Japan’s Yasukuni Conundrum
The Yasukuni shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, has long been a problem for Chinese and Koreans. The Chinese media often refers to the shrine as “notorious.” Read Here – Businessweek
Tag: diplomacy
Lessons From Ford
Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to face aggressive adversaries, nervous allies, and a U.S. public deeply unwilling to make the commitments necessary to reassure those allies in the Asia-Pacific. A look back at the Asia-Pacific policy of President Gerald Ford and his chief foreign policy architect Henry Kissinger is surprisingly instructive for […]
A Dangerous Alignment
PRESIDENT BARACK Obama likes to say that America and the world have progressed beyond the unpleasantness of the nineteenth century and, for that matter, much of the rest of human history. He could not be more wrong. And as a result, he is well on the way to repeating some of history’s most dangerous mistakes. […]
Neither Atatürk Nor A Sultan
Mr Erdogan and his political machine are both thoroughly modern, and as able as any other modern political machine to deploy sophisticated, well-organised, disingenuous and cynical methods, including demagoguery, spin, polling and gerrymandering to win votes. (Mr Erdogan can also boast real economic achievements, however problematic.) All this is a much different from the situation […]
Chasing China In Africa Difficult For The US
Africa’s resource wealth is certainly of huge importance to China, a manufacturing superpower that is urbanizing and building infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Unlike Western powers, however, China sees raw materials as only one of the three pillars of its Africa strategy. The second pillar involves using Africa as a springboard to help Chinese businesses […]
Why Would Little Sri Lanka Matter To Japan?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is slated to visit Sri Lanka soon. Abe will undoubtedly express his appreciation for Sri Lanka’s past assistance to Japan, but a more important task will be to convey Japan’s strong concern over China’s strategic muscle-flexing. He will be trying to pour a bit of cold water on the island-nation’s […]
India Has Little Use For The United States
India offers America nothing of concrete strategic value that Washington cannot, currently, live without. Not only does it balk at an alliance of any kind, its political and intellectual elites are wedded still to nonalignment, that antediluvian credo from the years of the Cold War. Read Here – Daily Beast
Geopolitics Vs Globalization
Economic interdependence was supposed to defuse geopolitical tensions over time – or at least allow the two to be compartmentalized. But today the West is using Russia’s participation in the global economy to punish it for its actions in eastern Ukraine. The EU has announced sanctions that will hit Russia in the banking, oil and […]
Is Another World War Possible?
In this centennial of what participants named the “Great War,” many have recalled Mark Twain’s observation that while history never repeats itself, it does sometimes rhyme. Read Here – The Atlantic
