Despite Iran’s severely weakened economy its gross mishandling of the coronavirus, the religious-security establishment in Tehran seems firmly in charge of the country and has shown no hesitation to squash any opposition… The United States and its regional allies have to accept that the Islamic Republic is here to stay and find a way to live with it.
Read Here | The National Interest
US President Donald Trump lashed out at China in his annual United Nations General Assembly address on Tuesday, saying the country had “unleashed” the coronavirus on the world and polluted the environment at extreme levels with impunity. “We have waged a fierce battle against the invisible enemy: the China virus,” Trump said in a pre-recorded speech.
Read Here | South China Morning Post
A spiralling tech war between the United States and China has reinvigorated Beijing’s ambitions for semiconductor independence in recent months and turbocharged efforts in Washington to thwart its plans, leaving chip-making powerhouse Taiwan caught in the crossfire.
Read Here | South China Morning Post
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to strike a delicate diplomatic balance between China and the United States. But as Sino-American tensions escalate, his successor, Yoshihide Suga, will find it increasingly difficult to avoid taking sides, especially on technology issues and security arrangements.
Read Here | Project Syndicate
America’s open society allows for the infiltration of Chinese soft power organisations, such as the Confucius Society. America’s liberalism also makes it susceptible to disinformation campaigns and election meddling.Against China, the United States has the better hand. It has more and better allies than China, a better economy, a larger middle class, a more legitimate regime, a larger military, a greater soft power, and a superior political system.
Read Here | The Bulwark
What is China up to in the Middle East? What are its intentions, and do they constitute a threat to the predominant U.S. order there? And will there soon be a transformation in its approach to regional conflict, especially through the emerging concept and practice of “peace through development”?
Read Here | WarOnTheRocks
For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism.
Read Here | The Spectator
If you are of two minds about the foreign-policy orientations of the Indian government, what do you do? Answer: Read the lips of US State Department officials. They will give you the authoritative account of what India’s secretive foreign policy elites are up to.
Read Here | Asia Times
In many ways, then, U.S.-Indian relations are in better shape than ever. But they are also different from what previous U.S. and Indian governments had envisaged. Above all, they are now much narrower, encompassing a smaller set of issues. Once vibrant exchanges in education, agriculture, and science and technology have atrophied.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
Washington doesn’t need to compete dollar-for-dollar, or troop-for-troop, with Beijing in order to reassert itself in the Horn of Africa. The mere act of standing for basic tenets of U.S. foreign policy, like promoting human rights and democracy, can reverse the destabilizing authoritarian backsliding in the region’s largest, and arguably most important, country: Ethiopia.
