While US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was visiting the Middle East, delegations from Iran and Saudi Arabia secretly visited Beijing and achieved diplomatic success in easing tension in the Gulf.
Posts published in “Asia and Pacific”
Having come to the United States at the age of 19, I started to think of it as my adopted country. But it wasn’t long before I recognized that the America I had yearned for so long was a shell of its former self.
Why does China struggle to win hearts and minds abroad? Why is it still “uncool” in the international arena?
After his election as the new President of South Korea in May, Yoon Suk-yeol hastily implemented one of his key promises: to relocate South Korea’s presidential office from Chung Wa Dae (Blue House) to a Defense Ministry Complex in Yongsan, an underdeveloped neighborhood in Seoul best known for its stationing of the United States military forces.
Imran Khan’s constitutional coup and subsequent dissolution of the National Assembly has polarized Pakistan; a flurry of allegations has magnified the power of the military in the country's domestic politics.
The CCP can only keep up this deceit for so long before the Chinese people get fed up with continual announcements of easing restrictions whilst ever more preposterous responses take place.
Not only is China incapable of preventing a recession — it appears that China’s recession is already underway, and there are several leading indicators suggesting that the worst is yet to come.
In the Arctic, global warming is opening opportunities for the allocation of needed resources even to non-Arctic states.
The show of force and shift in new leadership firmly established Xi’s undisputed control over party and country, making the entire week-long affair seem less about confirming political appointments, and more of a coronation ceremony for Xi.
As the recent 20th Party Congress came to a conclusion, Sino-watchers across the globe were less interested in China’s immediate policy direction. Rather, there was a profound sense that the world’s second-largest economic and military power seemed to have gone adrift; or for some, more depressingly, it highlighted the end of an epoch.