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
China’s international role is changing. But the country is struggling to reconcile its traditional foreign policy of non-interference with its growing economic presence around the world. Read Here – Asia Centre
The furore over the scale of American mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden shifted to an incendiary new level when Angela Merkel of Germany called Barack Obama to demand explanations over reports that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her mobile phone. Read Here – The Guardian
Riyadh‘s frustration with Russia and China now extends to the United States, not only over Syria, but also over Washington’s acquiescence in the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and its new quest for a nuclear deal with Iran. Read Here – Reuters
Among all continents, Asia has the ability to disrupt the world the most. Read Here – The Atlantic
India’s prosperous future has hardly ever seemed farther away than it does today. The country’s ongoing economic crisis has darkened the atmosphere — and done so in a way tragically familiar to most Indians. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
The cancellation of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to South-East Asia, and the two separate tours of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang to the region can be seen as geopolitical markers of our times. Read Here – The Hindu
Forty years ago this month, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries proclaimed an embargo on oil exports to the U.S. as retaliation for its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. It would last only five months, but it haunts U.S. energy policy to this day. Read Here – Bloomberg
In an unprecedented tour also locking in energy deals with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, Xi has consolidated Chinese power in Central Asia as Beijing looks to reconfigure its economy based on cleaner, more diversified energy sources amid rising overall demand for fuels. But the impacts are expected to reach much farther and wider than […]
For all his brazen anti-Western rhetoric, Putin would like nothing more than for the elected Western leaders to join him on the Olympic stands in Sochi in four months’ time—a confirmation of his regime’s legitimacy, prestige, and status as an accepted equal on the world stage. Read Here – WorldAffairsJournal
looking beyond borders 