While everyone’s anxiously watching and analyzing the events unraveling in the South China Sea, there’s another resource conflict involving China that also deserves attention. In the Himalayas, China and India are competing for valuable hydropower and water resources on the Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River. The dispute offers some important lessons for regional cooperation (on more than […]
The rivalry for Iran’s future has played out over WhatsApp, Viber, and Tango. All three are used heavily to make free calls, send messages, and post photos or videos. They’re also ways to share the deliciously naughty political humor that Iranians love, without getting caught by the Committee to Determine Instances of Criminal Content. Read […]
With fresh parliamentary elections scheduled for August 17, Sri Lanka’s politics has once again entered a phase of some uncertainty. The fate of the ‘silent revolution’ of January 8, 2015, which saw the autocratic regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa being replaced, is in the balance. If Rajapaksa returns to power as Prime Minister with a parliamentary […]
The ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine casts a long shadow over areas of shared American and Russian interest, making the Obama administration’s 2009 “reset” in relations appear a distant memory. However perceptions have shifted in the intervening six years, common concerns still exist between Washington and Moscow; chief among them: terrorism. For this reason, U.S. […]
When the United States threw off the British crown to become one of the world’s first republics, it also jettisoned the belief that some people are destined to rule over others because they were born or married into a particular family. Some two hundred and forty years later, the wife of a former President is […]
President Xi Jinping’s Beijing doesn’t inspire confidence—not among the Chinese people, and not among those who live on China’s “peripheries,” who have taken note of the erosion of liberties that has accompanied this slow descent. Read Here – The National Interest
For Israel, the bigger problem with the deal is the omission of guidelines on Iran’s regional activities. Changes to the United Nations Security Council embargos on arms deals and ballistic missile technology, for example, are not conditional on Iranian behavior apart from direct violations of the agreement. This is to be expected, as it is […]
The next president of the United States will almost certainly be more hawkish on Iran than Barack Obama. Maybe a little more hawkish, if Hillary Clinton; potentially a lot more hawkish, if a Republican. What can that president do about the nuclear accord that the Obama administration and several world powers have struck with Iran? […]
For much of the past decade, the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka was more or less a family business — one that happened to be run on an island just 22 miles off the coast of the second-largest country in the world and astride a key shipping lane to the largest. By one estimate, former […]
In the wee hours of Monday morning, after a marathon 17-hour session, Greece finally agreed to a deal with the euro zone that would give it enough cash to start reopening its shuttered banks, pull it out of arrears, and stave off its exit from the euro. In some ways this deal (or any deal) might […]
looking beyond borders 