“What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the […]
The first decade of the 21st century has seen the Chinese military (People’s Liberation Army or PLA) undergo a number of major changes, which many observers around the world have kept a keen eye on. Indeed, among the world’s major military forces, the breadth and speed with which the PLA and the Chinese military industry […]
Like two hostile prisoners on the run and shackled to each other by fate, Iran and the United States continue their mutual loathing and periodic conflict. The inevitability of talking and even cooperating, however, also looms over both in a region neither can shape unilaterally. Washington and Tehran’s shared distaste for a wider military conflict […]
Trump has shown great restraint in the Middle East. He did not fire back after the September attacks on Saudi oil facilities. He has given measured, proportional responses, similar to Reagan’s restraint when Iran took out an American warship in 1988. And despite a publicly confrontational posture, he has minimised the risk of escalation. Read […]
New technologies now afford rulers fresh methods for preserving power that in many ways rival, if not improve on, the Stasi’s tactics. Surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, for example, allows despots to automate the monitoring and tracking of their opposition in ways that are far less intrusive than traditional surveillance. Not only do these digital […]
South Korean carmakers are the first of China’s global customers to feel the direct impact. The nation’s largest carmaker Hyundai Motor suspended all production for a week because it ran out of a crucial wiring component after a worker at its supplier’s factory caught the coronavirus in China, forcing the entire plant to shut. Read Here […]
This November’s presidential election in the United States will be a referendum on the state of the US economy, the country’s political and social direction, and American democracy itself. Should America – and the world – start preparing for four more years of President Donald Trump? Read Here – Project Syndicate
Apart from declaring several times that, in his view, America’s prestige around the world was higher than ever, Trump spent relatively little time in his 78-minute speech on foreign policy—no doubt with an eye toward his reelection campaign, which will depend largely on the performance of the U.S. economy. Trump didn’t mention Ukraine at all—though […]
Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Xi’s copycat version has an even more ambitious goal. It is to extinguish faith in God altogether, replacing it with faith in the Chinese Communist Party and the Party’s own “small-g” god of the moment, who is Xi Jinping himself. And it perversely intends to enlist China’s churches, mosques, shrines and […]
When nation-states engage in the bloody calculus of killing, the boundary between whom they can target and whom they can’t is porous…Since the Hague Convention of 1907, killing a foreign government official outside wartime has generally been barred by the Law of Armed Conflict. Read Here – The New Yorker
