In 1932, John Chamberlain lamented “the unwillingness of the liberal to continue with analysis once the process of analysis had become uncomfortable.” He was critiquing the way Wilsonian liberals drifted into World War One. Socialists...
With much attention being given to the passage of the 2015 USA Freedom Act, there is some odd silence about what the bill actually contains. Pundits from every corner identify the demise of section...
This is a guest post by Grant Dawson, assistant professor of social science and international politics at The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China and Cyrus Janssen is an American expat based in...
Here was my Tweet the other day. Today we have an answer. Tweeps, best case scenario on climate coming out of APEC? — Josh Busby (@busbyj2) November 7, 2014 If you went to bed early on Tuesday...
Statue Outside the Guingtou Battle Museum(Photo: Dan Nexon)Note: this is the second post stemming from my June trip to Taiwan. The first is available here.Seven years ago Bill Petti wrote a piece at the Duck called "US, Taiwan, and the Myth of an Obligation to Defend." Bill eviscerated the claim that the US was legally obligated to defend the island against an attack from the mainland, but concluded by noting that:Many US policymakers have come to see our position on Taiwan as a barometer by which enemies and allies judge US resolve. Over the last 50 years we have coupled our stance on...
Yesterday's IMF report on China "praised China's leaders" for responding quickly to its recent economic slowdown and concluded that "China's economy seems to be undergoing a soft landing, though global headwinds are increasing." It also repeated increasingly frequent warnings about the fragility of the banking sector and suggested that there are "significant downsize risks" ahead in China. China may have a soft landing amid the current slowdown, but it is worth reminding ourselves that it is a country with enormous contradictions -- many of which look to be far more complicated than the...
Everyone agrees China is a rising power. Some people think it can rise indefinitely; some people think its rise will decelerate; and some think that its rise is illusory. But it's hard to put even the People's Republic stellar growth rates into perspective without taking a longer view.The chart above shows the ratios of Chinese to other countries' GDP per capita. It's based on painstaking work by Angus Maddison to reconstruct long time series about output. There are reasons to think that Maddison's estimates before 1900 are a little speculative, but they are widely agreed to capture the...
The basic theory behind the Obama Administration's "Reset" policy was that US-Russian relations could be disaggregated: that it is possible for two countries to disagree on a range of issues and still cooperate on matters of common interest. That bet looks to be correct; despite a significant deterioration in relations between Washington and Moscow, the pursuit of common interests persists. The Russian government has given approval for the United States and its NATO allies to use a Russian air base in the Volga city of Ulyanovsk as a hub for transits to and from Afghanistan. The decree is...
Taipei 101Photo Credit: Dan NexonI spent 2-9 June in Taiwan on a trip sponsored by the government of the Republic of China. Taipei funds these trips, and others like them, as part of an effort to influence academics and opinion-leaders; while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MOFA) would certainly be pleased if its outreach resulted in more voices advocating on behalf of ROC interests, it would, I think, be satisfied if we simply paid more attention to Taiwan.As one of the China experts on the trip explained to me, Taipei has seen a significant loss of influence in the United States. Many of...
Alex Cooley -- whose book on power-political competition in Central Asia is due out soon -- had an interesting op-ed in Friday's New York Times. He argues that the apparent success of the 12th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit masks ongoing Sino-Russian tensions in the region:Since the financial crisis, China has displaced Russia as Central Asia’s leading trading partner, and Beijing would welcome using the S.C.O. framework to further boost regional economic integration and investment. But both Russia and the Central Asian countries fear the political repercussions of Beijing’s...
Two years ago, Der Spiegel published an audio recording of secret negotiations involving many of the world's most important leaders meeting together on Friday, December 18, 2009, during the Copenhagen climate summit:The world's most powerful politicians were gathered in the "Arne Jacobsen" conference room in Copenhagen's Bella Center, negotiating ways to protect the world's climate. US President Barack Obama was perched on the edge of a wooden chair with blue upholstery, talking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The blue turban of Indian Prime...
In fairness, fake dissertations areprobably more fun to read thanthe Little Red Book.Minxin Pei surveys the extent to which China's leaders have faked their credentials.Pei suggests that a number of China's leaders, hailed in the West by presumably credulous journalists, have in fact attained their educational credentials at what amount to diploma mills.The more interesting point Pei makes about this is that many indicators of Chinese "success," including local GDP calculations, may in fact be fraudulent. This is nothing new in China (or anywhere else, for that matter); one immediately...