Tag: Far East, South and Southeast Asia and Pacific Areas

Your Monday Briefing

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering China’s rewriting of history, the U.S. infrastructure vote and India’s weakening moral authority. Xi Jinping sets his legacy China’s top leader will most likely take center stage in a new official summation of Communist Party history. The document is likely to exalt Xi, 68, as a peer of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping before his expected re-election at a party congress late next year. The summation is sure to become the focus of an intense indoctrination campaign — in schools, culture and censorship laws — that…

Tourists in Asia Navigate a Patchwork of Policies

Chin@Strategy

While fully vaccinated Americans can fly to hundreds of cities and towns across the country and 27 European capitals, border rules across Asia remain far stricter than in any other region in the world. Governments in Asia have promised to reopen their borders because of the improved Covid situation and progress on vaccinations. But they are falling behind the rest of the world. Air travel in August across the region was still 10 percent of what it was two years ago, lagging the rebound in the United States. Travelers must…

What AUKUS Means for U.S.-China Great Power Competition

Chin@Strategy

This is a hallmark of great power competition: Competitive initiatives like AUKUS provide visible ways to counter or balance or complicate China’s military activities but don’t necessarily help allies meet defined objectives. More often, competition becomes an end in itself — an open-ended imperative that assumes everything an opponent dislikes must be good policy. Another common feature of competitive policies is that officials tend to overlook their costs. For one thing, AUKUS carries significant diplomatic costs at a time when the United States is in desperate need of credibility with…

How Asia, Once a Vaccination Laggard, Is Revving Up Inoculations

Chin@Strategy

Then came the Delta variant. Despite keeping their countries largely sealed off, the virus found its way in. And when it did, it spread quickly. In the summer, South Korea battled its worst wave of infections; hospitals in Indonesia ran out of oxygen and beds; and in Thailand, health care workers had to turn away patients. With cases surging, countries quickly shifted their vaccination approach. Sydney, Australia, announced a lockdown in June after an unvaccinated limousine driver caught the Delta variant from an American aircrew. Then, Prime Minister Scott Morrison,…

Australia’s Submarine Deal Adds to Asia Arms Buildup

Chin@Strategy

Positioning the hard-to-track submarines closer to seas near China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula could be a powerful deterrent against China’s military, said Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official responsible for relations with China. “The Middle East wars have ended,” said Mr. Thompson, now a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore. “We are in an interwar period, and the next one will be a high-end, high-intensity conflict with a near-peer competitor, probably involving China, and most likely in northeast Asia.” After condemning the submarine agreement last…

AUKUS Still Leaves Australia at Risk Against China

Chin@Strategy

The United States did not directly mention China in announcing its historic new security partnership with Australia and Britain last week, but it didn’t have to. The defense deal is a clear escalation and indication that Washington views Beijing as an adversary. It also has thrust Australia into a central role in America’s rivalry with China. After hinting at a more self-reliant defense posture for the past several years, Australia’s government is now instead betting big on the future of its alliance with the United States with the new pact.…

Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Used to It.

Chin@Strategy

Like most people in the developed world, Kirsten Gjesdal had long taken for granted her ability to order whatever she needed and then watch the goods arrive, without any thought about the factories, container ships and trucks involved in delivery. Not anymore. At her kitchen supply store in Brookings, S.D., Ms. Gjesdal has given up stocking place mats, having wearied of telling customers that she can only guess when more will come. She recently received a pot lid she had purchased eight months earlier. She has grown accustomed to paying…