Asia & the Pacific

5 Items

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Declinist Pundits

| November 2012

"Decline is a misleading metaphor that assumes there is an organic life cycle for countries as there is for individuals. We know little about the life cycle of states. It took three centuries for the Western Roman Empire to decline from its apogee to collapse. After Britain lost its American colonies in the 18th century, writer Horace Walpole lamented that Britain was reduced to the insignificance of Sardinia. He missed the fact that the Industrial Revolution was about to produce Britain's greatest century. Put simply, we do not know where the United States is in its supposed life cycle."

Analysis & Opinions - ecfr’s blog

Reinventing Europe

| January 23, 2012

"When Jean Monnet proposed the first integrative steps for Europe to take, he was thinking of creating a powerful economic instrumentality that would contend on equal terms with the then superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.  Now, if Europe and America pursue the closer economic union that Angela Merkel envisions, Europe can think of a new united West which can deal on equal terms with a rising but disunited East." 

Copies of a local newspaper, left, with the headline which reads "Downgrade of the U.S. credit rating is like tsunami," are on sale at a news stand in Beijing, China, Aug. 8, 2011.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - Reuters

Can China Afford to Downgrade the U.S.?

| August 8, 2011

"The real test will be whether China moves away from the dollar in any significant manner. While it makes modest adjustments to its reserve holdings, there are few good alternatives to the dollar. And while it calls for an international basket of currencies to replace the dollar, there are few takers. Of course, China might move toward opening its currency and credit markets in an effort to make the yuan a reserve currency, but the authoritarian political system is unwilling and unprepared to move to that degree of economic freedom."

Chinese and U.S. flags flutter on a lamppost in front of the portrait of Mao Zedong on the Tiananmen Square to welcome the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama in Beijing, China, 17 November 2009.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Washington Quarterly

American and Chinese Power after the Financial Crisis

| October 2010

"...Asia has its own internal balance of powers, and in that context, many states continue to welcome an American presence in the region. Chinese leaders have to contend with the reactions of other countries, as well as the constraints created by their own objectives of economic growth and the need for external markets and resources. Too aggressive a Chinese military posture could produce a countervailing coalition among its neighbors that would weaken both its hard and soft power. A poll of 16 countries around the world found a positive attitude toward China’s economic rise, but not its military rise."