After more than a month of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, progress toward a peace agreement remains slow. The key unknown variable is whether the United States has an appetite for staying involved in the long grind of overseeing a peace process that must reconcile two divergent views of Afghanistan’s future—which can […]

When President-elect Joe Biden enters the Oval Office on Jan. 20, he is unlikely to have North Korea at the front of his mind, given the many other urgent crises he will confront. But the Korean Peninsula has a way of forcing American presidents to pay attention.

Although President Donald Trump has not conceded the United States presidential election and is mounting multiple dubious legal challenges to the results, President-elect Joe Biden is moving ahead with the transition.

Sudan has recently shifted its position in the negotiations on Addis Ababa’s controversial dam on the Nile River, as Khartoum grows more concerned about the dam’s impact on its own dams and agriculture. Khartoum has recently escalated its position on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) crisis, with Sudanese officials rejecting the Ethiopian positions on […]

Unknown gunmen have opened fire on Bassel Haswani, the son of prominent business man George Haswani, who was recently implicated in the purchase of the ammonium nitrate that exploded at Beirut port reports Alhurra.

Japan strongly protested Chinese vessels’ repeated intrusions into its waters near the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea at their senior diplomats’ videoconference on Wednesday, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.

Experts say the terrorism label will complicate efforts to secure a decaying oil tanker in the Red Sea that could rupture at any moment and unleash another humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. Off war-battered Yemen’s western coast lies a rapidly deteriorating storage vessel that could at any moment become an oil spill of catastrophic proportions. Experts […]

The United States on Thursday blacklisted Chinese oil giant CNOOC and slapped visa restrictions on officials of the Chinese navy, ruling party and state-owned enterprises over land reclamation and “coercion” of Southeast Asian claimants in the disputed South China Sea.

The U.N. humanitarian chief is urging the United States to reverse its decision to declare Yemen’s Houthi rebels a terrorist group, warning that the designation will likely lead to “a large-scale famine on a scale that we have not seen for nearly 40 years.”

China’s WJ-700, a high-altitude, long-endurance and high-speed armed reconnaissance drone said to be able to create a new pattern for drone combat, successfully conducted a maiden flight test recently, as military experts said the unmanned aircraft is characterized by its large payload and ability to launch large munitions from outside hostile anti-aircraft fire coverage zone.

Wang Yi’s visit added two new partners for the BRI, among other agreements. Over the weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi concluded his tour to five countries in Africa, upholding a 30-plus year tradition of China’s top diplomat starting the new year with the first international visit to the continent. The trip brought Wang to […]

[M]uch of the world is organizing to roadblock China’s march to dominance in 5G telecommunications. That is, to get China’s spying out of our system – although we are far from done, there is a lot of 2020 to build on in 2021.

“It is a massive strategic blunder at a time when President Biden will be seeking to put together an international partnership of liberal democracies to deal with the bullying loutish behavior and assault on our international rules by Chinese Communists.” — Former Hong Kong Governor Lord Patten, Daily Mail, January 7, 2021.

A senior Indonesian MP has said that his country will never normalise relations with Israel, confirming that the US offered it $2 billion to make such a move, Shehab news agency reported yesterday.

As Iran commemorates one year since the assassination of Quds Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani on Sunday, the IDF prepares for a possible attack by Tehran, a senior military source told The Jerusalem Post. The military is bracing for an attack not only by Iran itself but from its proxies, in what the army calls […]

China has called on the United States to stop interfering in its internal affairs after outgoing US President Donald Trump signed into law acts aimed to further enhance support for Taiwan and Tibet.

Japan’s deputy defense minister has taken a tough stance against “aggressive” China, declaring Taiwan’s safety a “red line” and calling on US president-elect Joe Biden to “be strong” in backing the island territory claimed by Beijing in the face of a Chinese aggression.

The war in Afghanistan — the world’s deadliest ongoing conflict — enters a crucial phase in 2021. The United States is set to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by May as part of a deal with the Taliban aimed at ending the 19-year war.

Tensions between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) once again came to a head when an improvised explosive device (IED) laid by the PKK in the Amedi district of Duhok killed one KDP-affiliated Peshmerga and injured at least one more.

As the U.S. military scrambles to meet a mid-January deadline to draw down to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, a milestone in the conflict has passed almost unremarked: The combined NATO force on the ground now outnumbers the U.S. contingent. About 13,000 U.S. troops were deployed to Afghanistan as of the end of February, when the […]

Pakistan on Monday said it has made it clear to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that Islamabad cannot recognize Israel until a “concrete and permanent settlement” of the Palestinian issue.

Lawmaker Khan Mohammad Wardak survived the blast but is among 20 injured including women and children, Afghan Interior Minister Massoud Andarabi said. A car bombing in Kabul targeting an Afghan lawmaker killed at least nine people, officials said.

Pakistan has returned $1 billion to Saudi Arabia as a second instalment of a $3 billion soft loan, as Islamabad reaches out to Beijing for a commercial loan to help it offset pressure to repay another $1 billion to Riyadh next month, officials said on Wednesday according to a report by Reuters.

China has agreed to bail out Pakistan by providing it with $1.5 billion to help to repay a $2 billion debt to Saudi Arabia, according to the Express Tribune.

After more than a month of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, progress toward a peace agreement remains slow.

A combustible mixture of political unrest, stalled governance and military meddling await the incoming Biden administration. Political uncertainty has descended on Pakistan as the combined opposition, seeking to dislodge the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan, has gathered under the banner of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM). While the conflict may appear sudden, its roots […]

China has embarked on a grand journey west. Officials in Beijing are driven by aspirations of leadership across their home continent of Asia, feelings of being hemmed in on their eastern flank by U.S. alliances, and their perception that opportunities await across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. Along the way, their first stop is South […]

Following the 2020 U.S. presidential election, many observers asserted that China-U.S. relations, what have been strained most of the time over the past three years, will see a change, most likely for the better. Judging from the moves taken by the militaries of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in the air and under […]

Both the UK and the EU are engaged in a game of brinkmanship, amounting to a kind of shadow theatre— neither wants to shoulder the blame for the UK’s exit from the EU without a trade deal between the two. The stakes are higher for the UK.

In an address to Pakistani scholars and seminary students on Sunday, the senior cleric described the move as unethical and illegitimate and a sign of the United States’ enmity toward knowledge and humanity.

China may soon achieve a military equilibrium with the United States, General Mark Milli, head of the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. According to him, the PRC has a “very powerful” economy; the country has spent a lot of money developing the armed forces. At the same time, Milli stressed that China is […]

President-elect Joe Biden has said he will stand up to China and Russia, but unlike President Trump, he has stressed the need to work closely with allies and international organizations to present a united front against two countries that Washington considers its foremost competitors.

In October, Boeing and Mitsubishi signed an agreement to modernise Japan’s F-15 aircraft so they could carry long-range cruise missiles. The reason why Tokyo decided to upgrade the aircraft was China’s intensifying air patrols over the disputed Senkaku Islands, which have been a big issue for the two nations.

The People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) of China was forecast to have become the world’s navy in late 2019, although it still lacks the global power projection capabilities of its US counterparts. The Pentagon has responded with plans for a dramatic increase in the size of the US Navy using smaller ships and advances in artificial […]

GT: The Obama administration did not embrace the notion “new model of major power relationship” proposed by China. Do you think there is any chance Biden will reconsider it and why?