On June 8, Juan Cole, one of the few true Middle East experts in the US, posted a short entry on hisInformed Comment blog. The title said it all: “We misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the domestic surveillance to be made legal, not to end it”. But domestic surveillance was far from the only Bush policy that Obama has […]
China will almost certainly pass the United States in the total size of its economy within a decade or so. But if one looks also at military and “soft power” resources, the U.S. is likely to remain more powerful than China for at least the next few decades. Does it matter, asks Joseph S. Nye Jr? […]
Some of America‘s biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency’s recently-exposed “PRISM” and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats […]
Little noticed during last weekend’s milestone summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping was another landmark event: China’s currency hit a record high, reaching almost 6 yuan to the dollar. In recent years, one of the few things Republicans and Democrats could agree upon was that an artificially cheap yuan damaged U.S. exports and stole U.S. jobs. The […]
It’s official. We are living in a surveillance state. This week’s revelations that wave after wave of Verizon call data, and an endless sea of emails and Facebook posts, are all being trawled by government dragnets are shocking but not really surprising. We’ve known for years that the government’s intelligence machinery has invisible means of cultivating […]
The new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, and the US President, Barack Obama, are meeting for two days of talks at Sunnylands, a private estate near Los Angeles. It will be their first meeting since Xi assumed the presidency. The future fortunes of the world are bound up with the two countries finding a new kind […]
Just a few months ago, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next national security adviser, saw her main chance to become secretary of state dissipate before her eyes, as Senate Republicans excoriated her for, as they saw it, misleading the public about the attacks on […]
For those Chinese paying attention to Xi Jinping’s four-country tour of the Americas this week, one question stands out: Why would their president want to spend two informal days, more or less one-on-one with U.S. President Barack Obama in the middle of the desert? This isn’t just a matter of protocol — though there are plenty of questions […]
There will be a lot more than the bacon on the table in California for Obama and Xi, both of whom face massive domestic challenges, when they meet and start a process to getting to know each other. Personal relationship between leaders is always helpful to diplomacy, and this will be a test for a […]
China and the United States should explore a new type of relationship between major countries, President Xi Jinping said ahead of his summit with US President Barack Obama. Xi made the remarks when meeting with US National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, who is on a three-day visit to China to prepare for the summit, scheduled for June 7 […]
looking beyond borders 