The 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is fast approaching. China has just over a year before Afghanistan fades from the West’s radar and Western attention toward the country shrinks substantially. However, it is not clear that Beijing has properly considered what it is going to do once NATO forces leave and pass […]
While the Obama White House attempts to spin the president’s recent Middle East trip as a diplomatic success, in reality it provided more evidence of how irrelevant the United States has become to the byzantine politics of the region. The White House claims that President Obama orchestrated a rapprochement between Turkey and Israel after a […]
The energy map of the world is being redrawn — and the global geopolitical order is adrift in consequence. We are moving away from a world dominated by a few energy mega-suppliers, such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, and toward one in which most countries have some domestic resources to meet their energy needs […]
Has the eurozone crisis ended? Many politicians in Europe, including France’s president François Hollande, seem to think so. Well, not so fast. Far from ending, the crisis is yet to reach its most difficult phase. It is easy to see why politicians claim the crisis is over. Greece has just been promised another €50bn, provided it accepts […]
The overlapping power transitions in East Asia’s three main economies promise to mark a defining moment in the region’s tense geopolitics. After the ascension in China of Xi Jinping, regarded by the People’s Liberation Army as its own man, Japan’s swing to the right in its parliamentary election seems set to fuel nationalist passion on both sides […]
Early in his first term, Obama wasn’t especially warm towards India. However, he soon visited India, hosted Manmohan Singh as the first foreign leader at the White House, and advocated a permanent seat for India on the United Nations Security Council. Obama has since tried to rope India, along with Japan, into a hedge against […]
This month, a curious thing happened in the annals of diplomacy. A country offered up a peace plan to put an end to a seemingly endless civil war in Syria. This country was not one of the usual foreign policy suspects — it was not the United States, it was not in Europe, and it wasn’t Syria’s […]
Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable: the sight of a U.S. president standing next to Aung San Suu Kyi, the woman many believe should be — and might yet become — the president of her long-suffering country, Myanmar (also known as Burma). When Barack Obama was first elected to the White House […]
The rest of the world may have forgotten the anniversary, but a neglected border war that took place 50 years ago is now more pertinent than ever. Before dawn on the morning of Oct. 20, 1962, the People’s Liberation Army launched a surprise attack, driving with overwhelming force through the eastern and western sections of […]
In ways big and small, Asia is still living with the tainted legacy of imperialism. Consider the debate now underway in Myanmar – or Burma to some. Because the imperial tongue found it difficult to pronounce “Myanmar,” the country’s no-nonsense British masters renamed it Burma (redrawing its borders as well for good measure). The new […]
looking beyond borders 