China & Taiwan

China’s Two Meetings and What They Mean for the United States

On the first Monday in March 2024, delegates—nearly 3,000 to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and over 2,000 to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—gathered in Beijing. With the exception of a handful of members of ethnic minorities in...

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From Protests to Prosecutions: A Tale of Modern Hong Kong

 “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.” The most famous line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” might fairly be applied to the fate of Hong Kong since 1997. China’s slow strangulation...

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The Realignment of the Middle East

    Executive Summary In the Middle East, reality can change in the blink of an eye. Misconceptions and misrepresentations that dominate the public discourse have it that the region has been embroiled in war since time immemorial. Still,...

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Indonesia’s Presidential Elections: Old Guard, New Guard, and TikTok

The biggest single-day election on the planet is taking place on February 14 in Indonesia. It is the world’s third-largest democracy, largest Muslim-majority country, and tenth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. About 206 million domestic voters and 1.5 million...

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China’s Challenge to the International Economic Order

The United States has led the international economic order for the last seventy-eight years, with only the Soviet Union posing a serious challenge. However, China is starting to pose a severe threat to the United States by trying to...

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Central Asia’s Middle Corridor Expansion: Opportunity for China and Iran

The sustained attacks on merchant shipping in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels since November 2023 have given a fresh boost to a budding Central Asian trade network known as the “Middle Corridor” and, in so doing,...

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Zimbabwe as a Growth Hub for Southern Africa

The Integrated Country Strategy for Zimbabwe (ICS Zimbabwe) declares that “Zimbabwe’s strategic importance to the United States is as a potential growth hub for southern Africa.” This is a remarkable conclusion to draw for a country that currently ranks...

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ASEAN’s Centrality in Southeast Asian Affairs: Miles to Go

In September 2023, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held its first ASEAN-only joint military exercise. Personnel from all ten of its member countries participated in five days of drills that practiced maritime patrols, search-and-rescue operations, and the...

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China’s Military-Civil Fusion Strategy: A Blueprint for Technological Superiority

In an effort to transform the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into the most technologically advanced military in the world, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is systematically reorganizing its science and technology sectors to ensure that new innovations simultaneously advance...

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Seoul Searching: Lessons from South Korea’s Experience with Sanctions against Russia

  Introduction Russia and the West have found themselves enmeshed in an expansive economic war as a result of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. While the conflict on...

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