Asia-Pacific Archive

The Times reports that panicky American investors are repatriating their capital, and the Chinese haven’t hit the brakes on buying up American debt, either. That’s exacerbating the impact of the financial crisis globally by soaking up liquidity that could finance debt elsewhere. In other words, money is still flowing uphill, largely because high ground is safer when the water’s rising in the valley. But capital from emerging markets is increasingly flowing towards developed economies as well, where it is busy buying up assets. 2point6billion reports: A recent KPMG survey entitled – ‘Emerging Markets International Acquisition Tracker’points out that emerging-to-developed deals […]

I get the fact that the American merchant marine vessel mentioned in this WaPo article is probably the naval equivalent of a listening device. And I get the fact that the Chinese would want to harass it, even if it is in international waters. And I get the parallels to the U.S. airmen held at Hainan in the early months of the Bush administration. But this part, I don’t get: The Impeccable sprayed one ship with water from fire hoses to force itaway. Despite the force of the water, Chinese crew members stripped totheir underwear and continued closing within 25 […]

Remember the age of globalization, if you can. The world was flat. High finance was king. Swelling economic prosperity had lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Capitalism, in a variety of configurations, stretched from one end of the earth to the other. Even individual states were fading in importance, and the threat of a great-power war had all but come to an end. How quickly that utopia has been shattered. In short, the world is very much round again. Investment banking has collapsed. The global financial crisis is elbowing the poor aside. Corruption and rampant irresponsibility have resulted in […]

An Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit meeting concluded in Thailand on March 1 with a renewed consensus (.pdf) against protectionism and in support of free trade. In a rare moment of unity for the alliance’s 10 members, the ASEAN foreign ministers signed a free-trade agreement with Australia and New Zealand, while finance ministers of ASEAN Plus Three — China, Japan, and South Korea — expanded their emergency foreign currency fund from $80 billion to $120 billion. ASEAN’s anti-protectionist stance appears to be driven by concerns over exports to the United States, in light of President Barack Obama’s campaign promises […]

World Politics Review’s editor-in-chief and publisher, Hampton Stephens, appeared on Russia Today to discuss U.S.-Russia relations and the Clinton-Lavrov meeting. The interview can be found here.

If you’ve been following the “COIN will breed COIN” debate, check out these posts by Andrew Exum, Matthew Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman. If you haven’t, check them out anyway. It’s an interesting discussion of whether in makingCOIN a doctrinal focus of operations, the U.S. military will be tempted to intervene in counterinsurgencies of choice. It’s a subject I’ve written about often over the past 18 months. If anything has reassured me that my worries weren’t warranted, it’s been Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’ emphasis on “strategic balance.” Exum’s insistence that COIN practitioners are not necessarily COIN enthusiasts rings true, too. […]

I think Matthew Yglesias is significantly underestimating the degree to which the “rapid increase in our level of interest in Pakistan’s troubles” has led to a rapid increase in our less-than-well-informed meddling in Pakistan’s affairs. It’s not the interest per se, but the actions it generates, that lead to a “rapid escalation in the scale of the troubles.” Other than that, Yglesias’ observation is on target. Pakistan’s problems pre-dated our interest in them, and will in all likelihood survive it, too.

What are the two most pressing issues on the U.S. foreign policy agenda? Ask that question of 10 foreign policy mavens and nine will say Afghanistan and Iran. The other one will say Iran and Afghanistan. If the Obama administration manages to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and find a (lasting) solution to the vexing problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions over the next four years, it’s hard to imagine his first term won’t be deemed a smashing foreign policy success. It is against this background that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting today in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister […]

ADVOCATES CHEER AL-BASHIR WARRANT — Human rights groups from around the world cheered the issue of an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir by the Intenational Criminal Court to face charges of crimes against humanity. “The ICC represents the best hope for justice for the victims of Darfur,” Dismas Nkunda of the International Refugee Rights Initiative said in a statement released by the Justice for Darfur coalition. “The international community must ensure that Sudan complies with its obligation to cooperate with the ICC, including by handing over anyone subject to an arrest warrant.” Bashir has long been a […]

