China’s growing assertiveness with Japan and the U.S. is helping bring a level of attention to Southeast Asia unseen since the Vietnam War, ushering billions of dollars of investment, wider access to trade and stepped-up military assistance. Read Here – Bloomberg
As US Vice President Joe Biden just discovered on his tour of Japan, China, and South Korea, the American novelist William Faulkner’s observation – “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – could not be more apt, writes Jaswant Singh Read Here – Project Syndicate
Great power politics, with the major powers in the region dominating media attention and government agendas throughout Southeast Asia, threatens to relegate ASEAN itself to irrelevance, just a talking workshop for bureaucrats and diplomats. Read Here – The Diplomat
Both China and Japan are trying to centralize security decision-making. Could this help avoid a clash? Read Here – The Diplomat
For those seeking to understand the perilous politics of the region today, there is no better place to start than the First Sino-Japanese War, which pitted China’s fading Qing Dynasty against an ascendant Meiji Japan in a contest for regional supremacy. Read Here – National Interest
While the war is over and the Tamil Tigers have been jubilantly crushed by the government forces, the north remains heavily militarized and for many residents, the violence isn’t over. Read Here – The Diplomat
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will try to strike a delicate balance of calming military tensions with China while supporting ally Japan against Beijing on a trip to Asia this week that is being overshadowed by a territorial dispute in the East China Sea. Read Here – Reuters
In recent years, Bangladeshis have suffered the brutality of security forces and massive environmental destruction. For months now, the news from the world’s seventh-most-populous country has been dominated by the fractiousness of the country’s main leaders, thetrial of men suspected of war crimes during Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971, and the slavery-like conditions of the […]
The Communist Party summit that recast Xi Jinping as a reformer extraordinaire has produced its first foreign-policy initiative: poking Japan in the eye, writes William Pesak. Read Here – Bloomberg
In the coming weeks, Thailand’s political crisis is likely to escalate, not de-escalate, ultimately resulting in either a snap election or some kind of extraconstitutional removal of the government. In other words, more political tension with little resolution, a carbon copy of Thai politics going all the way back to 2001, when the populist telecommunications […]
looking beyond borders 