In Australia-China ties: in search of political trust, Linda Jakobson argues that this is detrimental to Australia’s interests because China is not merely an economic power but also a crucial political and security actor in the region. Underdeveloped political and strategic relations between Canberra and Beijing weaken Australia’s ability to exert influence regionally. Australia risks […]
The United States on Monday filed a broad trade case against China at the World Trade Organization, alleging unfair subsidies for exports of cars and auto parts. The case comes at a critical time in the United States presidential campaign, as auto manufacturing states in the upper Midwest like Michigan, Wisconsin and particularly Ohio have turned into crucial battlegrounds. But […]
JOHN DARWIN has spent his whole career thinking about Pax Britannica. Three years after his magisterial study, “The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970”, the Oxford historian has returned yet again to the subject. This time, though, his focus is different and the period he covers is longer. His new book […]
In Tiananmen Square last year, when the stolid National Museum of China reopened its doors following a costly renovation, a 31-foot-tall statue of Confucius stood outside. A short while later the statue mysteriously disappeared. The museum offered no explanation. But speculation ran high that as the decade-old effort to reinsert Confucius into Chinese society has […]
THE imagery is graphic enough. A mob scales the walls of the American embassy in the Egyptian capital, raises an Islamist banner and burns the Stars and Stripes. A female announcer dons a headscarf on state television for the first time in its 50-year-long history. Bearded police officers demonstrate for an end to the force’s […]
Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks. Time and again in recent years, as the outside world has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of birth in […]
Many Arabs believe that the Arab Spring is a Western, and more specifically an American, plan since the days of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to divide the Middle East into smaller rival nations to breed discord and plunder their wealth. Some subscribe to the theory that recent events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen […]
Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping (centre) has appeared in public for the first time in two weeks. Xi, who is expected to become China’s next leader, attended an event on Saturday to mark national science day, Xinhua news agency reported.
An eruption of violent unrest across the Middle East is confronting President Barack Obama with the most serious challenge yet to his efforts to keep the Arab Spring from morphing into a new wave of anti-Americanism – and he has few good options to prevent it. Read Here – Reuters
“It’s been a difficult year,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar acknowledged in an interview in her office in Islamabad last week. That’s a bit of an understatement for a first year on the job in which she has had to weather a series of diplomatic crises including turban-bomb assassinations, terrorist extraditions, and friendly-fire incidents. […]
