Day: August 5, 2022

China is Saudi Arabia’s most important crude oil customer. Beijing buys about a quarter of Saudi oil exports, more than three times the U.S. share. The kingdom was the largest source of China’s oil imports in 2021, though this year it has been supplanted by Russian oil exporters seeking markets […]

That’s because one facet of Europe’s about-face on energy has been to diversify its gas supply with an aggressive push to secure long-term contracts in Africa. German officials have pressed Senegal for gas supplies, while Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, and others have reportedly been shopping for gas in Nigeria. Stalled […]

Wickremesinghe’s democratic mandate is questionable. During the 2020 parliamentary election , his United National Party secured only a single seat. Wickremesinghe lost his. Nonetheless, he wrangled his way back into the political arena when he was appointed prime minister by then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. It was Wickremesinghe’s sixth time holding the […]

The trip underscores fears in some circles in Washington that the “One China” policy—started in 1972 under then-President Richard Nixon, in which the United States recognizes only one government in China but maintains unofficial ties to Taiwan—is slowly being chipped away and that this risks sparking a new political crisis […]

The Taliban takeover in 2021 came after we had concluded writing our book Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire. But many of the trends and patterns we observed continued to hold. Although China has undeniably stepped into a far more prominent role than ever before, it has continued to hedge its bets […]

After speaking to former diplomats and scholars in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, as well as reading the literature of the new nonalignment, it’s become clear to me that the Western demand to close ranks on Ukraine did not provoke a backlash so much as crystallize ways of thinking […]