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.

David Kearn argues that even in the absence of restrictive resource and budgetary constraints, a focus on identifying and achieving concrete objectives that will position the United States and its allies to effectively deter aggression in critical regional flashpoints should be the priority given the stressed nature of the defense industrial base and the nuclear enterprise.

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

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

The U.S. position in the global value chain puts it at a disadvantage, and Washington's confrontational policies are making things worse.

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.

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.

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. 

China has at least a 70% dependence on the U.S. and its allies for more than 400 items, ranging from luxury goods to raw materials needed for Chinese industries, a new analysis of trade data has found. (...) The analysis, set to publish Wednesday in the International Security academic journal, uses data from the United Nations Comtrade database, which tracks official global trade statistics. China’s high-dependency exposure was calculated by bundling together trade activity from the U.S. and more than a dozen allies across a range of categories.

The geopolitical implications of solar displacing oil as the world’s major source of energy are enormous. Why has the Middle East been a central arena in the “great game” for the past century? Because countries there have been the major suppliers of the oil and gas that powered 20th-century economies. If, over the next decade, photovoltaic cells that capture energy from the sun were to replace a substantial part of the demand for oil and gas, who will the biggest losers be? And even more consequentially: who will be the biggest winner?