After seven long years, the Indian government has decided that the time has come to once again make its presence felt in Iraq by naming an envoy to the country. The previous ambassador to Iraq was withdrawn in 2004 as the security situation in the country spiraled out of control. Even after the situation in Iraq had stabilized, with largely peaceful elections last year and the U.S. decision to withdraw its forces completely by the end of this year, New Delhi took its time to come to terms with the rapidly changing realities on the ground. After all, when it […]

BEIJING — Following a period of considerable success and strategic evolution, China’s foreign policy has been marked by a less coherent and less constructive approach to international relations over the past year. Nowhere has this shift been more pronounced than on the Asian littoral, a key arena in the country’s international rise, where China’s opaque naval expansion and increasingly abrasive behavior have begun to undermine previous strategic gains. China’s naval modernization is part of an ongoing force-wide attempt to enhance national military capabilities, particularly in nonconventional warfare and peacetime operations. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) also has a stated […]

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on the G-20. Part I examined efforts to rebalance the global economy. Part II examines efforts to reform the global monetary system. Leading up to and throughout the G-20 finance ministers meeting last weekend, murmurs were heard about the role of the dollar and the need to reform the global monetary system. This is nothing new, of course, as a variety of major economies have expressed an interest in demoting the dollar since the global financial crisis broke out in 2008. The most recent examples came from Brazil and China, […]

The decline of the American “empire” has been a persistent theme of the punditocracy these past several years, with the underlying logic being Washington’s inability to extend, ad infinitum, the primacy seemingly conferred upon it at Cold War’s end. The global financial crisis has now further revealed a suddenly — and stunningly — rebalanced global order, and as a result, Americans are supposed to dread the vast uncertainties of our allegedly “post-American world.” Worse, Americans are also being presented with a patently false binary choice: Should the U.S. do what is necessary to regain its primacy or simply let it […]

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on the G-20. Part I examines efforts to rebalance the global economy. Part II will appear tomorrow and will examine efforts to reform the global monetary system. Over the weekend, G-20 finance ministers met in Paris to discuss steps on how to address persistent global current account imbalances that some fear could send the global economy back into recession. From the outset, the meetings reinforced what we already know about the group: Preferences among the members are incredibly diverse, making progress toward cooperation painfully slow. This is exacerbated by the […]

Naval power is characterized by fungibility and flexibility. Because of the relatively open nature of the seas, ships and fleets can be transferred between ports and crisis zones in order to conduct operations or exert influence. Indeed, one of the key appeals of naval power is the ability of warships to respond to crises in a variety of locations without requiring a longstanding political and infrastructural commitment. However, of all the major naval powers, Russia remains most tightly constrained by its unfortunate maritime geography. Russian warships based in the Arctic, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific cannot easily support one another. […]

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series examining Ecuador under President Rafael Correa. Part I examined Correa’s domestic policy. Part II examines his foreign policy. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s radical “Citizen’s Revolution” has surprisingly translated into a foreign policy marked by pragmatism. Some of his moves — such as embracing China, Russia and Iran — have raised eyebrows, while others, such as the forced restructuring of Ecuador’s foreign debt, have prompted some foreign investors to question the wisdom of making long-term investments in the country. But his administration has also restored full diplomatic and commercial ties with […]

Brazil has profited handsomely over the past decade from its economic relationship with China. Exports to the People’s Republic have shot up nearly 20-fold since 2000, and last year alone, Brazil enjoyed a bilateral trade surplus of $5.2 billion, largely thanks to China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for iron ore and soybeans. In 2009, China supplanted the United States to become Brazil’s biggest trade partner, an arrangement that allowed Brazil to skirt the global recession by insulating it from the precipitous drop in exports that most other Latin American countries suffered. The relationship is not likely to change in the near […]

Chinatowns’ Avant-Garde in Northern Iraq

About 500 Chinese people are said to live in Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan’s second city. Many work in the new Kawa Mall where Chinese flags, lucky cats and paper lanterns present an incongruous scene on the Kurdish landscape. Such immigration and foreign investment is becoming more prominent in the semi-autonomous area run by the Kurdistan Regional Government.

For the third year running, China’s upcoming National People’s Congress will be dominated by political maneuvering and speculation over the 2012 leadership transition. With jockeying for post-2012 power an increasing focus of attention, the outgoing Hu-Wen administration has lost influence, effectively putting the government on lockdown at a time of critical economic and social change. As a result, Beijing has opted to flood the economy with new credit rather than engage necessary structural reforms, creating an increasing disparity between the country’s halting social progress and the image portrayed in government propaganda. Since Deng Xiaoping’s oft-cited instruction that China’s process of […]

India, EU Focus on Africa

A few news items highlight a point I’ve been periodically raising over the past year, namely that Africa, as the region of the world with the most strategic upside, deserves more and better-conceived U.S. attention. We already know about China’s strategic inroads into Africa’s resource and infrastructure markets. That has driven what is to my mind perhaps the most under-appreciated story of the past few years: India’s push to play catch-up in Africa. That has taken the form of investments in resources and manufacturing infrastructure, but also mobile phone markets and consumer goods. At the same time, the European Commission, […]

While there remains a ton of things that can go wrong with the unfolding revolution in Egypt, there’s a strong case to be made that America, despite its low popular standing there, has been handed a gift horse whose mouth, as the axiom puts it, is best left unexamined. Because most of America’s concerns center on security issues, I’ll frame the argument for why this is the case in tactical, operational and strategic terms, and then finish on the most relevant grand strategic note — namely, the new Axis of Good that may result. Concerning President Hosni Mubarak’s conditional offer […]

Global Insider: China-Argentina Trade Relations

China and Argentina recently signed a round of agricultural trade agreements. In an e-mail interview, R. Evan Ellis, an assistant professor at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies of the National Defense University and author of “China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores,” discussed China-Argentina trade relations. WPR: What is the current state of trade relations between Argentina and China? R. Evan Ellis: Argentina is running a trade surplus with China, driven by the export of soy products. Yet Argentine manufacturing interests are being undercut by Chinese companies that sell ever-more goods in the country, beginning with toys, footwear […]