A nation must think before it acts.
Asia
North Korea’s ICBM Test, Byungjin, and the Economic Logic
The Diplomat On Tuesday July 4, North Korean television announced that the country had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) earlier in the day. As per the Wall Street Journal: The missile, identified as the Hwasong-14, was launched at a...
Read more »
Time for Decisions on North Korea
This briefing argues that the United States should attempt to engage Russia as a potential broker of negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Russia’s ascension to a more prominent role in North Korean affairs is long overdue,...
Read more »Vietnam-U.S. Relations: An Unparalleled History
Abstract This article critically assesses how Vietnam-U.S. relations have evolved over the 42 years since Vietnam’s reunification in 1975. By dividing the development of Vietnam-U.S. relations into three main phases—1975-2000, 2001-2008, and 2009-the present—it analyzes the steps taken by...
Read more »
Deterring China in the “Gray Zone”: Lessons of the South China Sea for U.S. Alliances
Abstract If facing down a hostile actor in the “gray zone” is hard for a single actor, such as the United States, it is doubly hard for an alliance composed of actors with disparate capabilities, interests, and political fortitude....
Read more »There is no Thucydides Trap
SupChina Book review: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, by Graham Allison (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017) Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of...
Read more »Nations must stand up for Taiwan
Taipei Times Since Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) election as the president of Taiwan in January last year and her inauguration in May that year, the People’s Republic of China has increasingly worked to push Taiwan onto the sidelines of international...
Read more »Was Vietnam Winnable?
The New York Times My interest in the Vietnam War began in the early 1990s, when I took a college course on the history of the conflict. Part of what drew me to the subject was the visceral contempt...
Read more »UN: 10 Million Face Food Insecurity in North Korea. What Does That Really Mean?
The Diplomat A new report published by the World Food Program and other UN institutions, detailing food insecurity in the world in 2016 as a whole, says the following about the situation in North Korea: 4.4 million (or 17 percent...
Read more »No Pyrotechnics, No Progress
Comparative Connections Though free of the large-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations and acerbic exchanges that have characterized the recent past, the cold peace between China and Japan continued in the early months of 2017. There were no meetings of high-level officials,...
Read more »North Korea’s Dependence on China Is a Problem—for Pyongyang
World Politics Review out what China might be doing, saying and thinking about North Korea. Observers looks for signs in Chinese state media that Beijing might finally cut Pyongyang off financially and politically. They scrutinize shipping traffic to parse...
Read more »