New Zealand – part of the post-war alliance with the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia – has been openly reluctant to embrace the bloc’s pivoting security focus to Beijing, as tensions over trade, technology and ideology have strained relations between China and the West. Read Here
The US, EU, UK and Canada banded together to sanction Chinese officials over suspected human rights abuses in Xinjiang on Monday, a dramatic escalation in tensions with Beijing and a clear sign that the new Joe Biden administration plans to wield its alliances as a powerful tool to counter an increasingly assertive China. Read Here | South China Morning Post Also Read | Why […]
The era of cooperation with China may be over soon. Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand are beginning to regret saying “yes” to China’s strategic overtures. The leaders, once eager to assert a little independence from their often-overbearing superpower ally, now find themselves aligning with the United States… Read Here – Foreign Policy
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has had a very bad week, even in the context of a very bad year. The week of bad news actually started March 8 with a proposal from U.S. senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren to break up the company. Then there was the longest-ever outage of Facebook’s social network and services, which […]
What would you think of a Western democratic leader who was populist, obsessed with the balance of trade, especially effective on television, feisty and combative with the press, and able to take over his country’s right-wing party and swing it in a more interventionist direction? Read Here – Bloomberg
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the biggest trade agreement in history, reducing tariffs and other forms of protectionism in a dozen countries making up about 40 percent of the global economy with economic output of almost $30 trillion. The White House estimates it will eliminate 18,000 tariffs on U.S.-manufactured goods, while giving everyone from Vietnamese shrimpers to […]
A dozen Pacific-rim nations agreed to an historic pact that would cut trade barriers on items ranging from cars to rice, setting up a potentially contentious ratification vote before a skeptical U.S. Congress. After a week of final talks in Atlanta, an agreement was announced on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact more than five years in […]
The Five Eyes alliance — the secret services of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States — pursue a clear goal: removing the encryption of others on the Internet wherever possible. In 2013, the NSA had a budget of more than $10 billion. According to the US intelligence budget for 2013, the money […]
The roadmap for China’s foreign exchange reforms has now come into focus, following the recent conclusion of the landmark Third Plenum, which outlined the blueprint that is set to shape the direction of economic reforms in the world’s second-largest economy for the next decade. Read Here – The Diplomat
Australia’s new government must make tough decisions in defence policy. Australia’s broad national interests and the challenging strategic environment in Indo-Pacific Asia make it essential to modernise the Australian Defence Force. The nation’s defence capabilities remain underfunded and its strategic edge in the region is eroding. The gap between the nation’s interests and capabilities is […]
looking beyond borders 