There’s a conventional wisdom forming that in releasing the detained Chinese trawler captain, Japan backed down to Chinese pressure and as a result “lost” the confrontation. This is probably true from a short-term perspective, but the proof of the pudding will be whether Japan, in future, concedes on both the issue at hand — sovereignty over the disputed islands — and the broader issue that is China’s reach for regional dominance. I don’t think either of those are likely. And I think John McCreary sums up nicely why that is: The Chinese have overreached in their dealings with Japan, Southeast [...]
It seems like only last year that we were hearing warnings about how the state-capitalist model made possible by power concentrated at the top in places like China and Russia would ultimately make liberal economies a quaint artifact of the past. Now, it seems, China is increasingly going from mono to surround sound, as a marketplace of ideas emerges in its highest decision-making levels, at least when it comes to foreign policy and national security. It’s hard to imagine that this sort of policy-jockeying won’t also begin to characterize domestic economic policy, especially as the need to develop the vast [...]
I got an e-mail a while back from a reader who mentioned that he loved our Global Insider items, adding that they’re always highly informative even if the subjects are a bit “random.” I agreed with the former observation, but not with the latter. And a news item that I expect will garner a bit of attention over the coming days will help explain the method behind the apparent madness. We usually pick the GI topics from items on our Leading Indicators channel, based on whether we feel like it warrants closer attention due to its significance or its likelihood [...]
