With Britain poised to quit the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May needs all the friends she can get. That helps explain her visit Friday to the White House, President Donald Trump’s first from a foreign head of state. The question is, what’s in it for him? Read Here – Bloomberg
Before Donald Trump was the president, he was a businessman. He came to office leading a vast business enterprise that includes real estate, casinos, and a lucrative branding operation. “The network is huge,” says designer Kim Albrecht, whose riveting data visualization Trump Connections attempts to untangle it all. Read Here – Wired
Make no mistake: American foreign policy has indeed failed. It failed to prevent the rise of a peer competitor such as China, failed to entrench democracy in Arab and Latin American transition societies, and failed to integrate regional powers such as Russia and Iran into a liberal order. Barack Obama came into office seeking to […]
The Trump administration’s China-bashing strategy is based on the mistaken belief that a newly muscular US has all the leverage in dealing with its presumed adversary, and that any Chinese response is hardly worth considering. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read Here – Project-Syndicate
For the first time since the demise of the Qajar dynasty in the early 20th century, Iran is extending its political and military reach to what it considers its rightful sphere of influence: Mesopotamia and the areas of the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Peninsula with sizeable Shiite communities. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
China sees an America squandering its most precious global asset — soft power. The party propagandists, so often the target of scorn on the Chinese internet, can hardly believe their good fortune. Read Here – The Wall Street Journal
We may not appreciate his front-foot statements and awful tweets, his name-calling and his orange hair or even lack of political and diplomatic etiquettes. What, however, we do need to remember is the world will have to deal with President Trump at least for the next four years. Read Here – This Day And That
There are major foreign-policy issues about which Trump has generated huge uncertainty by flatly contradicting his own policy promises. He has mused that it might be good for U.S. allies to acquire nuclear weapons, and then sworn he never said that; he has promised to ban Muslim immigrants from the U.S., and then walked it back. But that’s […]
By bringing its position on Tibet into alignment with China’s claim, India has not won Chinese gratitude; rather, it has boosted Beijing’s clout and encouraged Chinese re-engineering of transboundary river flows, on which India is critically dependent. Read Here – Nikkei Asian Review
What many analysts have tended to miss is Putin’s revanchist, powerful sense of renewal of Russia’s pride and place in the world, and the strong social, emotional, and psychological appeal that this has for Russians. This accounts for Putin’s pervasively-high political popularity ratings –above 70-80 percent for most of his tenure—which no other politician in […]
