Japan’s future, whether she likes it or not, will be with its East Asian neighbors’ Belt and Road Initiative when the U.S. 7th Fleet scuttles back to Pearl Harbor. Although it is now 20 years since the English edition of my Japan: The Toothless Tiger best seller first appeared, everything that has since happened has…
‘Encirclement’ and ‘containment’ effectively have become Biden’s default foreign policy, Alastair Crooke writes. The key to China’s security riposte to the U.S. is linked to two words that go unstated in U.S. formal policy documents, but whose silent presence nevertheless suffuses and colour-washes the text of the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act. The term ‘containment’…
Another tour, started on December 9 by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, may have been unprecedented since he took office, both in terms of the number of countries visited and the breadth of topics that were supposed to be discussed with foreign colleagues. The plan was for the trip to include three phases: a stop…
France should embrace the multipolar trend of mutually beneficial cooperation in order to sustain its existing influence in parts of Afro-Eurasia as well as pragmatically expand it into new regions.
The regional tour of Southeast Asia by the US Vice-President Kamala Harris got inundated with the tsunami of criticism over the United States’ frantic efforts to complete the evacuation out of Kabul Airport by the month-end. Again, Israel being a hugely attractive topic in US news cycles, Harris’ visit to Singapore and Vietnam may get…
The feeling from Rory Medcalf of the Australian National University was one of breathless wonder. “The US government,” he wrote in The Strategist, “has just classified one of its most secretive national security documents – its 2018 strategic framework for the Indo-Pacific, which was formally classified SECRET and not for release to foreign nationals.” Washington’s…
