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Category Archives: China

China’s Growing Influence on the African Continent

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I authored recently in The Weekly Standard:
The African continent is quickly becoming a proxy battleground for Washington and Beijing, as the latter’s appetite for emerging markets and raw materials grows. In July 2008, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “China’s full [...]

Russia Seeks Counterbalance to West from SCO

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appealed to China and other Central Asian nations to show its support for Russia’s actions in Georgia at a Shangai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tajikistan today.  International press offered conflicting analysis, which of course, is no surprise. What is striking, however, is that the break was not along traditional media [...]

Russia as a Strategic Partner?

The other day Thomas P.M. Barnett asked whether or not Russia could eventually be a strategic partner for United States.  He argued that Washington’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia has been overly emotional:
Frankly, putting the political and strategic implications aside for a minute, Russia’s intervention in Georgia should strike us as more of a turn-on than turn-off. [...]

Robert Kagan and The Return of History

After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, some defense analysts and international relations scholars believed that a new, peaceful era would emerge. One scholar, Francis Fukuyama, built his career on this idealistic hypothesis (which he now backed away from). He wrote a an article in 1989 entitled “The End of History?” which concluded [...]

“How to Handle China”

From Fareed Zakaria’s recent article entitled “How to Handle China”
The greatest failure of Western foreign policy since the cold war ended has been a sin of omission. We have not pursued a foreign policy toward the world’s newly rising powers that aims to create new and enduring relations with them, integrate them into existing structures [...]

China Continues to Modernize its Strategic Forces, Builds New SSBNs, ICBMs

According to the most recent Nuclear Notebook published in the July/August issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen examine China’s nuclear forces in 2008.  They identify three important developments: 

China continues to modernize its strategic nuclear forces
China has deployed two new long-range ICBMs, the DF-31 and the DF-31A
China is [...]