The American political discourse is rife with fear-threat reactions regarding rising China, embodied most saliently in the Obama administration’s strategic pivot to East Asia and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s repeated promise to hold “currency manipulator” China responsible for its economic sabotage of the U.S. economy. Eagerly cashing in on the hype, last week’s Economist greeted us with the most lurid of covers heralding — yet again! — “the rise of state capitalism.” We are immediately informed by the subtitle that this is “the emerging world’s new model.” Sad to say, this is the state of strategic thinking in the […]

Globalization’s historical expansion from Europe to North America to Asia has featured a familiar dynamic: The last region “in” becomes the integrator of note for the next region “up.” Europe was the primary investor, customer and integrator for the U.S. economy in its rise during the 19th and 20th centuries, and America subsequently “paid it forward” with East Asia in the decades following World War II. Recently, it has been Asia’s turn, primarily through China, to pay it forward once again with Africa, arguably the hottest integration zone in the global economy today. Nonetheless, in Washington — and especially inside […]

Taiwan’s Tight Presidential Race Closely Watched by an Anxious Region

Taiwanese voters will head to the polls on Jan. 14 to cast their ballots in a close presidential race that has focused largely on how to address relations with China, which claims Taiwan as a province. Ma Ying-jeou, the incumbent and chairman of the Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party, has worked to strengthen ties across the Taiwan Strait. With James Soong, a candidate who trails a distant third, expected to bleed off some potential Kuomintang support, Ma is neck-and-neck with Tsai Ing-wen, the opposition candidate whose Democratic Progressive Party favors independence from the mainland. Expanding beyond the media focus on […]

Faced with irreversible long-term fiscal pressures to reduce the U.S. defense budget, late last week the Obama administration began unveiling its supremely focused rationale behind future cuts. The result is an elegantly slim strategic statement (.pdf) that indirectly names its deepest fear in its title: “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.” According to the document, over the past decade the U.S. military force structure has been “by necessity” dangerously skewed by “today’s wars.” Now America must start “preparing for future challenges” arising from a frightening and apparently imminent “inflection point” in East Asia’s military balance of power. […]

China’s New Foray into U.S. Energy Market Shows Evolving Strategy

News arrived this week that the second-largest oil company in China has agreed to pay $900 million, and contribute as much as $1.6 billion to future drilling costs, for a one-third stake in five American exploratory oil projects. The foray into American energy investment, the first by China Petrochemical Corp., known as Sinopec, comes in the form of a partnership with Oklahoma-based Devon Energy Corp. to develop shale reserves. “It’s a marriage of convenience and opportunity,” said Clayton Dube, associate director of the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute. “This is further evidence of Chinese firms and the Chinese state […]

According to an unnamed administration official cited by the Atlantic’s Steve Clemons this week, Vice President Joe Biden has been tasked by the White House with overseeing U.S.-China relations. As such, Biden will work directly with his Chinese counterpart, Vice President Xi Jinping, who is currently responsible for the Chinese side of the strategic dialogue between Beijing and Washington, but is widely expected to succeed to the Chinese presidency later this year. As Clemons concluded, the move reflects the Obama administration’s assessment that the “management of U.S.-China policy has become so central to a vast array of other policy challenges […]

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex sustained the massive Soviet military institution, which regularly gobbled up 15-25 percent of the nation’s GDP. In an odd and unexpected twist to the end of the Cold War, the Russian arms industry has turned to sustaining itself by arming a pair of Asian giants: Arms exports to China and India have proven lucrative for Russia — and have even had a synergistic and competitive quality. The unease each country has felt due to the other increasing its military capability has led to higher revenues for Rosoboronexport, the Russian state-owned arms […]

U.S., China Meet on North Korea

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell met with his counterparts in China on Jan. 4 to discuss the situation in North Korea. The two discussed the maintenance of peace and stability in the country in the wake of the recent leadership change, as well as food aid and a possible resumption of talks over North Korea’s nuclear disarmament, according to Campbell. World News Videos by NewsLook