South East Asia

The War in Ukraine Should Prompt a New Opening to China Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and the responses of the United States and China—has generated the first great-power crisis in decades. Such crises are rare and terrifying, especially in the nuclear age. Understandably, therefore, countries go to great lengths to avoid …

Beijing Is Using the Global South to Constrain America For the past decade, Chinese President Xi Jinping has endeavored to help China attain what it considers to be its rightful position at the center of the world stage. To do this, Xi—along with the rest of China’s leadership—is attempting to …

Ukraine’s successes in resisting and even turning back an invasion by a numerically superior Russian force has raised expectations in East Asia that smaller nations in the region could conceivably fend off an attack from a large military like China’s. Taiwan, of course, has long struggled with executing such a …

“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion.” — Nicolas Chaillan, former first Chief Software Officer for the Air Force, who resigned in protest over the Pentagon’s slow pace of technological …

Technological innovation is one of the main fields of US–China competition. Competition in the semiconductor industry is a significant point of tension where the continued interference of US bureaucracies in the industry is a source of contention between the superpowers. For Beijing, closing the technological gap with the most advanced …

The Russia-Ukraine war is upending global supply chains. In the case of Central Asia (the five republics plus Afghanistan) this impact reinforces the need for redundant transport routes and options for the landlocked states of Central Asia. These states still rely on Soviet-era transport links that connect them to markets. …

Asia is undergoing a world-historical geopolitical transformation. The rise of the Indo-Pacific as a coherent geoeconomic and geopolitical system coincides with the rise of what this author has previously termed the “Indo-Abrahamic,” an emerging transregional order connecting India to West Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. Until now, the geographic vastness …

A famous general once said, the soldier is the army and no army is better than its soldiers. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to be ruminating on this axiom and is pulling out all the stops to create wolf warriors in real life too. The clashes along the India–China …

The second in-person summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, Quad, in Japan managed to generate a lot of buzz. While the global media covered it in its usual breathless manner, China also ensured that the event retained its edge as its warplanes joined the Russians to approach Japanese airspace. It …

What do we know about the man supposedly leading Islamic State’s East Asia branch? Not much was known about the Islamic State’s new leader for its so-called East Asia province, which encompasses Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and, according to a terrorism monitor, also Thailand. The Diplomat has recently learned the …