Geopolitics / Asia

• Has Julia Gillard's Time in Power Ruined Australia's Economy?

  Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Labour Party (ALP)-dominated coalition Government of Australia has clung to power without an express public mandate since the August 21, 2010, House of Representatives elections. This has been largely because its parliamentary majority has been guaranteed by four independent parliamentarians and one member of the Greens party, all of whom recognize that they would be unlikely ever again to gain a position of power and vote with the ALP to preserve their privilege for as long as possible. Thus, Ms Gillard has been able to avoid being voted from office. Even her colleagues privately agree that…

• Will North Korea Disappear if We Ignore It?

  As North Korea celebrates 80 years and uses the occasion to lash out at the treacherous South with vows of a “sacred war” and to boast of its nuclear strike capability against the US, it won’t do to brush Pyongyang aside as simply irrational and unpredictable. Pyongyang is anything but irrational, and while it may be unpredictable, that only attests to the US Intelligence Community’s inability to get a handle on North Korea, which has very painstakingly and deliberately calculated every move it has made under the late Kim Jong-il and his successor son, four-star General Kim Jong-un. There was…

• U.S. Risks Involvement in Regional Central Asian Disputes

  The Pentagon, clearly unsettled by its proposed 2014 drawdown of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, has cast its net wide to retain a presence in Central Asia’s post-Soviet states. Accordingly, its new potential best buddy is Tajikistan, but the U.S. Department of Defense’s new strategy risks inserting Washington into one of post-Soviet Central Asia’s most intractable problems, energy issues between Central Asia’s former USSR republics. A crystal ball would indicate that the end result will be bitterness and all sides. But first, the politics. On 31 March in the capital Dushanbe Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon received U.S. Central Command…

• Pakistan and India to go to War over Water?

  A peaceful and stable Pakistan is integral to western efforts to pacify Afghanistan, but Islamabad’s obsessions with its giant eastern neighbor may render such issues moot.Since partition in 1947, Pakistan and India have fought four armed conflicts, in 1947, 1965, 1971 (which led to the establishment of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan) and the 1999 Kargil clash.  With the exception of the 1971 conflict, which involved rising tensions in East Pakistan, the others have all involved issues arising from control of Kashmir. But now a rising new element of discord threatens to precipitate a new armed clash between southern Asia’s two nuclear…

• India and China Vie for Influence in Nepal

  In the titanic struggle for world supremacy fought between the U.S. and USSR between 1945 and 1991, all eyes were focused on their attempts to bring Third world nations to their side, and the subsequent U.S.-Russian Federation continues to dominate headlines today. Now, that battle for influence continues to dominate the media, but has shifted to Western attempts to inveigle former Soviet republics to decouple from Moscow’s influence and move towards Western values and economic integration, most notably in the Baltic and Central Asian states. But in the past two decades a parallel tussle has developed, which has intensified between…

• China's Benign Foreign Policy Image at Odds with South China Sea Stance

  Beijing for years has relentlessly projected a benign image in its foreign policy, but as its maritime neighbors are discovering, China’s pacifist representations do not extend to energy issues, most notably in the disputed South China Sea. Now, Chinese “imperial” overreach may bring U.S. naval forces once again into the western Pacific, as Beijing’s southeast Asian neighbors feel increasingly threatened by China’s overarching territorial claims in the South China Sea. China currently contends sovereignty of the Spratly islands’ 750 islands, islets, atolls, cays and outcroppings with the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, bolstering its claims with ancient Chinese maps,…

• What is the Best Route for Supplying Landlocked Afghanistan

  Last November when the U.S. unmanned drone killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, in retaliation, the government of Pakistan decided to block the supply routes to Afghanistan. Since then, not only NATO supply trucks have been stopped, but also thousands of Afghan-bound containers loaded with commercial goods have been stranded in the port city of Karachi. Each and every time commercial goods are grounded in Pakistan, Afghan businessmen are losing money and Afghan consumers are paying higher prices for goods that are imported through Pakistan. It seems like landlocked Afghanistan is highly dependent on trade roads from Pakistan. However, there are three…

• China Casts Increasingly Large Investment Shadow Over Southeast Asian Neighbors

  Thinking of opening a textile mill in Kampuchea? A shrimp farm in Vietnam? Anything at all in Laos or Myanmar? Then think fast and act, as China is increasingly dominating is Southeast Asian neighbors' economies. Doubting Thomases should have a look at the document released last month by China's National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Science and Technology. Blandly entitled, "Country Report on China' s Participation in Greater Mekong Subregion Cooperation I," the study delineates in detail Beijing's interest in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) nations of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand,…

• Is War in the South China Sea Inevitable?

  If China is not actually preparing for conflict in the South China Sea over disputed archipelagos and islets and their rich offshore resources, from fish to hydrocarbons, then consider the comments made on 6 December by Chinese President Hu Jintao to the Central Military Commission, as reported by Xinhua. Hu said that China's navy should "make extended preparations for warfare," adding that the navy should "accelerate its transformation and modernization in a sturdy way, and make extended preparations for military combat in order to make greater contributions to safeguard national security. Our work must closely encircle the main theme of…

• Central Asian Setback for the U.S. Military

  The last few weeks have seen the U.S. Department of Defense suffer a number of setbacks in its effort to retain military influence overseas. First came the startling announcement on 21 October, when President Obama announced that all American troops would be withdrawing from Iraq by 31 December under the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement. Accordingly, 39,000 U.S. soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The deal breaker? Washington’s demand for continued immunity for any remaining U.S. troops, and the Iraqi government of President Jalal Talibani couldn’t, or wouldn’t, deliver. Now the handwriting’s apparently on…