A pan-Asia high-speed train has left the station – and India – behind. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which would have been the largest free trade deal in the world, was not signed in Bangkok. It will probably be signed next year in Vietnam, assuming New Delhi goes beyond what ASEAN, with diplomatic finesse…
The interview that Russian Prime Minister Medevedev gave to the Bangkok Post during his recent visit to Thailand to attend the ASEAN Summit there served to remind everyone of Russia’s skepticism towards the US’ “Indo-Pacific” concept, which he believes reduces the bloc’s centrality in regional affairs and also unnecessarily pressures its members to depart from…
Terrorism should always be condemned in every one of its forms, but the latest Bangkok blasts really aren’t that big of a deal if one puts them into context, so they therefore shouldn’t trigger an overreaction. Several small bombs blew up in Bangkok this morning in what was obviously a coordinated operation designed to coincide…
Western economists and intellectuals obsessed with demonization of China are never shy of shortcuts glaringly exposing their ignorance. The latest outburst posits that “we” – as in Western intellectuals – “are the modern version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” who electro-shocked a dead body (China) into a resurrected “murderous monster.” So, welcome to the Sino-Frankenstein school…
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made a provocative post on Facebook last week when he eulogized a former Thai leader for “opposing Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and the Cambodian government that replaced the Khmer Rouge” and therefore “preventing the military invasion and regime change from being legitimised”, with this contentious comment on Cambodia’s internal…
The US’ recently released “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” envisages India playing a key role in this vast transregional space in order to “contain” China, while Pakistan is conspicuously absent from the text despite being one of the few nuclear weapons states, among the most populous countries in the world, and the transit route for China’s overland…