Setting aside the thorny question of legal sovereignty, here’s a thought that’s been percolating in my head over the past couple days: Does the lack of any local opposition, whether armed or otherwise, to the Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia lend any legitimacy to the de facto disaggregation of the two breakawy provinces? Granted, Russian forces had already been there for over a decade as peacekeepers, and the “invasion” was not accompanied by regime change. But at a time when both American counterinsurgency doctrine and American diplomacy is increasingly engaging on the local level in Iraq and […]

Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (ret.) weighs in on a discussion of “hybrid war” over at Small Wars Journal with a good point. Maybe it’s time to get back to the basics and just start calling armed conflicts between enemies “war” again. That reminds me of something French Gen. Vincent Desportes said (.pdf) about “asymmetric war,” namely that all war is asymmetric, because victory depends on playing to your strengths while capitalizing on your enemy’s weaknesses. More important at this point is to get a consensus on a good working definition of peace. That’s what will ultimately determine when we […]

For the IMF, the global economic downturn could not have come soon enough. Two years ago, the Fund’s lending portfolio was a scanty $13 billion, down from $100 billion in 2003. As Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Indonesia, and the Philippines each paid off their loans early, the institution’s revenue stream slowed to a trickle. Since the institution’s operating costs are financed by fees and interest charged on its loans, its shrinking portfolio resulted in annual losses between $200 and $300 million. Forced to find alternative sources of income and reduce costs, the fund initiated plans to sell off some of its […]

Even before the global financial crisis, I’d been pointing out the various possibilities for a globalization backlash. It seemed pretty likely that opposition to the enormous transfer of wealth from developed to developing countries would eventually be couched in regulatory concerns, whether social or environmental. The global downturn is likely to accelerate that process, and spread it to emerging-emerging commerce as well. As an illustration, India just relaxed a recent outright ban on Chinese toys, limiting it instead to products not covered by global certification agencies. That provides the necessary cover for now. But while all economists are voters, not […]

I had some vague thoughts swirling around the cranium, and a French word I ran across in some weekend reading helped crystallize them: s’immerger, which means to immerse oneself, but also to submerge oneself. The word corresponds to the English immerge, which I hadn’t realized existed. (That rumbling sound you hear is my Shakespearian-scholar and Greek- and Latin-speaking grandfather rolling over in his grave.) It immediately made me think of President Obama’s Camp Lejeune speech, which put the withdrawal from Iraq in the context of a regional diplomatic fabric. The same approach informs the regional approach to the Afghanistan War, […]

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A failure by donors to pay up on financial pledges has pushed the Khmer Rouge tribunal perilously close to the brink of bankruptcy and overshadowed a sensational start to the historic trial of Pol Pot’s surviving lieutenants. Court spokeswoman Helen Jarvis initially told World Politics Review that the tribunal could not make March payroll. This was followed by a hastily arranged press conference where international judges warned earlier this week that corruption remained a key obstacle. “The problems mentioned concerning funding can be resolved once the international community is confident of a corruption-free environment in which […]

When the Chinese first learned that two Russian coast guard ships had sunk a Chinese-owned freighter on Feb. 15 in the Pacific Ocean, the incident must have aroused conflicting feelings regarding their sometimes overbearing neighbor. The freighter, the New Star, was registered with Sierra Leone and was using that country’s flag of convenience. The Hong Kong-based J-Rui Lucky Shipping Company owned the vessel. Ten of the 16 crew members were Chinese citizens, while six were from Indonesia, including the captain. Of the eight who died when the ship sank 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the port of Nakhodka, seven were […]

The Washington foreign policy community has a hot new buzzword: “Af-Pak,” an amalgamation of Afghanistan and Pakistan meant to denote the ongoing “two-front war” that Islamist militants are currently waging in both countries. Perhaps it is fitting that one of the most impenetrable foreign policy challenges of our time is symbolized by yet another impenetrable acronym. Not content to leave the field to the Bush administration’s clunky and ill-defined “GWOT” — that is, the “Global War on Terror” — the Obama administration has apparently adopted “Af-Pak” (or its variants, “Afpak” and “AFPAK”) as the acronym that will define a significant […]