In recent weeks, China has signed nearly $100 billion in energy contracts to increase Chinese access to the abundant petroleum resources of Central Asia. A major advantage of obtaining oil from Siberia and Central Asia is that it could travel to China overland—and thus beyond the reach of U.S. naval power. Read Here – The […]
Russian President Vladimir Putin may have toppled Barack Obama at the very top of the list, but China’s Xi Jinping has claimed the highest ranking among Asians (and third overall) in Forbes magazine’s latest survey of the world’s most powerful people. Read Here – The Diplomat
One future is an Asia that is relatively familiar: a region whose economies continue to enjoy robust levels of growth and manage to avoid conflict with one another. The second future could hardly be more different: an Asia of increased tensions, rising military budgets, and slower economic growth. Read Here – Council On Foreign Relations
Brazil and China can’t seem to agree on what either country is getting out of their economic ties Read Here – Quartz
American defense planners therefore need to accept the obvious: budget cuts are here to stay. The time to plan for cutbacks and start reshaping the military was two years ago, when the writing was already on the wall. Since that never happened, the government must catch up fast. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
This foreign policy crisis is of India’s own making. Inability to put its own house in order has shattered the notion of India as an emerging global power. In the last five years, the government in New Delhi decimated economic potential, scaring domestic and foreign investors, and making the county hostile to private investment. The […]
Contrary to what environmentalists, anti-globalisation campaigners and other economic curmudgeons like to think, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, writes Allister Heath Read Here – The Telegraph, London
Shinzo Abe’s first, brief premiership ended in disaster. Yet now, recovered from debilitating illness, the conservative nationalist is back in power and, emboldened by “Abenomics”, is determined to revitalise Japan after many years of decline. Read Here – The New Statesman
Due to unprecedented urbanization around the world, future population growth will be overwhelmingly concentrated in lower- and middle-income settings. And this is giving rise to sprawling cities – and slums – some of whom are emerging as geopolitical actors in their own right. Transformations in urban geography are thus precipitating changes in global governance. Read Here – OpenCanada
The news that the National Security Agency was monitoring the telephones of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many other foreign leaders is less shocking than the revelation that, for the first four and a half years of his Presidency, Barack Obama, the Commander-in-Chief, didn’t know anything about it. Can this be true? Read Here […]
looking beyond borders 