Forget RussiaGate for the moment. Forget James Comey’s upcoming testimony before the Senate intelligence committee. Forget all the conspiratorial speculation that Donald Trump is the plaything of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In strictly foreign policy terms, Trump’s election is not really working out so well for the Kremlin. The sanctions against Russia are still in… Continue reading Russia’s Not the Country Benefitting Most from Trump
It has not been a good month for China. On July 12, an international court of arbitration at The Hague handed the Philippines a huge victory over China in the struggle over the South China Sea. A few days before that, South Korea decided to go forward with the deployment of the US Army’s Terminal… Continue reading China on the Defensive?
The final of the World Snooker Championship took place this week in Sheffield, the hardscrabble town in England’s north perhaps best known as the setting for the movie The Full Monte. Sheffield is a former industrial center so snookered by globalization that the laid-off steel workers in that 1997 film decide to become male strippers… Continue reading Making China Great Again
“The upcoming summit between China and the United States will feature a major plan for reducing the military arsenals of the two countries, an initiative to stabilize and grow the global economy, a follow-up effort to further reduce carbon emissions, and a brand new proposal to address global poverty and health pandemics.” Oops, wrong press… Continue reading China and the Opportunity Costs of 9/11
There are several types of missing persons. Some missing people are missed so publicly that their absence is a presence. Vanished children reappeared on milk cartons and then later in amber alerts. American soldiers, killed in action or MIA, look out at us from rows of photos like headstones in the newspaper on Memorial Day.… Continue reading The Missing
It wasn’t long ago that certain pundits were predicting war in Asia. Back in the spring, the conflict over the South China Sea was heating up as China sparred with Vietnam over an oil exploration rig and with the Philippines over disputed reefs. Japan and China, meanwhile, were butting heads over a string of uninhabited rocks in… Continue reading Asia Smiles for the Cameras
By now, the phrase “Pacific Pivot” gives off a whiff of nostalgia. The Obama administration’s announcement of its intention three years ago to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward Asia seems to belong to an entirely different era. It was a time when the United States had the luxury to think geopolitically: to craft long-term policies… Continue reading The Dance of Superpowers
Last month I visited Ningxia province, in China’s northwest. It is a relatively poor region, with a large Muslim population, a considerable stretch of desert, and a growing petrochemical industry. It is far from the unrest of Xinjiang province to the west and the maritime disputes of the South China Sea to the east. Ningxia… Continue reading Is China’s Rise Still Peaceful?
We were surrounded by sand. It stretched in undulating waves to the horizon in all directions. Wei Men, who works for the Baijitan Nature Reserve in Ningxia province, beckoned for us to step down from our desert overlook and take a close-up look at the desert floor. He wanted to show us what officials hope… Continue reading Deserts vs. Development in China, Global Post
In a future update of The Devil’s Dictionary, the famed Ambrose Bierce dissection of the linguistic hypocrisies of modern life, a single word will accompany the entry for “Pacific pivot”: retreat. It might seem a strange way to characterize the Obama administration’s energetic attempt to reorient its foreign and military policy toward Asia. After all, the president’s… Continue reading The Empire’s New Asian Clothes
The oldest Chinatown in the world is not in New York or San Francisco or even Yokohama. It is in Manila, a fact that comes up often when Beijing talks about its longstanding connection to the islands that lie about 600 miles to the southeast. Similarly, China boasts of its three Confucius Institutes in the… Continue reading When Soft Power Fails
We won our independence from the British in a hard-fought revolutionary battle. Today, no hard feelings: the Anglo-American alliance is strong, we all love Downton Abbey, and our skirmishes are largely confined to disputes over which version of The Office is funnier and how to spell and pronounce the word “aluminum.” We fought the Germans, the Japanese, and the… Continue reading Frenemies
When Hu Jintao took over as the leader of China in 2002, U.S. companies welcomed his accession as a “good sign for American business.” Political analysts described Hu as a fourth-generation member of the Communist party leadership who might very well turn out to be a “closet liberal.” Playing it safe, the media tended to… Continue reading Our Man in Beijing?
If the killing of Osama bin Laden were a Hollywood murder mystery, the shootout scene in Abbottabad would be followed by the unveiling of the sponsor who arranged for the al-Qaeda safe house. Is it the Pakistani intelligence officer who appears early in the movie to assure his U.S. counterparts that he is fully committed… Continue reading After Osama: China?
“The Communists have taken over the World Bank!” So far, this phrase hasn’t appeared on Glenn Beck’s infamous chalkboard. I’m still waiting for Beck or Rush Limbaugh to make a big stink that the World Bank’s chief economist is from Mainland China. Justin Yifu Lin has been in his position for more than two years… Continue reading China: Already on Top?
