Given the current bipartisan US antipathy toward China, President-elect Joe Biden is unlikely to change the fundamental tenets of President Donald Trump’s hard-line policy. But if Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping each invest a modest amount of political capital, they may be able to de-escalate bilateral tensions.
Read Here | Project Syndicate
The visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to India for the third India-US 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue coupled with the recent Quad consultations between the two sides have refocused attention on the ties between two of the world’s biggest, and perhaps most consequential, democracies.
Read Here | Asia Times
For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism.
Read Here | The Spectator
Global institutions need a deliberate and large-scale renovation; it is now time to construct a new architecture and usher in a more modern and streamlined multilateral skyline. Some institutions need to be replaced or thoroughly morphed into new ones. Some need to be pruned. The most effective and nimble ones need to be scaled up or have their model applied to more current and pressing mandates.
Contemporary understanding of middle-power diplomacy is tied to a bygone era. Behavioural characteristics like activist diplomacy, coalition building, niche diplomacy and good international citizenship, which underpin norm entrepreneurship, always ultimately relied upon the support of the dominant power. That era may be over, and hopes of a revival rest on the illusion of a middle-power moment. So, what happens to middle powers after the middle-power moment?
What a difference two decades make. In the early years of this century, the world appeared to be moving toward a single, seamless order under U.S. leadership. Today the world is fragmenting, and authoritarian challengers, led by China and Russia, are chipping away at American influence in East Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
The coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping across the world is more than a public health emergency. It poses unprecedented threats to national and international security, and fighting it, as the leaders of several countries have stressed, will resemble a major war involving similar numbers of fatalities. Intelligence services will have a major role in this struggle, just as they have in previous wars throughout history. That role will largely be played in the shadows—but it will be no less significant for its secrecy.
It took more than three months, a death toll above 87,000 and cases in more than 180 countries, repeated pleas from smaller nations, and a growing sense of shame among senior diplomats — but the United Nations Security Council is finally going to meet to discuss the coronavirus. That is, in a private session unlikely to yield any serious action.
The coronavirus has all but halted the world of international diplomacy, derailing major summits and leaving diplomats stranded as governments temporarily ban international travel. The World Trade Organization joined a raft of United Nations agencies, financial institutions, and international organizations that have been forced by the virus’s spread to cancel, suspend, or postpone conferences on everything including human rights, the Law of the Sea, and antimicrobial resistance.
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.
