United States
Saudi Arabia and China: a blossoming friendship
As the relationship between longtime allies Saudi Arabia and the United States becomes increasingly strained, China could cultivate a stronger bond with the Middle Eastern kingdom…
Iran applies its own maximum pressure in nuclear talks
Negotiations in Vienna to revive the Iran nuclear deal have dragged on through nearly a dozen rounds for more than a year now. The Biden administration’s hopes for a quick…
Understanding the rise of Trump – and how it might happen again
Book Review: Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History, by Lawrence R. Jacobs (Oxford University Press 2022)
Joe Biden demonstrated in the 2020…
Vietnam’s “Four No’s” of defence policy are being tested
Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February, there has been ongoing controversy over the response by the Vietnamese government, which has refrained from naming Russian…
AUKUS can be a good platform for cooperation with India
Someone famous once reputedly quipped “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” So there is a certain echo to the AUKUS arrangement, which brings together Australia,…
Madeleine Albright: “I have come a long way, so I must be frank”
The essence of diplomacy is communication. Madeleine Albright excelled at delivering a message. And as a woman of firsts, she encountered the all-too-typical obstacles of a male…
Economic diplomacy: Cryptocurrency (quietly) joins a new world order
Fence-sitting
Right from the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov has walked both sides of the new global divide over digital…
Zelensky’s direct plea to America
Is it possible for the United States to be both righteous defender of Ukraine’s right to self-determination and prudent decisionmaker? The combination of an experienced president…
Waiting for North Korea to escalate
After North Korea conducted a spate of missile tests in January, it was argued that the country had ended its self-imposed 2018 moratorium on testing intercontinental ballistic…
The Gulf’s diversification dilemma
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had posed difficult questions for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and exposed the costs of pursuing a more diversified series of diplomatic,…