Day: February 19, 2022

If you would like to receive South Asia Brief in your inbox every Thursday, please sign up here . The highlights this week: U.S. President Joe Biden’s executive order on frozen Afghan central bank assets helps the Taliban, state elections get underway in India —with a potential shake-up in Punjab, […]

Southeast Asian countries, particularly Thailand, are important suppliers of raw goods, such as rubber and electrical parts, which are vital to China’s construction and auto industries. In agriculture, Vietnam and Myanmar accounted for more than half of China’s rice imports in 2020, and Thailand is a major supplier of raw […]

This time, however, the link between the Ukraine crisis and strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific goes beyond the sometimes amorphous question of prestige and credibility. It is more fundamentally a question of strategy. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi blew a big hole in the Asia First argument when […]

This puts the United States in a serious bind. If Washington expects to convey a credible deterrent against a Russian invasion of Ukraine using financial and economic sanctions, it will need to signal its resolve to impose secondary sanctions against China in the same breath. The problem is that the […]

The United States remains the world’s leading power with global interests, and it cannot afford to choose between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Instead, Washington and its allies should develop a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating Russia and China at the same time. As Russia threatens the […]

Beijing’s challenge is that, unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan is a functionally independent state, separated from the mainland by a body of water, and Chinese authorities are not already present in Taiwan, as they were in Hong Kong. To overcome these obstacles, China thus must engineer a crisis that would compel […]