In The News

The Power of the New China-Led Investment Bank

Richard Javad Heydarian April 13, 2015
The US “pivot” to Asia hit turbulence with a decision by the UK to join the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank as a founding member. Previously, the US had led an effort to boycott the AIIB among European allies and key allies in Asia-Pacific including Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Though officially based on doubts regarding the AIIB’s investment standards for governance,...

China-Pakistan: A Strategic Relationship in the Shadows

Andrew Small April 7, 2015
China and Pakistan share a border of just 523 kilometers but are the strongest of neighbors. An on-again off-again trip to Pakistan by China’s President Xi Jinping does not tell the real story. “This is a relationship where the public theatrics have generally been a poor indicator of the underlying substance,” writes Andrew Small, author and a transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund’s...

UK’s Risky Obsession With US Decline

Gideon Rachman April 7, 2015
The United Kingdom understands full well how empires tend to over-reach and shrink, and British historians – notably Yale’s Paul Kennedy, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson and Stanford’s Ian Morris – suggest that such patterns are playing out for the United States, explains Gideon Rachman for the Financial Times. “British policy makers also seem to be operating on the assumption that the continuing rise...

Can Authoritarian Capitalism Outlive Lee Kuan Yew?

John Cassidy April 6, 2015
From 1959 to 1990, Lee Kuan Yew guided Singapore’s remarkable rise to an Asian economic powerhouse. The Singaporean prime minister trail-blazed the creation of an “authoritarian capitalist” model of economic development, soon followed by China. The model was built on western ideas favored by Lee including meritocracy, universal public education, and emphasis on science and technology.. But the...

Making of a New World Order

Nayan Chanda April 3, 2015
Many US allies including South Korea, Australia and the United Kingdom, signed up for founders’ memberships of the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. “Leaders in Washington were stunned that their transatlantic ‘cousins’ did not even consult them before rushing to sign up with AIIB,” writes Nayan Chanda, YaleGlobal editor, in his column for Businessworld. “Ever since China...

Major Companies Threaten to End Relationships With Indiana Over “License to Discriminate” Law

Louis Weisberg April 2, 2015
A storm of criticism from multinational corporations and human-rights groups has convinced lawmakers in Indiana to backtrack on a vague law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, suggesting that governments could not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” and individuals or businesses could assert such claims in legal proceedings. The law was crafted soon after courts required...

Iran Deal Reached, Struggle For Acceptance Begins

Dilip Hiro April 2, 2015
The cliff-hanging negotiations over curbing Iran's nuclear program have ended with preliminary agreement. Iran negotiators had to contend with six powers that rarely agree - the US, the UK, China, France, Russia and Germany - as well as internal US polarization. “The hard-knuckle bargaining that has marked high-level negotiations over the past several days at the Swiss resort of Lausanne...