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Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance?
Senior Fellow Douglas Farah's analysis of the debate over the level of threat posed by Iran's expanding diplomatic, trade and military presence in Latin America, and its stated ambition to continue to broaden these ties.
Chinese Naval Modernization: Altering the Balance of Power
Richard Fisher details China's naval modernization program and the potential impacts on U.S. interests in the Western Pacific.
Looking Forward
"Looking Forward" is an informal department of our website, usually written by
our Vice President Arthur Waldron, but to which colleagues and friends contribute as well, that seeks to tag, comment on or speculate about important developments before they hit the front pages, or to provide new points of view on existing issues. We call it "informal" because it is speculative, whereas for most of our work, the number one requirement is to find the facts and let the political chips fall where they may.
Thus we may look at rumors about proliferation or at new weapons, unconventional threats to our national security, environmental issues, energy, diseases, or give our thoughts about a well known issue. Our researchers travel, and often the column will reflect that. Thus Professor Waldron is spending a lot of time in Europe this semester, reading the European press (including the European Chinese-language press) and talking to European scholars and experts, and can be expected to send periodic sketches of what he has found.
Professor Waldron learned the rigorous techniques of simulation and gaming during his seven years at the Naval War College, but the tendency to try to look into the future--which seems strange, for he is after all a historian--may also be in the blood. His great uncle was, for many years, the anonymous author of "The Trader" column in Barron's Magazine, celebrated in his own time as the only Wall Street pundit who had called the great crash of 1929, the market bottom and the post-war recovery. Unfortunately, speculating on world affairs is far less remunerative.
As always, we invite serious comments from our readers about this column as well as our other offerings.
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Coming in Taiwan: Major Electoral Realignment
Now that Taipei’s Mayor Ma Ying-jeou has defeated Legislative speaker Wang Jynping in the race to succeed Lien Chan as chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, a major realignment of voting patterns in Taiwan appears close to inevitable.
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Central Asia Winds of Change
There has been a “change of sky” [biantian—i.e. the appearance of a new regime] in Kyrgyzstan, where the post-Soviet government, once one the most promising in Central Asia but later just another dictatorship, has been overthrown by people power, with its president fleeing to Moscow and then resigning. Almost certainly this is a glimpse of things to come, with immense strategic and economic interests at stake.
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Japan Emerges
Though not widely noticed in the media, the now unmistakable determination by Japan to take seriously her own and regional security is easily the most consequential recent development in Asia, the repercussions of which are only beginning to be detected.
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Russian Enigma Part Three
When it comes to serving national interests through their foreign policies, few countries have ever proven very successful, whatever political theorists may tell us, and Russia in the decades ahead looks to be no exception.
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Russian Enigma Part Two
Winston Churchill thought that the key to the USSR’s future behavior would be “Russian national interests.” This sounded like wisdom at the time, but in fact it tells us nothing unless it specifies what exactly are Russian national interests—and on that there was no obvious single answer even at the end of World War II but rather a host of competing imperatives—not least the need to keep the Communists in power, regardless.
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The Russian Enigma
To call Russia an “enigma,” while accurate enough, is a journalistic cliché, drawn from Winston Churchill’s celebrated phrase “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
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China and Japan: Asia’s Dangers Shift to the North
During the first half of the last century, bloody conflict between China and Japan lay at the center of Asian international politics. That such conflict could come again may seem unlikely, given Japan’s deep and sincere pacifism since the end of World War II. But some recent events, most notably the cruise of a Chinese nuclear submarine through Japanese waters (preceded by a circumnavigation of the key US territory of Guam), has given new substance to what has long been every strategist’s nightmare.
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Back to Basics: Washington Reiterates China Policy
Few pieces of American foreign policy are more cloudy, and intentionally so, than that with respect to Taiwan and China-but periodically the clouds are forced to open, as has happened in the last week, in response to some misguided remarks by Colin Powell, the American secretary of state.
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Resource Conflicts Coming in Southeast Asia
While we fret about North Korea and the Taiwan Strait, what are literally life and death issues for the peoples of Southeast Asia are being raised by little noted, ongoing actions by China with respect to the rivers that feed that region, but have their headwaters in Chinese controlled territory. As our colleague Milton Osborne makes clear in an important article available through this website, China’s current program of damming the waters of the Mekong river before it enters Southeast Asia, and blasting away the rocks and rapids that have prevented its use for large scale navigation, are sowing the seeds for major problems ahead.
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An Open Door for China-Taiwan Talks
There is no longer any credible reason for Beijing and Taipei not to talk, especially in light of the proposal Taiwan's President Chen Shuibian made this week in his major speech on this year's national “Double Ten” holiday. Both sides, he suggested, should return to the agreement of 1992 that led to the highly successful Singapore talks of 1993.
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