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It is a recent tradition among occupants of the White House, as they head out of office, to play a few practical jokes on their successors. The Clinton administration jesters, for instance, removed all the Ws from White House keyboards before handing over the keys to George W. Bush’s transition...
Many experts argue India is the weaker power unable to take on China. In an article in Foreign Policy, James Crabtree argues that a trade war with China would be a bad idea for India. In his view, India’s “military is inefficient, underequipped, and dogged by procurement corruption...
As reported by Al Jazeera, China’s President Xi Jinping is seeking to realize the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony within the borders of Tibet. He has a threefold goal: Xi wants to “build an ‘impregnable fortress’ to maintain stability in Tibet, protect national unity and educate the...
On February 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid bare his long-awaited vision of a “global Britain” in a world after Brexit. Speaking amidst the imperial grandeur of Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Johnson’s message was that the United Kingdom, liberated from the...
From 1830 to 1895, the British and Russian Empires schemed and plotted over control of Central and South Asia. At the heart of the “Great Game” was the United Kingdom’s certainty that the Russians had designs on India. So, wars were fought, borders drawn and generations of young met death in...
For decades, the Chinese government has sold to the world the notion that the Chinese economy can defy gravity, maintaining double-digit GDP growth rates year after year in the 1990s and 2000s, and staying above 6% for all of the previous decade, according to official government statistics. The...
In 2016, Alan Lichtman departed from conventional wisdom to predict a Donald Trump victory in that year’s presidential election. The political scientist was following something he called the “13 keys to the White House.” Using this relatively straightforward metric, Lichtman had correctly...
With the 2020 US election approaching, the Republicans, led by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appear to have decided that there are only two issues worth pursuing. The first, which they hope the American public will swallow, would be the visibly diminished...
Anthropogenic climate change and the unprecedented shift in the global center of economic gravity from West to East represent two of the most profound macrotrends set to transform the geopolitical landscape in the 21st century. Indeed, as Asia’s emerging powerhouses, notably China, with its...
China has for the first time taken the top position in the Nature Index as the biggest producer of high-quality research in chemistry. What will the future of China science look like? Quantum physics may be science on an impossibly small scale, but it is one field where China is staking a...
Chinese and Indian forces have pulled back from their confrontation in the Himalayas, but the tensions that set off the deadly encounter this past June — the first on the China-India border since 1975 — are not going away. Indeed, a poisonous combination of local disputes, regional antagonisms...
