Publications

Discussion of the United States’ relations with China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong can be framed as an issue of nationalism and national humiliation. Taiwan and Hong Kong are and have been crucial symbols of China’s emergence as a strong...

My book The Much Too Promised Land had a very strange origin in the sense that I really never intended to write it. I “resigned” from the State Department in January 2003. Only two secretaries of state in the...

Over the past half decade, the decline in the dollar’s value against all major foreign currencies and the concurrent rise in oil prices have put the American economy on a precarious footing. Despite the danger, changes in financial and...

Abstract: When individuals and populations of organisms face resource scarcity, they respond in various ways: by substituting other resources, by expanding or changing geographic range, or by finding ways to compete more successfully for the resources. Humans have also...

Pennsylvania’s President James Buchanan rode to the White House on the strength of an unprecedented economic boom. Since 1846, U.S. markets had been boosted by Britain’s embrace of free trade, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, railroad and...

Israel remains a focal point of world attention, as it has been since its birth. The state’s origins do much to explain why the Arab-Israeli conflict has been so hard to resolve, but also provide a glimpse of the...

No bombs need fall from the sky. Yet damage can be inflicted on the United States through market manipulation that would be as costly to recover from as any conventional attack. The threat of financial and commodity market manipulation...

China’s Early Encounters with the West: A history in reverse Andrew Wilson of the U.S. Naval War College explained how the image of a weak backward China adrift in a modern world, bullied by Western powers, dominates China’s historical...

I am going to look at the history of China’s encounters with the West in reverse order, beginning with the more familiar storyline of China as a weak and battered power in the modern era and closing with a...

I want to talk about rising China and the United States. To start with a couple obvious points about the rise of Chinese power in the twenty-first century, the most obvious is that we are talking about a resurrection...