South East Asia

During the May 2023 G7 summit in Hiroshima, US President Joe Biden observed that ties with Beijing would ‘thaw very shortly’. Four months later, the United States and China have taken important first steps to put the balloon incident behind them and stabilise their rocky relationship. Lines of communication have …

What is the origin of Xi Jinping’s strongman rule? A “victorious Xi” thesis argues that Xi simply won his fight to gain power. But this raises the question of where Xi found the political support to do so. A “collective support” thesis suggests that centralized power was willingly given to …

At the G20 summit, the United States and its partners revealed an economic corridor linking India, the Middle East, and Europe. It is premature, however, to call this a serious counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. At last week’s G20 summit, President Joe Biden announced an India-Middle East-Europe Economic …

Right from the inception of Pakistan, it has had the insatiable desire to keep Afghanistan under its tacit control; anything and everything for Afghanistan should go through Pakistan. Pakistan, from the 1980s, increasingly meddled in the affairs of Afghanistan. From training and nurturing the Taliban in the early 1990s to …

Malaysia faces a tough crossroads of economic choice in choosing to end its reliance on China or to align more closely on the West for long term economic assurance, albeit in a slower term. Kuala Lumpur will need to have a strategic long term reorientation of its economic fundamentals, especially …

Xi has been eyeing the South and East China Seas, coopting the Solomon Islands, building and militarizing his own artificial islands, and threatening not only Taiwan, but neighbours such as Australia, India and Japan. Putin seized and occupied territory in Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014 (Crimea) and 2023, …

While Türkiye has announced the project cannot happen without its cooperation, experts also warn the new Western-led project could entail a number of logistical issues and comes amid escalating tensions between the US and China.. On September 9, amid the G20 leaders’ summit hosted in India, the US, Saudi Arabia, …

Senior U.S. officials are upbeat about the prospects for improved relations with Central Asia’s five republics following a first-of-its-kind summit between the region’s leaders and President Joe Biden in New York this week. “I think we’ve heard an openness from all our Central Asian colleagues and really a desire for …

The Taliban have enabled some terrorist groups and reined in others, elevating longstanding concerns for U.S. policy. Two years into Taliban rule, the question of whether Afghanistan would once again become a safe haven for international terrorism remains alive. Longstanding fears were affirmed a little over a year ago, when …

As Russia’s relationship with the West has deteriorated, the Kremlin’s view of the Taliban has changed. But substantive economic cooperation will be hard to achieve. Russia is one of just a handful of states in the world actively seeking to strengthen its relationship with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. While …