South East Asia

The Pentagon is preparing for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan amid fears that the Taliban may overrun the compound in the coming days. As the Islamic terrorist organization makes significant gains, capturing ten provincial capitals across the country, the State Department will reduce embassy staff …

Alarm is growing at the prospect of the Taliban unseating the Kabul government, but that outcome is just one of three scenarios for Afghanistan’s future amid mounting military uncertainty and an unfolding human tragedy. There is no question that momentum is with the Taliban, which have taken more territory in …

In 1947, George F Keenan, an American Foreign Service officer, formulated the policy of ‘containment’. The continuity that this policy represented may be appreciated by its longevity. It was the foundation of US strategy during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the keystone of their foreign policy. It …

China has gone through major political transformations over the past decade, with the rise and consolidation of Xi Jinping’s power being a key driver. The change in leadership has been accompanied by power centralisation, governance changes, anti-corruption drives, and growing ethnic tension. This decade coincided with China’s rise in the …

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reportedly has dismissed Chief of Army Staff Lt. Gen. Wali Mohammad Ahmadzai from his post, after the ninth provincial capital fell to the Taliban early on Wednesday morning. The Taliban have captured more than a quarter of the country’s provincial capitals in less than a week. …

Trump’s adoption of a realistic relationship with China successfully slowed any CCP plans for military expansion in the South and East China Seas. What ended any possibility of a warming trend in US-China diplomatic ties was Beijing’s repeated lies that there was no human-to-human transmissibility of its Wuhan virus. Soon, …

Analysts and officials say a Taliban victory is far from guaranteed, pointing to the resources of Afghan defence forces, who remain in control. The Taliban now controls about half of Afghanistan’s districts, after lightning pace offensives in the months since foreign troops began their final withdrawal from the country. But …

Taliban overruns cities of Farah and Pul-e-Khumri in fresh setbacks for Afghanistan’s government. The Taliban has captured two more cities in Afghanistan, taking the number of provincial capitals the group has seized since Friday to eight. Farah city of the eponymous southwestern province and Pul-e-Khumri of the northern province of …

As cyberattacks start to resemble traditional acts of war in their destructive power, initiatives like the EU’s planned Joint Cyber Unit will prove inadequate to the task of preventing cyberwarfare from reaching more destructive levels. Only a bold doctrinal innovation of Article 5 of the NATO treaty will. The most …

French President Macron, for his part, called on Iran’s new president to ‘quickly resume’ stalled negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear deal In his first phone call to a Western leader, the new president of Iran asked his French counterpart Monday to help secure Iran’s “rights” in now-stalled talks to …