Tag: United States of America

America’s Trouble with China

18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Photo: Voice of America/Wikimedia Commons

WASHINGTON, DC – Xi Jinping, China’s newly anointed president, made his first visit to the United States in May 1980. He was a 27-year-old junior officer accompanying Geng Biao, then a vice premier and China’s leading military official. Geng had been my host the previous January, when I was the first US defense secretary to visit China, acting as an interlocutor for President Jimmy Carter’s administration.

Americans had little reason to notice Xi back then, but his superiors clearly saw his potential. In the ensuing 32 years, Xi’s stature rose, along with China’s economic and military strength. His cohort’s ascent to the summit of power marks the retirement of the last generation of leaders designated by Deng Xiaoping (though they retain influence).

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America’s Unhinged “Pivot”

Obama meets with Myanmar’s President Thein Sein. Photo: Pete Souza/Wikimedia Commons

NEW DELHI – President Barack Obama’s first foreign trip since winning a second term highlights Asia’s new centrality to America’s economy and security. But Obama’s Asian tour also underscores the main question about American policy in the region: Will the United States’ “pivot” to Asia acquire concrete strategic content, or will it remain largely a rhetorical repackaging of old policies?

The United States, quick to capitalize on regional concerns triggered by China’s increasingly muscular self-assertion, has strengthened its military ties with its existing Asian allies and forged security relationships with new friends. But the heady glow of America’s return to center stage in Asia has obscured key challenges in remaining the region’s principal security anchor in the face of China’s strategic ambitions.

One challenge is the need to arrest the erosion of America’s relative power, which in turn requires comprehensive domestic renewal, including fiscal consolidation. But the need for spending cuts also raises the prospect that the US might be unable to finance a military shift toward the Asia-Pacific region – or, worse, that it will be forced to retrench there.

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India, Japan and the US Step on the Gas

Obama and Singh participate at Hyderabad House, New Delhi.
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh participate in a bilateral meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, Nov. 8, 2010.

The third trilateral dialogue between India, Japan and the United States was held in New Delhi on 29 October 2012. This series of dialogues began on 19 December 2011 in Washington DC, with a second held in Tokyo on 23 April 2012. The Indian delegation at the New Delhi meeting was led by the Joint Secretary for East Asia in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Gautam Bambawale, the Japanese delegation by the Deputy Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kenji Hiramatsu, and the US delegation by Robert Blake, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia.

The three countries discussed a wide variety of issues from the prospects of cooperation between the three countries in Myanmar, Africa and Afghanistan, as well as ways and means to pool their resources in the fight against piracy.

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Andreas Falke on the 2012 US Presidential and Congressional Elections

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the first presidential debate. Photo: VOA/Wikimedia Commons

On 8 November, our parent organization – the Center for Security Studies – hosted a colloquium on the recently completed Presidential and Congressional elections in the United States. The guest speaker, Professor Andreas Falke, not only analyzed the election data for his audience, he also speculated on how the election’s outcomes might impact US domestic and foreign policies over the next four years, to include its influence on transatlantic relations.

Hosting Professor Falke also provided us with the opportunity to put some questions of our own to this keen observer of American politics. In the following podcast, we ask him whether he thought there was anything surprising about the election results, what the future holds for the US Republican Party, and what else we might expect from President Obama in his second term.

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Missing the Mark: The ICC on its Relationship with the UN Security Council

ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo briefing the UN Security Council on the situation in Sudan. Photo: Coalition for the ICC/flickr

Last month, for the first time since the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established, the United Nations Security Council debated its relationship with the Court. After two Security Council referrals (Darfur 2005 and Libya 2011), it was high time that the relationship was critically analyzed. Unfortunately, key issues which have undermined the independence and legitimacy of the ICC were left largely unaddressed.

There are many problematic issues with regards to the relationship between the ICC and the UN Security Council. Broadly, most fall under three categories: the potential tensions and dilemmas between peace-making/conflict resolution and international criminal justice; the inevitable selectivity that only some situations of mass atrocity will be referred by the Council to the ICC while other cases, which are just as deserving, will not; and the political constraints imposed by the Security Council on the ICC when it decides to refer a case to the Court.

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