I have zero sympathy for the Russian and Chinese governments who decided to block a U.N. Security Council resolution to amp up the pressure on the Assad regime in Syria. I’m not sure the resolution would have been decisive in ending … Continue reading
Tag Archives: China
Plutocracy and Mechanisms of Government Capture
James Kurth has a great piece in The American Interest on the foreign policy of plutocratic states and the manner in which a plutocracy’s dominant economic-institutional form (industry vs. finance) affects the kinds of international regimes those states seek to implement. … Continue reading
History, Strategic Commitments and Signalling
Matt Yglesias has a post up talking about Chinese perceptions of America’s strategic rationale in Afghanistan, noting that – shockingly – they tend to think it has a lot to do with the U.S.-China relationship and an American effort to … Continue reading
Multipolarity Doesn’t Mean Intervention is Dead
Shashank Joshi, writing in The Telegraph, speculates that the rising power of BRIC countries may make Libya “the last place where the West is allowed to intervene.” Joshi highlights how different the international situation is now compared with a decade … Continue reading
Identity Matters: East Asian Nationalism in an Age of Complex Interdependence
Paul Staniland has a very engaging post over at The Monkey Cage critiquing this long Robert Kaplan piece about security competition in the South China Sea. Kaplan’s arguments are interesting, though in my view he fails to examine some baseline … Continue reading
China, Infrastructure, Economic Development and Oligarchy
Last week James Joyner had at post up over at OTB breaking down some of the unwarranted CCP-oriented Sinophilia that occasionally overtakes otherwise sensible people. For all China’s economic might, it’s worth remembering that it remains a) quite poor in … Continue reading
Does the U.S. Need a Peer Competitor?
Because of Blogger is bad at basically everything, this post was inexplicably deleted. I have no desire to rewrite it, but you can find it over at the Progressive Realist.
Quick Hit: Currency
While I agree with Atrios that this statement by Geithner might send a mixed message, it’s worth noting that the dollar floats, the renminbi doesn’t. Unless my understanding is seriously flawed, the Chinese government has been depressing the value of … Continue reading