Next week, Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to the United States to meet Donald Trump for the first time. But according to Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, power is flowing in the opposite direction. Read Here – The Atlantic
Saudis, Russia, shale. That is all ye need to know in order to understand the oil market. The Saudis lead the OPEC oil cartel, Russia is their largest potential fellow traveler, and the Permian Basin in the Southwest is the oil-rich shale that stands between the other two and $100 per barrel oil. Read Here […]
It’s no coincidence this evolution has coincided with the rise of social media. The only thing that can accelerate a topic online better than outrage is humour—combine the two and you have a potent tool for reaching millions. (Hell, even protest signs—“We shall overcomb”—spawn top-10 lists.) Read Here – Wired
China’s role and influence in global markets is a big lure to Saudi Arabia. It is the world’s largest energy consumer and the second-biggest importer of crude, after the U.S. Just like the Japanese, China is driven by its need to secure sources of energy. That gives Saudi Arabia an opportunity to solidify its market […]
Ultimately, of course, policy differences, not personal ones, will matter most. Everyone in the Saudi leadership shares with the Trump administration a common view on the dangers posed by Iran. But there’s a gap in their respective positions on the war in Yemen and how the kingdom can best be extricated from it. Read Here […]
Feelings of being disconnected and despised, however, are powerful emotions, strong enough to twist facts into a dark alternate reality. It is critical to look beyond a simple story of populism, of masses versus elites. Read Here – Project Syndicate
The acronym of the moment in Beijing is BAT: Baidu (the search engine), Alibaba (Jack Ma’s answer to Amazon), and Tencent (which is the nearest thing to Facebook). These companies are much more than clones of their US counterparts; each has shown itself to be innovative in its own right. Read Here – Boston Globe
Foreign-policy realists define great-power status in terms of a country’s self-perception or material capacities. For China, however, status is conceived in the context of its relationship with the established authority, namely the West. Read Here – Project Syndicate
The Koreas were split at the end of WWII. That was when the Japanese, who annexed the peninsula in 1910, were replaced by occupying forces from the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south. The partition line at the 38th parallel would eventually mark the border of what have become […]
Despite murmurs of prospect clashes between the world’s two trade giants, drumbeats for a China-U.S. trade war are increasingly muted when both sides underscore closer win-win economic cooperation. As the new administration of the United States sent its first cabinet-level official to China for a visit, the messenger echoed a sequence of rapport-building gestures made […]
looking beyond borders 