Asia

  In the context of yesterday's article in The Australian that China was being invited to America's biggest annual Pacific naval exercise, RIMPAC (which wasn't really news), it is useful to be reminded of the climate of wariness and mistrust in which such invitations are extended. 

Yesterday we posted some beautiful images and trenchant commentary from our regular Pakistan-based contributor, Alicia Mollaun, which I encourage you to check out if you haven't already. We'll have another dispatch from Alicia soon from the Pakistan-India border, but above and below are a

Glorious! More such food-themed travel videos here. (H/t Kottke

The second anniversary of the Syrian civil war is looming and the political and military situation remains deadlocked. The Assad regime's superiority in conventional weapons has meant that, while government forces have ceded ground, they have denied the rebel groups control over any of the main

Chris Williams writes: I need to challenge your China linkage reporter for 29 January for drawing the headline directly from the Bangkok Post source article, 'China will train the Cambodian army, a move likely to rattle its ASEAN neighbours'. The headline was intended to cater to an internal

I'm sorry to spring this disturbing trailer on readers as you wind down for the weekend (a long weekend in Australia), but this film looks too astonishing not to share. Here's part of the synopsis: When Sukarno was overthrown by Suharto following the tragic 30 September Movement in 1965,

One of my favourite online distractions, ArchDaily, yesterday posted a photo spread on Gibraltar's glorious new airport. This got me thinking about the two-decade debate over a second Sydney airport, which everyone except the owners of the existing airport seems to agree is necessary. Problem is,

Interpreter alumnus Andrew Carr does sterling work on Twitter today, drily recounting Gerard Henderson's 'scoop' in the SMH: Here are the opening two paragraphs of Henderson's column, which Andrew refers to: The fashionable left-wing view of former president George W. Bush is he invaded

Matthew Linley is an Assistant Professor at Temple University, Japan. The past few months have seen a number of problems in the Japan-China relationship. Numerous commentators cite the dispute over the Senkaku Islands and the re-election of Shinzo Abe as prime minister as reasons to predict a

Last week's floods in Jakarta illustrate that the private sector can provide valuable public goods, available free of charge to just about anyone. If you wanted to see how hard it was to get around the city, a free web link (lewatmana.com) gave access to real-time cameras at various strategic

Luke Maynard writes: Hugh White's final blog post of 2012 was characteristic in its effort to sketch the boundaries of Asia's strategic future while remaining firmly rooted in modern realities. In it, White draws parallels between his vision for order in this region with that described by Kevin

You may have heard by now that UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is cutting short his Australia visit because of the hostage crisis in Algeria (Prime Minister Cameron, too, is changing his plans; the important speech on the eurozone that Mark Thirlwell referred to in his post yesterday has been

Professor Wadan Narsey is an Adjunct Professor at The Cairns Institute. The Fiji regime's clear breach of its own decrees and roadmap to democracy, as described in my previous post, has unsettled traditional donors and must also create serious question marks over the continuing support by China

Peter McCawley is a Visiting Fellow at the Indonesia Project, ANU, and former Dean of the Asia Development Bank Institute, Tokyo. During the first decade of this century we heard a lot about the economic role of China and India but very little about Indonesia. For close to ten years following

From Fred Kaplan's latest column: ...at the end of 2009, Obama sent an additional 33,000 troops to Afghanistan, a surge of nearly 50 percent above the 68,000 already there—and that he did so not to go after bin Laden and al-Qaida (a task that could have been handled with far fewer forces) but

Danielle Rajendram is a Research Associate in the Lowy Institute's International Security Program whose work focuses on India and China-India relations. The gang-rape protests in New Delhi continue to dominate the Indian media. My picks for some of the best reading on the larger problems women

James Brown's post about the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Obama's new Defense Secretary focuses on his views about the Asia 'pivot', but perhaps those views won't matter very much in comparison to the stance Hagel takes on US defence spending overall. President Obama has said that an

This morning's announcement of Chuck Hagel as President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense elicited predictable outrage over Hagel's judgment on Israel. Congressional majority leader Eric Cantor issued a statement concluding, 'Senator Chuck Hagel is the wrong man for the job at such a