South East Asia

When the Wagner mutiny first happened in late June, it shocked most strategists and observers in China. To them, it added a whole new layer of uncertainty to their understanding of Russian domestic politics, the Russian-Ukrainian War, and China’s overall external security environment. With Russian President Vladimir Putin now appearing …

Will a Toughened China Strategy Be Enough? In 2020, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, called on Europe to forge its “own way” with China and distance itself from the “open confrontation” approach pursued by U.S. President Donald Trump. The goal of Borrell’s “Sinatra doctrine,” so named in …

On the heels of the recent NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, it has again become clear that this small but ardent Baltic country is emblematic of a restructuring and rebalancing of European relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its Communist Party leadership. In 2021, Lithuania dared to …

The 32nd report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team of the 1267 ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council, released this week, noted that “one Member State assessed that Al-Qaeda is shaping AQIS (Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent).

It is generally recognized that any discussion on South Asia without reference to India would be putting the cart before the horse. In the article Why France and India Are Natural Partners, Antonia Collabasanu (July 20 2034-Geopolitical Futures) has emphasized the importance of Franco-Indian collaboration as a preeminent feature of …

Since the countries of Central Asia gained independence in 1991, the Arab world has devoted most of its attention to the region promoting the revival of Islam and thereby promoting the fundamentalist Islam characteristic of much of the Arab East. The effort has prompted the West to oppose Arab involvement …

U.S. policy toward China appears to be suffering from a belief in magic – that, for instance, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be a great idea; that Putin would be happy with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine; that the Chinese spy balloon was “silly;” that the mission of education and the …

The fall of Kabul in August 2021 prompted discussions about the end of Western influence in the country and an opportunity for China and Russia to dig their heels in the ‘graveyard of empires’. In the immediate aftermath, in contrast with Afghanistan’s other neighbours, Russia didn’t close its embassy in …

With China working on its dual-carbon goals and under the current high temperature, virtual power plants have been consistently dominating the country’s new energy sector since the beginning of this year. In fact, in 2022, the 14th Five-Year Plan for Modern Energy System proposed to promote flexible resources such as …

Russia’s isolation, China’s assertiveness and a surge of interest in joining BRICS have pushed calls for a BRICS currency. Brazilian President Lula da Silva attacked the global economic order at last month’s international financing summit in Paris, criticising the dominance of the United States (US) dollar as the currency for …