Asia

Detecting, identifying, and tracking ships at sea are among the most fundamental intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) tasks that any country must perform if it wants to exert control over a maritime area—a goal China has long sought to...

Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide’s summit with U.S. President Joseph Biden was awaited with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety in at least four capitals: Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, and Taipei. Both the United States and Japan have concerns about...

The relative importance of the factors that drive Malaysian foreign policy has long been opaque. Historically, decisions have been made within a small coterie of senior officials and without much debate or discussion of their policy options in civil...

Future historians may well consider President Joseph Biden’s recent comments on China as a pivotal moment in the history of American foreign policy. It was not long ago—early in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary process—that Biden dismissed the idea...

Every March, nearly 5,000 delegates descend on Beijing for the meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political and Consultative Conference (CPPCC), generally simply referred to as the lianghui, or two meetings. The NPC,...

Oil has long dominated concerns about energy security because oil products have fueled nearly all of the world’s transportation for over a century. But that may be changing as vehicles powered by electric motors have become competitive with those...

The declassification of the U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific in the waning days of the Trump administration stated forthrightly America’s intention to align its Indo-Pacific strategy with those of Australia, India, and Japan by “aim to create a...

For most of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the sea was the path over which foreign foes reached China, a fact not lost on Chinese naval strategists. In the 1980s, with the advent of...

Only days after his inauguration on January 20, President Joseph Biden faced one of his first foreign policy tests in the Indo-Pacific. On January 23-24, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent over 15 aircraft into the southwestern part of...

Many naval theorists have heralded the end of the aircraft-carrier era. They argue that the advent of pervasive sensors and precision-guided munitions would overcome improvements in ship-based defenses to render the aircraft carrier (and perhaps most large surface combatants)...