Taiwan has long been an epicenter of great power tension, perhaps most dangerously so during the early 1950s. Following his defeat by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang supporters withdrew to Taiwan, planning to regroup and return to the mainland in force. With the U.S. Navy lying athwart the...
The Arctic debate appears to present a conflict between long-term necessities and short-run priorities. In the long run, mitigating the climate crisis will necessitate multilateral cooperation, with Russia and China as integral parts. However, deterrence is the only policy that can credibly commit the U.S. to defend its Arctic interests. Abandoning the Arctic could invite...
President John F. Kennedy arrived in Vienna sixty years ago with lofty expectations for a Cold War breakthrough. But rather than alleviating U.S.-Soviet tensions as Kennedy had hoped, his conference with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instead precipitated a summer of crisis in Berlin, the perennial flashpoint of the Cold War. Probing Kennedy’s resolve, Khrushchev reissued...
Ahead of a diplomatic swing highlighted by an encounter with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has broadcast the Biden Administration’s concerns about the militarization of the Arctic. Against the backdrop of increased Sino-Russian cooperation in the region, united by shared economic interests in its control, Blinken has stated that the...
In October 1994, the Clinton administration had momentous news to share with the world. It had reached an agreement with North Korea to incrementally achieve normalization and denuclearization. Pyongyang pledged to freeze and dismantle its nuclear reactors, submit to international inspections and comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. promised North Korea financing for...
From 1949 to 1979, the status of Taiwan was a constant source of tension between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, threatening at its gravest moments the perils of nuclear war. Today, the combination of geopolitical competition between the United States and PRC and worsening relations between Beijing and Taipei has reactivated...
Last Friday marked the opening session of National People’s Congress in Beijing, an annual meeting of China’s highest legislative body, featuring the latest installments of the “Work Report,” which reviews economic statistics for the past year and lays out projections for the next, and the “Five-Year Plan” (the 14th, in this case), which lays out...
It’s been a week since a military junta detained State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, ending a decade of quasi-civilian rule and marking Myanmar’s first coup since 1988. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets, demanding a restoration of a government that won a landslide re-election last November, the largest...
The long-awaited regulatory approval of Covid-19 vaccines has opened a new debate about their distribution. Fraught politics on the national level are fueling a contentious geopolitics of global health – marked by dramatic inequalities as powerful countries balance between domestic and international needs. The decisions of the nations most engaged in ‘vaccine diplomacy’ have closely...
The new Biden administration argues that only through close cooperation with its transatlantic partners can the United States effectively confront rising geopolitical challenges, such as an increasingly aggressive China and democratic backsliding in the western world. Recent developments, however, show that President Biden’s goodwill is unlikely on its own to rejuvenate transatlantic ties. In late...
