South East Asia

On 15 November 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held their first virtual meeting. According to the White House’s readout, Biden told Xi that the two countries should establish ‘common sense guardrails to ensure that US–China competition does not veer into conflict and to keep lines …

Until very recently, the hefty monetary and fiscal relaxation unleashed by governments to stimulate the economic recovery at the onset of the global financial crisis has not had major inflationary repercussions, in particular as the main benchmark has been the benign consumer price inflation, rather than the rapidly growing real-estate …

The Taliban takeover has decimated the gains of the past twenty years achieved by Afghans—against tremendous odds—in the spaces of education, women’s rights, and civil society engagement. With no embassy and no forward presence on the ground in Afghanistan, Washington’s leverage to impact events has been significantly reduced. Among a …

The European Union (EU) has begun to think more creatively about initiatives that can challenge China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the recently launched “Global Gateway” project. Since its official launch in 2013, China’s BRI— Chairman Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative—has come under criticism from the West and …

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is attending talks that began Saturday among Group of Seven foreign ministers in Liverpool, with a call from British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to unite against authoritarianism. The appeal from Truss came as ministers from the world’s wealthiest democracies, informally known as the G-7, …

On 14 April this year, the price of a single Bitcoin reached a then all-time-high of around US$64,870. Just over a month later, the price of the world’s most popular digital currency had tumbled to $34,259. A significant driver behind this sudden drop was the news that China had begun …

Sun Tzu, the pioneer of Chinese military thought and author of the famed treatise ‘The Art of War’, has influenced China’s strategy. With the objective of weakening the enemy, Sun Tzu propagated several measures to ensure the outcome of any conflict would be predetermined. “Ultimate excellence lies, not in winning …

But U.S. Power Faces Threats at Home “Time and momentum are on our side,” declared Chinese President Xi Jinping in January. But developments this year have not borne out Xi’s confidence about China’s inexorable rise. A number of structural weaknesses have been dragging down China’s prospects: a rapidly aging population, …

On 26 October 2021, US President Joe Biden attended a virtual US–ASEAN summit meeting — the first time in four years that the United States engaged at the highest level with the 10-member bloc. During his speech, Biden said that Washington is committed to the central role ASEAN has in …

China’s Huawei has come to dominate the 5G rollout in Cyprus, with risks for data security and independent policymaking that go far beyond the island’s shores, experts warn. In October 2015, two years after a banking crisis left Cyprus in desperate need of new financing, President Nicos Anastasiades visited China …