China's Military Comes Into Its Own
Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting the United States, perhaps his last state visit as president before China begins its generational leadership transition in 2012. Hu's visit is being shaped by...
View ArticleChina Tests Japanese and U.S. Patience
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has warned Beijing that Tokyo is losing patience with China's assertive maritime behavior in the East and South China seas, suggesting China consider the economic and...
View ArticleChina's Fragile Evolution
Last week, China's anti-corruption campaign took a significant turn, though a largely overlooked one. The Supreme People's Court released a statement accusing former Politburo Standing Committee member...
View ArticleThe Role of Inertia in Geopolitics
Geopolitics, at least in the sense that we practice, is neither deterministic in its approach to understanding nations and their interactions nor simply synonymous with current events or international...
View ArticleChina's Crisis: The Price of Change
Last week was an eventful one for China. First, the People's Bank of China shocked the financial world when it cut the yuan's reference rate against the U.S. dollar by nearly 2 percent, leading to a...
View ArticleA Delicate Balance in Beijing
In China, a fear of social instability has long constrained government efforts toward economic and structural reform. After three decades of nearly unrestrained and uncoordinated growth, China's...
View ArticleNorth Korea: The Outlier in U.S. Policy
Pyongyang's latest nuclear test is another reminder of the seemingly intractable "problem" of North Korea. The country's pursuit of nuclear weapons has apparently been unstoppable. First quietly in the...
View ArticleRevisiting the Geopolitics of China
In 2008, Stratfor published The Geopolitics of China: A Great Power Enclosed, the second in a series of monographs describing the underlying geopolitics of key countries and explaining their current...
View ArticleListening to the Echoes of the American Revolution
"The struggle had opened in a grey dawn at Lexington; its last shot was fired eight years later on the other side of the world outside a dusty town in southern India." So ends Piers Mackesy's 1964 book...
View ArticleFacing North Korea's Nuclear Reality
After announcing that it would cut communications with the United States, North Korea launched three missiles (two Scuds and a No Dong) last week. In some ways, there is little unexpected in North...
View ArticleA New Round in the Great Game Begins
Central Asia was once the prize in the so-called Great Game, a center of competition for the Russians, British, Persians, Mongols and Turks at various times and in various combinations. Sitting at the...
View ArticleEast Asia: Where Eastern and Western Ambitions Meet
From their opposite ends of the Asia-Pacific region, China and the United States have distinct â though sometimes overlapping â strategic visions of East Asia. The respective hefts of the...
View ArticleTaiwan, Trump and a Telephone
With his characteristic bluntness, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has, at least briefly, wiped away some diplomatic niceties and sent China a clear message: If Beijing wants to sit at the grown-ups'...
View ArticleUnderstanding America's Global Role in the Age of Trump
The New Year, of course, is a time when many reflect on the past and look toward the future. The past provides potential lessons and cautions for those who would seek to find tomorrow's solutions in...
View ArticleNorth Korea: A Problem Without a Solution
Since the end of the Cold War, paradox has characterized the United States' perception of North Korea. Pyongyang is at once a constant threat and a continual joke, its leaders a source of as much fear...
View ArticleThe United States: Between Isolation and Empire
Since taking office less than two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald Trump has moved quickly to put his policy directives into practice, from placing a temporary ban on the admittance of some migrants...
View ArticleChina Moves to Put North Korea in Its Place
In response to North Korea's latest missile test, and perhaps to the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, China has declared it will cease coal...
View ArticleNorth Korea’s Peculiar Brand of Rationality
"Irrational" North Korea has done it again. Even with U.S. and South Korean forces gathered on the peninsula for their largest annual joint military exercises, Pyongyang launched four ballistic...
View ArticleGlobalism in the Eyes of Two Beholders
The world over, the topic of globalism rarely fails to elicit a strongly held opinion. At its extreme in Europe, the march of globalization is accepted as a near-inevitability: In that view, it is no...
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