While it may be true, as writes Robert Sutter in the introduction to National Bureau of Asian Research’s excellent report “Russia-China Relations”, that “The United States has a long experience in assessing the twists and turns of the relationship between Russia and China and what it means for US interests”, most casual (Western-oriented) observers are…
When China announced plans to launch an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015, the United States chose a response reminiscent of its Cold War playbook. It cast doubt on China’s intentions and leaned on other nations not to get involved. The result was no different from the Cold War era too—nations, including close allies of…
The ASEAN Miracle observes that Southeast Asia is the world’s most diverse region. Although obvious once mentioned, it still seems novel. Southeast Asia’s history is a mix of Chinese, Indian and Islamic influences, with sizable populations of several of the world’s major religions. Yet despite this and its complicated colonial and postcolonial history, Southeast Asian…
There is much to admire in Salvatore Babones’s short book American Tianxia. It is a welcome corrective to the often-unchallenged conventional wisdom that the 21st century belongs to a rising China that is fast overtaking US global predominance.
Nicholas Gordon interviews Kishore Mahbubani, author of The ASEAN Miracle.
The rise of China in the wake of the slow relative decline of the United States has been the overarching narrative of global studies since the beginning of this century. Is this narrative correct? China’s growth is slowing as it reaches middle income status and the United States is still overwhelmingly more wealthy and powerful…
It is important for statesmen and policymakers to study and understand history, but the use of historical analogies to inform policy is fraught with dangers. The United States and its allies discovered that the “lessons of Munich” of 1930s Europe, for example, were not easily translatable to wars on the Korean peninsula and later in…
While the brightness of China’s economic and geopolitical future is a subject of recurring debate, the prospects for the “China book” industry seem undiminished. Toh Han Shih’s recent Is China an Empire? is, the title notwithstanding, one of the more straightforward and restrained entrants.
In the triumvirate of superpowers, only China and Russia share a border. In Beyond the Amur, Victor Zatsepine discusses how that border, or rather the eastern section of it, came to be.
“Man cannot control the current of events,” remarked Otto von Bismarck, “he can only float with them and steer.” The great German Chancellor understood that it is much easier to design a grand strategy for international politics than to implement one.
Discussions on the so-called “rise” of China at some point tend to cycle ’round to the question as to whether these developments are new or instead herald a return to a status quo ante, a consideration which depends in no small part as what that status quo actually was. That China was dominant in East…
A frequent reader of the American foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs will feel right at home reading Kurt Campbell’s The Pivot. The author was the Obama administration’s principal architect of the US pivot or “rebalance” to Asia, and beyond the abundance of conventional wisdom, offers some important insights into the emergence of what many are…