Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s recent landmark trip to Iraq was closely monitored and discussed from various aspects by the media and analysts around the world. Some observers put their focus on the bilateral aspect, talking about the importance of the visit in terms of Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, while others analysed it within the context of Iran’s plans […]
The supercomputing race between the world’s two largest economies escalated after the US unveiled plans for its first machine to cross the “exascale” performance threshold by 2021, putting it roughly a year behind a similar plan from China. Read Here – South China Morning Post
How should emerging-market governments deal with the new original sin? One way would be to develop a large domestic institutional investor base that sets its objectives in domestic currency terms and is thus insulated from exchange-rate swings. National pension systems contribute to this goal, and many emerging-market countries, such as Chile and Mexico, have made […]
The accuracy of China’s official growth statistics is once again in question. Last week, at the annual “two sessions” conference, Premier Li Keqiang announced that China would reduce its 2019 target for GDP growth to between 6 and 6.5 percent—previously, it was “around 6.5 percent.” That same week, a group of Chinese economists published a paper with the Brookings […]
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has had a very bad week, even in the context of a very bad year. The week of bad news actually started March 8 with a proposal from U.S. senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren to break up the company. Then there was the longest-ever outage of Facebook’s social network and services, which […]
Although propitious political circumstances made the Balakot crisis between India and Pakistan manageable, Pakistani terrorism remains the principal continuing threat to stability in South Asia. U.S. policy moving forward must relentlessly pressure Pakistan to crack down on jihadi groups or risk continuing crises in the region. Read Here – Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
Masood Azhar is deeply plugged into the Pakistan military’s intelligence setup, or at least those parts of it with which he shares an appreciation of the need for the Islamic world to have a strong center to provide protection to Muslims all over the world. Azhar is for the Deobandi jihadis what Lt. General Hameed […]
There is no question at this point that the relative sizes of the U.S. and Chinese economy today are much closer than those of Japan and the U.S. in the interwar period. And long story short, underselling the size of the Chinese defense budget and overselling the size of the Chinese economy does tend to […]
The Trump show is endlessly distracting in a way that would be familiar to any connoisseur of the Latin-American strongman. The Wednesday-afternoon Oval Office appearance alone had enough fodder for countless talk-show segments: Trump grounds the airplanes! Trump lies about building the wall! Trump lies about being vindicated in the special-counsel probe —even when a […]
If for more than half a century oil and natural gas have been at the heart of the geopolitics of energy, it is sensible to investigate if and how this will change as a result of the global energy transition, a process driven by decarbonisation policies and by quick developments in renewable energy technologies and […]
