In his Jan. 13 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson made an extraordinary comment concerning China’s activities in the hotly disputed South China Sea. The United States, he said, must "send a clear signal...
Just into his fourth month as head of state, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has managed to become one of the most controversial actors on the global stage, rivaling if not eclipsing Donald Trump. Not least there's his war on drugs at home, which has...
A combination of recent events, underpinned by long-running historical strains reaching back more than 60 years, has turned the western Pacific into one of the most hazardous spots on the globe. The tension between China and the United States "is one of the most...
It has not been a good month for China. On July 12, an international court of arbitration at The Hague handed the Philippines a huge victory over China in the struggle over the South China Sea. A few days before that, South Korea decided to go forward with the...
The Philippines would seem to have won a major victory against China in a recent international court ruling in the Hague, which voided Chinese claims to parts of the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. In a major rebuke of...
Two recent close encounters between US spy planes and Chinese jets spell trouble for relations between Washington and Beijing. The first, between a US EP-3 spy plane and two Chinese jets over the South China Sea (SCS) near China’s Hainan Island, was strikingly similar...
International reports about the recent election in the Philippines invariably refer to its result as a "political earthquake." The metaphor is accurate. A year ago, few believed that Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao, would be the next president of the Philippines....
The final of the World Snooker Championship took place this week in Sheffield, the hardscrabble town in England’s north perhaps best known as the setting for the movie The Full Monte. Sheffield is a former industrial center so snookered by globalization that the...
by Louis Kriesberg In the eighth year of Barack Obama’s presidency the struggle over assessing the correctness of his foreign policy is understandably under way. Unfortunately, too often the struggle is waged in extreme, ill-founded terms. Many Republican leaders and...
President Obama did not distinguish himself as a statesman during Chinese President Xi Jinping's recently concluded state visit. Nor did he do any better with President Vladimir Putin when they sparred a few days later at the UN General Assembly. China and the United...