China & Taiwan

When Beijing dispatched a relatively unknown rear admiral from its National Defense University to the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, bypassing its own defense minister and forfeiting its plenary address, it did more than snub Asia’s premier security forum. It signaled...

Since President Lai Ching-te was inaugurated in May 2024, Taiwan’s domestic politics have been in relative turmoil. Large-scale protests, the incarceration of Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) leader Ko Wen-je on corruption charges, and an unprecedented recall election targeting thirty-one...

A year of sustained losses has left Iran’s grand strategy in ruins. The near destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the evisceration of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria deprived Iran of...

The multi-state dispute in the South China Sea has enveloped the region for decades, with no signs of abating. Much of the media attention on the region has recently focused on coercion and aggression conducted by the People’s Republic...

Executive Summary  In 2015, a new space race began. Blue Origin, a privately owned company, landed a booster on a launch pad back on earth, after lifting an object 100 kilometers into the atmosphere. SpaceX quickly followed suit, landing its own Falcon booster back on a pad for use again for later space...

Introduction While international attention often centers on China’s latest foundation models or its constrained access to high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chips, these headlines obscure the broader architecture of China’s AI strategy. China is pursuing a dual-track approach that combines...

Cyber operations are now a defining feature of modern warfare, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated—and China is taking note. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has served as a testing ground for the integration of emerging technologies...

Introduction The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China announced that their friendship had “no limits” and “no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation” in 2022. That summit between President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping...

For a document intended to carefully outline relations with a key US partner while navigating a region’s complex history and geopolitical realities, eight pages seem brief. Enacted in 1979 in response to the US switch in recognition from the...

China has been a major investor and trade partner in Central Asia for some twenty-five years. For the first half of those years, Beijing was focused on oil and natural gas pipelines and roads and railways to bring energy...