Three major powers — which together account for nearly half of the global economy — are vying for influence in the Indian Ocean arena. India, China, and the United States each view the region through their own geo-strategic frameworks, ensuring intense jostling at best or conflict at worst.
Is populism still on the rise? That question will be looming over elections in Israel, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Spain, and the European Union over the next two months. Yet it will be misplaced, for the real contest is between nationalism and internationalism.
If global leadership is China’s ultimate goal, then does China’s intended leadership style lie within its history? Some experts accept China’s eventual rise to global hegemony, yet history shows that China maintained tenuous control over its neighbours. For this reason, China’s foreign policy aims to incentivise the cooperation of its neighbours through the promotion of Confucian norms and by providing economic opportunity to foreign governments.
For decades, Europe has served as a steward of the post-war liberal order, ensuring that economic rules are enforced and that national ambitions are subordinated to shared goals within multilateral bodies. But with the United States and China increasingly mixing economics with nationalist foreign-policy agendas, Europe will have to adapt.
Arab leaders meeting in Tunis have issued a renewed call for the establishment of a Palestinian state and condemned a move by the United States to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. Held in Tunisia’s capital, the 30th Arab League summit kicked off on Sunday against the backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, instability in Libya and mass anti-government protests in Algeria and Sudan, as well as a continuing boycott of Qatar by four fellow bloc members.
NATO is celebrating its 70th birthday next week, but rather than blowing out 70 candles, the foreign-policy establishment is pondering whether it should still exist. In truth, we’ve been having this argument since 1992, after the Soviet collapse, and maybe since France pulled its military out of the alliance in 1966…
Polybius’ Histories should not only be viewed as a precious repository of information for classicists, but also as required reading for today’s national security managers. Indeed, over the past decade or so, growing apprehensions about China’s rise and America’s relative decline have prompted a surge in the study of the kind of great-power transitions experienced by Polybius.
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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.
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.
