Southeast Asian Naval Modernization and Hedging Strategies

For over a decade, Southeast Asia’s largest maritime countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—have engaged in extensive naval modernization programs. Though they have done so with varying levels […]

A View from Australia

Australia’s relations with China have not been healthy for some years, but they deteriorated further in 2020-2021 when Beijing introduced savage import restrictions to punish Canberra for proposing […]

A US Perspective

The New Washington Consensus Washington DC is a sharply divided city these days. A recent Pew Research Center poll concluded that Americans have increasingly embraced “conflicting partisan priorities […]

A Southeast Asian Perspective

The annual ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) and the related ASEAN-plus meetings—a series of ASEAN-led forums involving foreign ministers from 27 nations across the Indo-Pacific—were held from August 2-8, […]

A View from the United States

Inadvertent escalation or Chinese expansion? Two very different fears compete for attention in the proliferating discourse on the risk-rich imbroglio  of the South China Sea. Some fear an […]

A View from Indonesia

On March 20, 2016, a Chinese coastguard vessel intruded into Indonesia’s territorial sea near the Natuna Besar Island, the largest island in Indonesia’s Natuna Islands located in the […]