BLOG Post #376: The Taiwan Imbroglio 4 Jun 2023 What’s Going On? In my previous blog (Post #375) I reported on the worrying signs of a large gap in communications between the US and China. But I also noted…
BLOG Post #375: Out of Touch: The US-China Communications Gap 21 May 202322 May 2023 Among the many troubling trends in US-China relations these days is the lack of high-level diplomatic engagement. Until a few weeks ago, only John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy on climate…
BLOG Post #374: China’s Aid to Russia Under the “No Limits” Partnership 10 May 20239 May 2023 "No Limits” Has Limits In the war in Ukraine, the China-Russia relationship is a wildcard. The notion persists, going back to the Putin-Xi meeting in Beijing just before Putin…
BLOG Post #373: Nuclear Politics: The US-South Korea “Washington Declaration” 5 May 20235 May 2023 The US-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance began in 1953, at the end of the Korean War. Now seventy years later, President Biden and Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol met to cement…
BLOG Post #372: TikTok and US National Insecurity 22 Apr 2023 High-tech spying is in the news because of the one-sided, hypocritical debate in Congress on whether the popular app TikTok is actually a tool for Chinese government data collection on…
BLOG Post #371: France’s Diplomatic Disaster in China 13 Apr 202312 Apr 2023 “Strategic Autonomy,” French Style French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen just visited China. You can bet Joe Biden and his national security team are…
BLOG Post #370: A Political Lynching 7 Apr 20237 Apr 2023 The Tennessee House of Representatives, dominated by a Republican supermajority, voted yesterday to expel two Black Democratic legislators who had participated in a peaceful public demonstration on behalf of…
BLOG Post #369: The Climate Time Bomb 3 Apr 2023 The Bomb is Ticking The odds are against us. That is the bottom line in the latest IPCC report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global…
BLOG Post #368: A Big Deal: China’s Middle East Diplomatic Coup 26 Mar 202325 Mar 2023 A Big Deal for Some By any stretch of the imagination, the March 10 announcement of China’s brokering of a Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement to resume diplomatic relations and exchange security…
BLOG Post #367: Deepening Tensions on the Korean Peninsula Demand New Thinking in Washington 18 Mar 202318 Mar 2023 The Mounting Danger Tensions on the Korean peninsula have reached a new level of intensity. North Korea’s foreign ministry issued a statement Feb. 17 in anticipation of another round of…
BLOG Post #366: No Exit: Two Ukraine Peace Proposals Going Nowhere 6 Mar 20235 Mar 2023 Two Very Different Paths to Peace Two proposals for bringing peace in Russia’s war on Ukraine were issued on nearly the same day last month: a UN General Assembly resolution…
BLOG Post #365: The Coup in Israel 28 Feb 202328 Feb 2023 Israel has always been touted as America’s most reliable friend in the Middle East, a bastion of democracy in a region dominated by autocracies. Now that picture is fraying as…
BLOG Post #364: China and Europe: Profits versus Principles 22 Feb 202320 Feb 2023 With all the attention on US-China relations, Beijing’s on-again, off-again relations with the European Union (EU) don’t receive the attention they deserve. In the short space of a few decades,…
BLOG Post #363: More on the China Balloon Episode: Much Ado About Very Little 13 Feb 202322 Feb 2023 (The China Balloon Incident has three phases. We have just exited Phase 2. In Phase 1, “Discovery,” the Biden administration went into action mode on finding that a Chinese “spy”…
BLOG Post #362: Risky Business: Japan Steps Out 25 Jan 202325 Jan 2023 (This blog is also available as a podcast at https://www.podserve.fm/episodes/86207/67-risky-business-japan-steps-out-h1JT0.mp3) Background to a Changing Strategic Perspective Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida Fumio has just visited Washington, drawing attention to how Japan…
BLOG Post #361: Ukraine’s Future: Peace Through War? 14 Jan 202315 Jan 2023 Hopes and Realities Ukraine’s President Zelensky had a fairly successful visit to Washington last month, returning home with promises of more American weapons and unqualified US backing for Ukraine’s war…
BLOG Post #360 The Threat Business: China or Russia? 2 Jan 20233 Jan 2023 Dual Enemies For those in charge of US national security, the central challenge is identifying threats and determining how to counter them. The Biden administration has cast China and Russia,…
BLOG Post #359: The Iran Protests and US Policy 13 Dec 202212 Dec 2022 "Women, Life, Freedom" Streets in dozens of Iran cities are filled with angry people in popular protests that have already gone on much longer—three months and counting—than those in 2009…
BLOG Post #358: China’s COVID Uprising 4 Dec 20227 Jan 2023 Significant dissent in China reared its head for the first time since the Tiananmen uprising in 1989. In many of China’s major cities, protesters joined hands to denounce the COVID…
BLOG Post #357: The Biden-Xi Summit in Bali 22 Nov 202222 Nov 2022 Some Reasons for Optimism The much-ballyhooed first in-person summit between Pres. Biden and Xi on November 14 went off pretty well. Biden clearly communicated the US belief that a…
In the Human Interest - Mel Gurtov 