The supercomputing race between the world’s two largest economies escalated after the US unveiled plans for its first machine to cross the “exascale” performance threshold by 2021, putting it roughly a year behind a similar plan from China.
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Although propitious political circumstances made the Balakot crisis between India and Pakistan manageable, Pakistani terrorism remains the principal continuing threat to stability in South Asia. U.S. policy moving forward must relentlessly pressure Pakistan to crack down on jihadi groups or risk continuing crises in the region.
There is no question at this point that the relative sizes of the U.S. and Chinese economy today are much closer than those of Japan and the U.S. in the interwar period. And long story short, underselling the size of the Chinese defense budget and overselling the size of the Chinese economy does tend to obscure the magnitude of China’s defense buildup.
The current media-designated “war” between the, investment and technology has, unsurprisingly, revived a previously dormant discourse on differences between “Asian” (here, “Chinese”) vs “Western” (“American”) values that many believe portend the “clash of civilisations” advanced by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1993, and repeatedly embellished by numerous acolytes since.
In delivering his 2019 government work report to the National People’s Congress in Beijing, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said the country would “work faster to make China strong in manufacturing” – this despite there being no mention of “Made in China 2025” in the government work report for the first time in three years.
Governments are motivated to pursue leadership in AI by the promise of gaining a strategic advantage. At this early stage, it’s tough to tell what sort of advantage is at stake, because we don’t know what sort of thing AI will turn out to be. Since AI is a technology, it’s natural to think of it as a mere resource that can assist in attaining one’s goals, perhaps by allowing drones to fly without supervision or increasing the efficiency of supply chains.
There was once an uninhabited islet lying close to the Chinese side of the Ussuri River, which marks the border between Russia and China in the Far East. “Was,” because it has since attached itself to the Chinese bank in a defiant act of geographic irony. But during the turbulent spring of 1969 this little islet — called Damansky in Russian and Zhenbao Dao in Chinese — was the stage for a game-changing encounter.
For the past seven decades, the world has been moulded by a strong, transatlantic relationship with the US and EU underwriting the terms of peace, stability and economic prosperity. The success of this order has created its own existential challenge. Its rising beneficiaries in Asia and elsewhere increasingly challenge the validity of these arrangements and the efficacy of rules that have managed global affairs
The expectations were enormous: Perhaps Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un would, at a summit in Vietnam, finally declare an end to the Korean War…Instead, the second meeting between the two leaders ended in failure on Thursday, with a table set for a leaders’ lunch abandoned, a signing ceremony scrapped, and a terse statement from the White House press secretary: “No agreement was reached at this time.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump will conduct their summit over the course of two days in Hanoi, starting with a one-on-one meeting on Wednesday before a dinner that evening. On Thursday, the two leaders will have a “series of back and forth” meetings, according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who briefed reporters aboard Air Force One as Trump left the US. The US president is expected to arrive in Hanoi later on Tuesday, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo already in the Vietnamese capital.
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