Asia & the Pacific

Stephen Walt writes that those who favor foreign policy restraint believe the United States should trade and invest in other countries, encourage other states to do the same, and be open to managed immigration instead of building walls in a fit of xenophobia.

Stephen Walt writes that the differences in foreign policy will be less significant than one may think. Consider how Trump and Biden would each likely deal with the three most important items on the current foreign-policy agenda: Ukraine, China, and the Middle East.

In this deeply personal book, Joseph Nye shares his own journey living through the American century.

Joseph Nye argues that while former US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping each played important roles in ending Sino-American engagement, the death of the policy started with the 2008 global financial crisis. That is when Chinese elites concluded that America was in decline, and that China need no longer bide its time.

Anatol Klass recounts how Uyghur chieftain Yolbars Khan came to be buried in a Chinese Nationalist grave in Taipei. It reveals much about China's violent relationship with its most western province.

Stephen Walt elaborates on what he is expecting for 2024:  the Israel-Gaza conflict widening, the 75th anniversary of NATO, the possible re-election of Donald Trump, and the election results from other populous democracies, to name a few.

Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional, but their exceptionalism actually comprises three distinct views. Whichever prevails in next year's presidential election will have significant implications for ongoing conflicts in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Stephen Walt argues that Henry Kissinger's concerns about the destabilizing impact of ideas made him hypersensitive to the smallest perturbations in strategically marginal countries and inclined him to overreact to them in ways that other realists opposed.

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

François Sully (1927–1971) is an underreported figure in the critical period of U.S.-South Vietnamese relations between 1960 and 1963. As one of the earliest journalists the First Republic of Vietnam expelled in 1962, his reporting introduced Vietnam to American readers, and his journalism influenced a generation of Western reporters covering the intervention of U.S. forces in Vietnam. However, despite his extensive reporting for Newsweek and other outlets, little is known about Sully or how his contentious relationship with President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam contributed to political turbulence before Diem's assassination on 2 November 1963. This is the first article to focus exclusively on Sully's reporting on Vietnam and the first to assess his efforts using primary sources.