Analysis

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, is expected to publicly launch a digital version of the yuan as soon as late 2020. The project is being fast-tracked, partly in response to Facebook’s Libra and the COVID-19...

On August 18, Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was overthrown in a coup d’etat led by breakaway elements of the Malian Armed Forces. The United Nations (UN) swiftly condemned the coup, and the Economic Community of West African States...

International relations is going soft, with countries from India to Qatar to Turkey opting for soft power persuasion over hard power pressure. Soft power collectively refers to the tools in a nation-state’s arsenal that do not punish, reward, or...

Channeling President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, President of the Czech Senate Miloš Vystrčil said, “I am Taiwanese,” to a standing ovation in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan on September 1 to show his support for...

Over the past two months, the very public rivalry between China and Taiwan has moved into the Horn of Africa over representation in unrecognized Somaliland. On July 1, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it had signed a...

Five years on from its intervention in Syria, Russia presents a different and more formidable set of challenges for the West. Western policymakers will need to get used to the idea that Russia is intent on establishing itself as...

On August 15, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that he would look into the possibility of granting a pardon to Edward Snowden, the former contract employee for the National Security Agency (NSA) who “perpetrated the largest and most damaging...

Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement. That raised concerns among U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific as to whether the new American president was intent on further retrenchment...

It is no secret that Moscow is increasingly utilizing so-called “private military contractors” (PMCs) to pursue foreign policy objectives across the globe, especially in the Middle East and Africa. What has received less attention is that Moscow’s deployment of...

The United States is struggling to define its Syria policy and is not yet fully grappling with how the battlefield has changed since Turkey’s invasion in October 2019. With so few troops on the ground, Washington does not have...