of his legacy.

Overnight the US and the EU Commission reached an agreement on transatlantic data flows, 3 months after the European Court of Justice ruled the old ‘Safe Harbour’ framework was invalid. The EU Commission stated that the new agreement will provide ‘stronger obligations on companies in the US to protect the personal data of Europeans and stronger monitoring and enforcement by the US’. The EU Commission statement also notes that the US has agreed not to conduct ‘indiscriminate mass surveillance’ on EU citizens data shared with the US.

Discussions towards the new agreement were almost derailed earlier this week after a Republican amendment to a bill for the Judicial Redress Act. The Bill, which would allow EU citizens to use US courts to challenge misuse of their personal data, was a critical prerequisite in reaching the new agreement. The amendment raised European Commission concerns stated that the bill mustn’t negatively affect national security interests, and requires EU countries covered by the bill to allow commercial data flows to the US.

Sticking in the US, Republican Party candidate Ben Carson has released a policy paper calling for the establishment of a National Cyber Security Administration (NCSA) as a single centre of government and private sector cybersecurity. Carson wants the US to be the ‘unquestioned cyber power on the planet’, and has even referenced the Space Race as an analogy for his vision of US cyber dominance. Over at the Washington Post, Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and ICPC Fellow) notes that Carson’s analogy is weak at best, as the space Race was an engineering problem but cybersecurity involves more complex political and policy issues. Ryan Hagemann from the libertarian Niskanen Center thinks that centralising cyber security policy in the NCSA will inhibit rather than incentivise the cooperation needed between the public and private sectors to enhance US cybersecurity.

Also vying for the title of cyber power is Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has prioritised the development of Israel’s cybersecurity industry to drive economic growth and support national security. Adam Segal from the Council on Foreign Relations has analysed a number of key aspects of Netanyahu’s speech to the annual Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv on 26 January. Notably, Netanyahu discussed his perspective on government’s role in cybersecurity as ‘immunising’ organisations through best practice and standards, while responding to larger ‘epidemics’. Netanyahu remains skeptical of effectiveness of a ‘universal code’ of cyber norms, advocating for likeminded countries to define norms and sanction those who violate them.

During the speech Netanyahu also raised new government guidelines on the application of export control laws for cybersecurity products. Netanyahu claimed they are necessary to balance the risk of cyber capability sharing with the economic potential of the cybersecurity industry. Israeli government figures show that its cybersecurity industry, comprising about 250 companies, represent about 20% of global investment in cyber security and exported US$3.5 billlion in products and services in 2015. The industry has largely been founded on personnel trained in the Israeli Defence Force who, once released from national service, use their expertise to work in major firms such as CheckPoint and CyberArk, or start their own firms. Israel remains a big target for hackers, and news that Israel’s Electric Authority was infected with ransomware spread after an employee opened a spear phishing email brings home that even the best aren’t immune to cyber incidents.

Regional cooperation between Asia–Pacific computer emergency response teams (CERTs) has taken another step forward with the announcement that India’s CERT-In announced has signed agreements with Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. The four countries will share knowledge and experience in detection, resolution and prevention of cybersecurity incidents. Last week, Japan announced a new recruitment drive for government cybersecurity officials. 40 new positions will be established within the National Centre of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity, increasing total personnel in the Centre to 180. At least 18 of the positions will be recruited from the private sector, and government personnel will be seconded to private firms for further training.

And finally, in the first case of its kind, a 20-year-old Kosovar man who was arrested by Malaysian police in October last year has faced court in the US for hacking a US company and providing the information to Daesh. The US Justice Department claims that the man, Ardit Ferizi, provided the information that Daesh released in August last year detailing 1,300 US citizens personal information, exhorting its followers to attack and kill those named on the list.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reads as a remarkable document. (Here’s a useful fact sheet.) If fully implemented, it’ll prove an historic triumph of diplomacy—one that significantly reduces the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear weapon while helping to re-integrate Iran back into the community of nations.

