The West’s sluggishness in realising that it has been on the receiving end of China’s elaborate, multidecade hostile strategy has a lot to do with the hubris that followed the United States’ triumph in the Cold War. U.S. policymakers assumed that the CCP would find it nearly impossible to resist the tide of liberalisation set off by the […]
For members of China’s red aristocracy, the problem isn’t billionaires—it’s billionaires they’re not related to. The new rich of the 1980s onward often scrabbled to build connections to powerful families, like the relatives of Gen. Ye Jianying, for exactly this reason. Read More Here
The election of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi in Iran has raised fears that the country will refuse to negotiate with the West. But with Iran’s economy in tatters, and the Sunni Taliban returning to power in neighbouring Afghanistan, Iran’s leaders have every incentive to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Read More Here
The withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan is likely to accelerate current trends in India’s relations with the United States, China, and Russia: greater cooperation with Washington, deeper conflicts with Beijing, and wider fissures in the traditional strategic partnership with Moscow. Read More Here
The White House is moving quickly to contain the fallout from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, hoping to blunt possible damage to the rest of the president’s agenda. Read More Here
Policymakers in the United States and Europe have adopted the position that their mission is to promote democracy worldwide, regularly arguing that if they fail, authoritarian governments will exploit American restraint and join forces. Read More Here
For centuries, Russia has viewed the Black Sea as central to its security. Catherine the Great annexed Crimea from the Ottoman Turks in 1783, and her consort, Prince Grigory Potemkin, created the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol that same year. Read More Here
The Taliban’s senior leadership includes many Mujahideen fighters who were once trained by the U.S. during the Cold War to battle against the invading Soviet Union forces in the 1980s. The Sunni group’s membership is drawn largely from the majority ethnic Pashtun population most dominant in the southern part of the country. Read More Here
Iran does not have ideological qualms about supporting violent Sunni extremist groups as well as other ostensibly nonreligious ones, despite often being seen as the “protector of Shiites” around the world—when that role serves Tehran’s purposes. Read More Here
It is now clear that there was no Afghan state, no government, no military. These were convenient fictions, phantasms, if you will, that were invoked by successive administrations to justify America’s presence as an occupying power. But no sooner did Biden pullout than the entire Potemkin village came crashing down. Read More Here
looking beyond borders 