Introduction The rapid growth of China’s economy and its increasingly vigorous diplomatic engagement with regional and international institutions have given rise to much discussion of China’s “peaceful rise” to great-power status. At the same time, the Pentagon has identified China as the only potential hegemon on the horizon that stands a chance of challenging the… Continue reading Chinese Military Spending: Soft Rise or Hard Threat
To: Leon Panetta, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, Shanghai office Re: Memo XE1250 Leon: I just received the memo on the latest Blackwater scandal. Talk about embarrassing! Why did we outsource assassination to those bozos? Remember in 2006 when a Blackwater guy, drunk as a skunk, killed the Iraqi vice president’s bodyguard? And we were… Continue reading Chinese Assassination Squads
The United States has basically thrown up its hands in the current crisis with North Korea. Washington has mounted an aggressive campaign at the UN to further isolate the world’s noisiest nuclear aspirant. But no one thinks that UN actions will have much effort. There is no greater indication of frustration than the revival of… Continue reading Outsourcing North Korea Policy
On June 4, 1989, history forked. In Poland, voters went to the polls to give the anti-communist opposition a sweeping victory in the country’s first, partially free elections in ages. It was the first sign of the revolutionary changes that would sweep through Eastern Europe that year, knocking down the Berlin Wall and changing the… Continue reading Twenty Years Later
Future historians will view the Bush administration’s assertion of unilateral U.S. power and authority as the last gasp of the American empire. The imperial overstretch that historian Paul Kennedy diagnosed near the end of the Cold War is finally hitting us: the banking crisis, the recession, the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,… Continue reading The G-2 Paradox
Let’s say that China sends a ship 75 miles off San Diego to do a little surveillance. Those are international waters, after all, and Beijing is interested in the latest developments in our submarine warfare capabilities at Naval Base Point Loma. And it wants to do some reconnaissance for its own expanding fleet of subs.… Continue reading Naval Gazing
You might have missed the news: China is now No. 3. Statisticians have finally crunched the 2007 numbers and discovered that China surpassed Germany that year to become the third-largest economy in the world. With its gross domestic product (GDP) at $3.32 trillion, the Chinese economy is now poised to overtake No. 2 Japan at… Continue reading What’s the Matter with China
As part of our special investigation “Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide,” we asked a host of military thinkers to contribute their two cents on topics relating to global Pentagon strategy. (You can access the archive here.) The following dispatch comes from John Feffer, codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy… Continue reading Surrounding China’s String of Pearls
A devastating earthquake leveled the Chinese town of Wenchuan, leaving in its wake over 60,000 dead and five million homeless throughout Sichuan Province. It will take years to heal the damage of this tragedy. Nevertheless, even as aid organizations and local government scramble to erect temporary housing and supply drinking water, it’s important to step… Continue reading Wenchuan as Eco-City
Headquarters was worried. Complaints were flooding in from the Chinese countryside about the quality of the new Haier washing machines. The water pipes were defective, the peasants told the Chinese manufacturer. But when the Haier team went to investigate, they were surprised to discover that the pipes were not broken or poorly fitted. Rather, they… Continue reading The Big Yam
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s first visit to the United States comes at a time of great uncertainty for both Japan and Asia. The North Korean nuclear crisis remains suspended between crisis and resolution. The free trade agreement between the United States and South Korea, still unratified, will have an unclear impact on the rest… Continue reading China Remains Main Concern for U.S.,Japan
<p><b>China is everywhere you turn: the label on your sweater, every second item on the shelf at Wal-Mart, the computer on which you read this essay, the weather satellite zapped out of the sky in January by a ballistic missile. Unlike Britney Spears, however, China is not merely ubiquitous. It is an essential part of… Continue reading China the Indispensable?
“The glory of Our Empire shines on this universe with brilliance,” a ruler once declared in a letter to courtiers in London. “Not one single person or country is excluded from Our kindness and benevolence.” He had good reason to be pleased. His country sat astride the global economy. His army was large, his domains… Continue reading Big Red Checkbook
The regional status quo in Northeast Asia appears to have self-destructed over the last few years. North Korea has announced that it possesses nuclear weapons and, with its most recent test, may have kicked down the door to the nuclear club. Japan has already stepped out from under its “peace constitution,” and it is no… Continue reading China and the Uses of Uncertainty
China has embarked on a vigorous policy of engagement with regional institutions in Asia. From the steppes of Central Asia to the resource-rich waters of Southeast Asia, Beijing has implemented its own version of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “good neighbor policy.” But this playing-well-with-others approach has presented China watchers with an intriguing riddle. Is China’s new… Continue reading Chinese Multilateralism or U.S. Bilateralism