What's New

A Profitable Partnership Under Stress: Why it makes sense to ratchet-down US-China trade tensions

A research paper dated 11 June 2017 by the Hinrich Foundation shows that notwithstanding concerns about trade deficits and more demanding foreign business environment in China, both American and Chinese businesses need each other even more, the former to exploit the massive Chinese consumer market and the latter to help upgrade China's technologies and global skills.

China's consumer market skyrocketed to $4.8 trillion in 2015, surpassing the United States, contributing a lion's share to global revenues of American corporate giants like Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Cummins, GM, Ford and Nike. The momentum is set to grow even stronger in coming decades. Moreover, R & D in China also enhances foreign corporates' global competitiveness, as evidenced by Dupont and TI.

On the other side of the coin, foreign direct investments are estimated to contribute about 33% of China's GDP and 27% of its employment, not to mention numerous positive spillovers in terms of technological, management and other knowledge and skills.  

The Paper argues that this profitable partnership should help redress the balance in perceived US-China trade tensions and rhetoric. 

Panama cuts ties with Taipei in favor of China

Live interview with Radio Sputnik, Moscow on 13 June, 2017. This tallies with a report of the same date in the New York Times. 

All Measures Short of War: The contest for the 21st century and the future of American power

The Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., hosted an introduction and panel discussion on 5 June, 2017 on a forthcoming book with the above title by Thomas Wright, Director of the Institution's Center on the United States and Europe and Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy.  The panel was moderated by Susan Glasser, Chief International Affairs Columnist with Politico, with the book's author, Gérard Araud, Ambassador of France to the United States, and Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. 

After two decades of convergence with unprecedented cooperation between the major nations, great power competition has returned to a new era of strategic competition with revisionist powers of China and Russia more capable of challenging the US-dominated world order since the end of the Second World War. Wright argues that the great powers all seek to avoid a major war with each other but will compete will all measures short of war, including globalized interdependence, cyber war, economic war, proxy war, and coercive diplomacy. He proposes a new American strategy—responsible competition—for navigating these challenges and strengthening the liberal order.

Major challenge to the liberal order, however, springs as much from revisionist competition as America's own growing unwillingness to shoulder global responsibilities except on narrower, more transactional, zero-sum calculations. Even with "responsible competition", the question remains whether the balance of global power will shift towards one where China, Russia, India and other emerging powers will carry much more weight and whether, and to what extent, the hitherto West-centric world order will stay unmodified.