In March 2018, The Heritage Foundation, in partnership with three leading think tanks from Australia, India and Japan, held the fifth iteration of its “Quad-Plus Dialogue” in Tokyo, Japan. Inaugurated in 2013, this unique Track 1.5 dialogue was designed as a forum for think tank and government representatives from the four democracies to discuss common…
Australia is attempting to tighten its vise-grip of control over the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. The tiny nation has sought to strategically liberate itself in recent years by realigning closer to China as a means of “balancing” out Australia’s excessive influence, but the rapid success of this policy fed into fake news fears…
Several noteworthy events, which have occurred in the past few weeks, bear witness to the continuing changes in the Indo-Pacific region’s political map. This process was long in the making, but its pace increased substantially after the election of Donald Trump as the US President, whose key campaign slogan, “America first,” is often misinterpreted as…
Rosneft is drilling for oil off the South China Sea coast of Vietnam in an area claimed by China. The Russian energy giant is involved in the Lan Do oilfield that narrowly sits within the southwestern border of China’s nine-dash-line but is apparently regarded by the company as being under Vietnam’s de-facto sovereignty. China officially…
China’s reported deployment of anti-ship and cruise missiles to its reclaimed islands in the South China Sea was the inevitable action of a country that chose to act first in order to thwart its American adversary from doing the same thing at a more disadvantageous time in the future. All of Asia seems to be…
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…
