The climate change conference starting in Cancun Monday is doomed to failure. Many factors contribute to this, such as a healthy skepticism about how much should be spent to remediate climate change, but one alone guarantees failure: Chinese coal production and policy. When climate change soared up the American agenda …
Following reports of an alleged blockage of shipments of rare earth minerals from China to the U.S. and Europe, Congressman Edward Markey (D–MA) turned to the Obama Administration for clarification and to express his concern. In a letter to the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce, as well as the …
The NATO summit to be held in Lisbon on Nov. 19–20 has a hefty agenda in which Russia features prominently. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is defining its role in Afghanistan; is seeking agreement on joint missile defense; and is hosting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The Lisbon NATO summit is …
The report today from the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission is chilling but not terribly surprising. According to the commission (pages 243–44): For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese …
In sharp contrast to this year’s Pentagon report on Chinese military power, this year’s report from Congress’s U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission includes a number of startling revelations. Perhaps the most notable is the report that the Chinese diverted 15 percent of global Internet traffic to Chinese servers at …
The Conference Board, a global research association, made a splash with their 2011 global outlook. The group’s most interesting claims are that emerging markets will drive “global growth” and that China could pass the U.S. on one measure of economic size as early as 2012. The Conference Board is making …
AFP reported late last week that Sprint Nextel will not consider bids from two Chinese companies for large telecom contracts due to national security concerns expressed to Sprint Nextel by the American government. This is probably the right outcome, but it is the wrong way to achieve that outcome. One …
The decision by the United States to delayl military exercises in the Yellow Sea in order to placate “neighboring countries,” i.e., China, prior to the G-20 summit in the Republic of Korea (ROK) marks the latest in a series of ill-considered, costly concessions Washington has made toward China. A high-level …
This week’s encouraging news—that the U.S. affirmed its security commitment to Japan under the 1960 bilateral defense treaty—sends exactly the right signal to China: that the U.S. will push back on Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the region. Most notably, Washington went far beyond long-standing ambiguous diplomatic statements to publicly state …