Asia

In spring 2024, Taiwan took over the global mainstage, not because of the election and upcoming inauguration of President-elect Lai Ching-te, whose electoral victory in January demonstrated Taiwan’s democratic successes to the world. No, Taiwan has another international superstar...

Japan-Korea relations, historically strained by disputes over historical memory, seem to be experiencing a cautious upswing. Despite the lingering effects of historical, political, and economic disagreements, the rapprochement best seen in 2023’s Camp David summit between the leaders of...

In October 2023, the White House requested emergency supplemental appropriations for Fiscal Year 2024 to provide additional aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific. After months of debate, the House of Representatives passed an emergency $8.1 billion supplemental appropriations bill to support Indo-Pacific...

The explosive growth of development along the Mekong river since 1995 has produced an estimated 167 hydropower plants, with eleven mainstream facilities on the way in Laos, Cambodia, and along the Laos-Thailand border. With its electricity generating capacity projected...

The mighty Mekong River, a life source for millions across Southeast Asia, now faces an existential threat. An ambitious regional plan developed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) incorporates the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) as...

  Introduction According to its Constitution, China is a unitary state; however, as part of economic reform in the 1980s and early 1990s, the central government delegated administrative authority to the provinces. Administrative delegation authorized local governments’ autonomy in...

On the first Monday in March 2024, delegates—nearly 3,000 to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and over 2,000 to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—gathered in Beijing. With the exception of a handful of members of ethnic minorities in...

 “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.” The most famous line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” might fairly be applied to the fate of Hong Kong since 1997. China’s slow strangulation...

The biggest single-day election on the planet is taking place on February 14 in Indonesia. It is the world’s third-largest democracy, largest Muslim-majority country, and tenth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. About 206 million domestic voters and 1.5 million...

The United States has led the international economic order for the last seventy-eight years, with only the Soviet Union posing a serious challenge. However, China is starting to pose a severe threat to the United States by trying to...