Asia Pacific

Rameen Siddiqui  The final week of 2024 delivered a stark message: the era of easy money is over. In a synchronized pivot, the world’s major central banks turned hawkish—the Bank of Japan hiked rates to a thirty-year high, and the ECB signaled an end to easing. This monetary …

Zineb Riboua China’s inroads in the Middle East demonstrate how the region is still a critical front in the era of US-China competition. The 2025 US National Security Strategy signals the most significant shift in Middle East policy since the Iraq War. The new framework aims to reallocate …

James Holmes Naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan would likely be baffled by Trump’s war on drugs—but would be instantly familiar with his broader geopolitical motives in the Caribbean. What would Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, America’s fin de siècle evangelist of sea power, say about the US blockade on …

Dimitra Staikou Since 2022, the energy relationship between India and Russia has quietly become one of the most consequential adaptations to the West’s sanctions on Moscow. What began as an opportunistic trade in discounted crude has evolved into a durable restructuring of global energy flows—one that exposes a …

Alexander Langlois Fifteen years after the Middle East’s largest pro-democracy movement, the West still has not learned that supporting autocracy is no longer sustainable. The Arab Spring carries multiple meanings for the many millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa, let alone the world. The …

Jianli Yang China’s chip strategy is focused on self-reliance. The United States should reconsider its decision to allow Nvidia to export H200 chips and instead enact a total export ban. US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement to permit Nvidia to export its high-end H200 chips to China has triggered another …

Seth J. Frantzman The pro-democracy movement marked the death knell of Arab nationalism and unintentionally quickened a shift of regional power toward the Gulf States. In early December, Tunisian authorities arrested a well-known opposition activist. Human Rights Watch noted that Ayachi Hammami, “a lawyer and rights defender, was …

Tony Blur The contemporary international system did not emerge overnight. It was forged through a sequence of decisive political, economic, military, and technological shocks that gradually dismantled the post–Cold War order and replaced it with a far more fragmented and contested global landscape. From the collapse of the …

By any democratic standard, it is extraordinary for a sitting prime minister to take the witness stand in a criminal corruption trial while continuing to govern a country at war. Yet this is precisely where Israel finds itself as Benjamin Netanyahu testifies for the first time in a …