Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States was extremely short on substance. It was really just a public relations exercise for both sides aimed at audiences back home. And as for building rapport between leaders, by nature, the visit was bound to come up short. President Obama …
According to Associated Press reports today, the Philippine military has killed Southeast Asia’s most-wanted terrorist on Thursday. With U.S. support, two OV-10 aircraft bombed a terrorist stronghold, comprising militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). When the dust settled, Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir, known by …
In a secret NATO report recently leaked to the British media, Taliban insurgents told their interrogators that they are increasingly confident that the Taliban will retake power once NATO forces depart Afghanistan, and that Pakistan is positioning itself for such an outcome. NATO officials have sought to downplay the report’s …
President Obama publicly admitted Monday for the first time that the U.S. is conducting an aggressive drone missile campaign against terrorists predominantly located in Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. U.S. officials in the past have been tight-lipped about drones, partly out of deference to Pakistani officials, who are sensitive about …
With the election of Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan has once again demonstrated the maturity of its political processes. The successful conduct of Taiwan’s democratic elections reminds us that Taiwan is part of the growing group of states capable of undertaking peaceful elections as the means of effecting political transition and change. …
The British newspaper The Guardian has reported that the U.S. has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantanamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office in Qatar. If true, this would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is dangerously naïve about the …
Real life can never give social scientists the kind of laboratory-quality tests that natural scientists can create, but sometimes it comes close. Since the two Koreas–North and South–are virtually identical culturally, it would appear that the different political systems explain the outcome illustrated by the figure below, which comes from last …
Chinese officials have recently been discussing the possibility of establishing a naval facility in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. Unlike the comments made by Chinese Rear Admiral Yin Zhuo last year when he raised the prospect of China establishing overseas naval bases, however, these comments appear to be …
The reaction of bloggers in two remaining communist dictatorships to the recent deaths of pro-freedom crusader Vaclav Havel and his polar opposite, North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il, tells you all you need to know about why communists can’t hold elections. In the restricted cyberspace afforded to Chinese and Cubans …
A federal court this week barred the simultaneous application of anti-dumping and countervailing duties to imports from China, a practice begun by the Department of Commerce in 2007. Commerce has rightly classified China a “non-market economy” for purposes of applying anti-dumping duties against goods sold in the U.S. at below-market …
