I got an alert from the Foreign Policy app on my phone the other day: Tunisia had fired its UN ambassador after he opposed Trump's Israel-Palestine "peace plan." Tunisian foreign policy doesn't usually make waves, but this caught my attention. It's a sign that, while...
Did you see the photos like the one above out of Shanghai? For the first time ever, Shanghai's air pollution, like Beijing's before it, exceeded the scale for particulate matter. For the past seven...
If you haven’t yet seen the zone’s geography, here it is to the left, complete with its overlap with the Korean and Japanese zones. The most important conflict of course is over Senkaku, but Korea...
As has been widely reported in the Western media, on Friday, China’s state media finally officially announced two changes in human rights policies: (a) an end of the “Laojiao” policy of...
Will we look back on all those arguments about how unipolarity is stable, American primacy is secure, and traditional balance-of-power politics don't work in hegemonic systems as quaint artifacts of the late 1990s? Will we conclude that US primacy died in the sands of Mesopotamia, or that secular economic and technological trends ended hyperpower? Or will we see, in retrospect, that Russian assertiveness, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Sino-US balance of financial terror, European defense plans, and all that jazz, were merely noise?Image source:...
China is in the Satellite business. The NYT reports that China is launching a communications satellite for Nigeria (pictured right).The lead says it all:For years, China has chafed at efforts by the United States to exclude it from full membership in the world’s elite space club. So lately China seems to have hit on a solution: create a new club.Beijing is trying to position itself as a space benefactor to the developing world — the same countries, in some cases, whose natural resources China covets here on earth. The latest and most prominent example came last week when China launched a...
What do other states think of America's nuclear arsenal and strategic posture? Defense analyst Lewis Dunn, with coauthors Gregory Giles, Jeffrey Larsen, and Thomas Skypek, recently completed a project sponsored by the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office (ASCO) of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency that looked at this and related questions. Their report is available on the web: Foreign Perspectives on U.S. Nuclear Policy and Posture (warning: long pdf).On March 20, Dunn presented the findings at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Through his interviews with foreign individuals,...
Why the lack of posts? Well, I've been under two writing deadlines in recent weeks. For both projects, I've been working on pieces about the domestic and international politics of global warming -- one for a magazine and one for a textbook. Here's some news from that research worth serious discussion:A report released last week by Beijing authorities indicated that as its economy continues to expand at a red-hot pace, China is highly likely to overtake the United States this year or in 2008 as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.This information, along with data from the...
China has over $1 trillion of US treasury bills. Its a well described cycle--China produces massive amounts of consumer goods, the US buys those goods, the trade is imbalanced, so China ends up with a lot of dollars, and they invest them hier in T-bills, essentially loaning them back to the US government to finance the US federal budget deficit. So far, China has been sitting on this mound of cash, content to save. That seems to be changing, reports the NY Times today: China will create a new agency to invest the country’s immense reserves of foreign currency, now totaling more than $1...
As I was saying about Frenemies (video) ....Its a must watch, especially if you're snowed in this morning like we are.
I really don't want to criticize the same high-profile blogger twice in a row, but David Adesnik's takedown of Henry Kissinger deserves some commentary.Kissinger's shilling for China again. No news there. David does a good job of pointing out what's substantively wrong with the op-ed. His framing, however, is all off. For David, Kissinger's mistake is a failure of realism:As a committed realist, Kissinger desperately wants to believe that American foreign policy can be made without reference to the deeply-rooted ideals of democracy and human rights. And he's right; it can. From 1969 until...