The key objectives of each side are well-known. The US wants to keep Iran’s nuclear latency to at least one year—that is, how long it would take for Iran to race to a bomb. The Obama administration considers this to be enough time for an Iranian nuclear break-out attempt to be detected and thwarted.

Nuclear latency is mostly guesswork, based on a combination of how much fissile material is currently stockpiled, and how rapidly any new weapons-grade material may be produced. The JCPOA assesses Iran’s current latency to be just two to three months. This reckoning is extraordinary and probably untrue, having been overstated to extract greater concessions from the Iranians to roll back its existing program.

In this endeavour the JCPOA exceeds all expectations. For at least the next 10-15 years Iran has agreed to dramatically reduce the number of spinning centrifuges, remove the reactor core from its Heavy Water facility at Arak, export the overwhelming majority of its Low Enriched Uranium stockpiles, not build any new enrichment facilities, and not reprocess any spent fuel. Critically, Iran’s also agreed to an intrusive IAEA inspection regime and accession to the IAEA Additional Protocol, meaning that any non-compliance is likely to be detected early and for the foreseeable future (well beyond the life of the agreement). In sum, Iran has agreed to adhere to its NPT obligations.

While the JCPOA is prescriptive with regard to what Iran will concede, it remains comparatively sketchy in terms of the breadth and speed of sanctions relief, and the practical implications of allowing Iran to undertake ‘limited research and development with its advanced centrifuges’.

In particular, the JCPOA advises that ‘US and EU nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after the IAEA and Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps.’ This could take years, and will require Iran to take some significant and irreversible steps in the meantime. It’s unrealistic to expect Iran will do this without some  concessions being made. Accordingly, UN sanctions (as opposed to US and EU sanctions) will likely have to be removed earlier and in a staged fashion. In any case, early sanctions relief is desirable  as it’s crucial that the Iranian people don’t become disillusioned with the benefits of cooperating with the West. However unlike those from the US and EU, UN sanctions could prove much harder to re-impose should Iran prove non-compliant with the deal.

For American negotiators, the interim agreement involves a calculated risk. In laying bare the scope of what Iran is agreeing to it’s now very hard to argue that this is a ‘bad deal’, even for long-running sceptics like myself. By allaying critics’ concerns, it should now be possible to build Congress support for a final deal. Yet it also means that any further concessions needed before the final agreement will likely have to come from the P5+1 group. Should the negotiations ultimately fail, the US will wear much of the blame, making international consensus for any new sanctions on Iran difficult to attain.

The main loser is Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s been doing his level best to undermine the special relationship that exists between Israel and the United States. Netanyahu’s speech in the US Congress, wherein he attacked the P5+1 negotiations against the express wishes of the White House, is unprecedented. Netanyahu’s outright rejection of a two-state solution and apartheid-esque warning that Arab-Israeli citizens might actually exercise their democratic right to vote dismayed even long-standing Israeli supporters. If the JSCPOA provisions are implemented, then Netanyahu’s claim that the deal ‘paves Iran’s way to a bomb’ will seem utterly ridiculous.

The broader strategic context can’t be ignored. American and Iranian interests in the region are rapidly converging This is most obvious in Iraq and Syria where there’s common cause to drive back the Sunni-dominated Islamic State, and where Iranian cooperation is needed to facilitate a permanent US withdrawal. Iran most likely sees this deal as an opportunity to further wedge the United States and Israel. After all, Israel isn’t a true US ally against Islamic State. Islamic State resists Iranian influence, distracts from the Palestinian question, and has shown little interest in attacking Israel. Israel has also proven less than loyal to the US elsewhere, for instance, by refusing to condemn Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The US is still a very long way from calling Iran a ‘partner’ in the region. Yet if the P5+1 negotiations are settled and built on, and Netanyahu continues to undermine Israel’s national interest, who knows what US relations with the Middle East will look like in another five years’ time?