The traditional understanding of China’s civil-military relations is that the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was historically symbiotic, without functional differentiation or institutional boundaries based on technical specialization. This kind of symbiosis, according to political scientists Amos Perlmutter and William LeoGrande, can be attributed to the legacy of the communists’ guerrilla war in China, which was “a form of politico-military combat in which the fusion of political and military elites is virtually inevitable, and in which the governing of liberated territories is a function performed largely by the guerrilla army itself.” Also […]

Australia last sat on the Security Council in 1985-1986, and there was no great enthusiasm when the current Labor government announced it would seek one of the council’s rotating, nonpermanent seats for the current period. The opposition and much of the media claimed it would involve unnecessary expense, require concessions on policy to win over uncommitted votes and be unlikely to succeed. In something of a geographic absurdity, Australia has to compete with Western European states for a Security Council seat, and Finland and Luxembourg were already vying for the 2013-2014 seats at the time Australia tossed its hat into […]

Guess who: I’m a G-20 country, ranked 25th out of 139 countries for macroeconomic stability. I’ve got the world’s 16th-largest economy, and analysts think I could crack the top seven by 2030. I’ve averaged 4-6 percent GDP growth over the past decade despite the global economic crisis, and I’ve got the demographics to keep this all on track. If you guessed Indonesia, you’d be right. With stats like these and a population of 240 million to boot, it’s little wonder that corporate executives and governments the world over have begun to take a closer look at the opportunities on offer […]

Friday’s ministerial meeting in Almaty, Kazakhstan, of the Istanbul Process will bring together representatives of 14 regional countries and 16 others to discuss efforts to stabilize Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2014 withdrawal of Western forces from the country. As the drawdown nears, regional powers are growing increasingly worried. Russia, India, Pakistan and China recognize that the departure of Western forces could allow a resurgence of the Taliban, threatening Afghanistan’s economic and political development and spreading ripples of insecurity throughout the region. Unfortunately, the Istanbul Process is focused on vague confidence-building measures, rather than concrete proposals for Afghan reconciliation. […]

The Obama administration’s response to the steady drumbeat of threats issuing from North Korea in recent weeks could not have been clearer. “The United States will, if needed, defend our allies and defend ourselves,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said during his April 12 visit to South Korea. The American F-22 stealth fighter jets and nuclear-capable B-2 bombers that flew drills over South Korea in March and the two missile-defense ships that sidled up to South Korea earlier this month undoubtedly sent the same message. As a crisis management policy, that message was exactly right. As a strategic signal […]

The International Energy Agency, an organization comprising 28 industrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) aimed among other things at preserving global energy security, is reportedly seeking to expand energy cooperation with emerging powers. In an email interview, Thijs Van de Graaf, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ghent Institute for International Studies specializing in global energy politics and international institutions, explained the IEA’s expansion drive and its likely effects. WPR: What is motivating the IEA’s push to form an “association” with emerging economies for the first time in its 40-year history? Van de Graaf: When […]

For at least the past decade, China has witnessed tens of thousands of mass social protests per year. In 2005, the last year in which Chinese authorities released figures, there were 87,000 such protests. Scholars and observers have estimated that roughly the same number has occurred in each subsequent year. These protests have been the subject of a great deal of media coverage in the West, with the typical takeaway being that China is a simmering cauldron of unrest, perpetually on the verge of bubbling over. Yet the reality is far more complex. Since 1990, almost none of these movements […]

Under North Korea’s former dictator Kim Jong Il, crises followed a well-choreographed pattern. There would be provocation and sometimes outright aggression accompanied by paranoid, hostile and even hysterical rhetoric from Pyongyang. Eventually Kim would be mollified by some diplomatic concession or more assistance to keep the ramshackle North Korean economy from collapsing altogether, and things would return to normal — such as it was. However much this game frustrated the United States, Washington was fairly confident that it would not escalate into accidental war. Kim knew how far to push and when to back off. Unfortunately, the young Kim Jong […]

Over the weekend, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who is on a tour of Asia that ends tomorrow, met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in southern China. Pena Nieto’s trip is part of an effort to develop closer bilateral ties between Mexico and China, after more than a decade of what the Financial Times has called “reciprocal coolness.” The trip “was predicated on the idea of engaging China in order that Chinese investors see Mexico as an optimal export platform into North America,” Francisco Gonzalez, associate professor and Riordan Roett chair in Latin American Studies at the Johns Hopkins University […]

The Realist Prism: North Korea Gambles on Strategic Assumptions

Experts are debating what precisely are the motives behind North Korea’s recent spike in belligerent rhetoric and posturing, with answers ranging from the opinion that “war talk” is an attempt by the North’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, to solidify his hold on power to the worry that the regime is losing its grip on reality. What is more certain, however, is the set of assumptions guiding Pyongyang’s strategic calculus. Whether the North Korean leadership’s assessments are accurate or not — and what steps the other powers in the region take to correct them — may help determine how this […]

Former U.S. envoy William Stanton’s recent tough-love message to Taiwan reflects a long-standing concern in Washington over Taipei’s commitment and ability to defend itself in the event of a Chinese attack or invasion. Stanton, who retired last summer after three years as America’s unofficial ambassador to Taiwan but chose to stay in the country, raised the subject of Taiwan’s military budget in a speech to the World Taiwanese Congress in Taipei last month. He emphasized that he was speaking for himself, not the U.S. government, but his words echoed similar American complaints going back a decade or more. “I worry […]

The Active Pariah: Zimbabwe’s ‘Look East’ Policy

In 2012, Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace ranked Zimbabwe the fifth most likely country to fail — putting it in greater danger than Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti. World leaders frequently describe Zimbabwe under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe as a pariah state. The United States, the European Union and Australia have all imposed sanctions against the Zimbabwean government for not respecting democracy and human rights, and the United Nations has proposed sanctions against Zimbabwe repeatedly. The country has lost many of its onetime allies and has found itself shunned by many in the international community. Despite all […]

In recent weeks, the Republic of Belarus has been attempting to break out of its near isolation from the European Union and end a period of tension that began after Belarus’ December 2010 presidential election. Following the arrests of more than 700 protesters in Minsk’s Independence Square after the election, the EU revived its travel sanctions on leading Belarusian political and judicial figures, headed by President Alexander Lukashenko. In response to the EU’s actions and its demand for the release of all political prisoners, including former presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich, Belarus moved measurably closer to Russia. Belarus is a full-fledged […]

On March 8 in Caracas, Raúl Castro, looking somber, stood in a place of honor beside Hugo Chávez’s casket during the late Venezuelan president’s state funeral. Castro was no doubt pondering what Chávez’s death means for Cuba’s ambitious economic reform program — or “updating” of the economic model, as Cubans prefer to call it. Not long after Chávez’s first election victory in 1998, he and Fidel Castro signed the first of what would become more than 100 bilateral cooperation agreements. By the time Chávez died, Venezuela was providing Cuba with some 110,000 barrels of oil daily at subsidized prices, worth […]