Since late February, three nor’easter storms in two weeks have pummelled the northeastern United States while the cold spell known as “the Beast from the East” froze much of Europe, dumping heavy snow and causing massive disruption and chaos. Following in their wake is likely to be a geopolitical storm of equally large proportions –…
An ordinary person might not think that Ethiopia and Myanmar have anything in common, but an analysis of their latest leadership changes shows that these two Chinese Silk Road partners actually share five structural vulnerabilities with one another, and identifying these points of pressure could reveal some crucial insight about the US’ latest Hybrid War…
We’ve been there before, in the crash of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when we believed that downloading pop music and porn would drive the economy of the future. We’ve done it again: We made another tech bubble on the premise that Americans would write the apps and Asians would make the hardware, and the…
Who is the real Mike Pompeo and what does he really think about Russia, Iran, Afghanistan or Syria? Moscow has been noticeably reticent about US President Donald Trump’s dismissal last week of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his replacement with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Pompeo. This is curious considering how often Trump’s perceived…
Seventy-two hours was all it took to rip up the rule book for international relations – or at least the chapter on Northeast Asia. In the space of just three days, a once unthinkable scenario unfolded as North Korea accepted an invitation from the South for a summit and extended its own invite to the…
In 2005 Japan raised the possibility of a separate grouping of four nations, Australia, India, Japan and the United States, as a potential counterweight to the growing power of China. It was an ill-considered notion then, and nothing has happened since then to make it a better idea. If anything, it is a worse idea…
