President Joko Widodo’s forthcoming visit to Australia is an opportunity to reset relations with Indonesia after three years of remarkable turbulence, even by the volatile standards of the past.
But a cautionary reminder: Australian governments are prone to excessive exuberance about the prospects for enhanced relations with Indonesia Read more
Mosul in early autumn looks peaceful from the Bashiqa ridge. The first positions of the Iraqi Kurdish army, the Peshmerga, are here, 12km from the city. The occasional mortar shell lands somewhere in the vicinity once in a while. Further off, one can sometimes hear the distant thunder of heavier ordnance. But mostly it’s quiet. Read more
Will China rule the world? Many of its citizens hope so, an understandable desire given the country’s emergence from a century of relative weakness and “national humiliation” at the hands of foreigners in an otherwise extended period of pre-eminence in Asia going back millennia. Read more
Geopolitics is back, with a vengeance, and needs to be elevated to a first order risk when weighing investment decisions. This is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the disconcerting bout of geopolitical volatility that is sweeping the globe from Europe to the Middle East and Asia. Read more
HANGZHOU, China — President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China formally committed the world’s two largest economies to the Paris climate agreement here on Saturday, cementing their partnership on climate change and offering a rare display of harmony in a relationship that has become increasingly discordant. Read more
Call it “citizen spying”. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Chinese government sources act as a giant human vacuum cleaner, sucking up intelligence to be digested in Beijing. Even the smallest scrap of information might be useful. Read more
China is hosting the G20 meeting of the world’s most powerful nations on the weekend, and one Australian China analyst has some stern advice for Malcolm Turnbull when he meets with his Chinese counterpart. Read more
China’s hosting of the premier international forum for co-operation on global economic governance in picturesque Hangzhou this weekend is testimony to China’s newly acquired economic weight and influence. Read more
If a modern-day Australian Rip Van Winkle were to awake from a two-decade slumber and turn on his television set or iPad, he would be stunned by the extent to which terrorism has come to dominate our lives. Read more
The town of Gaziantep is located 30km from Turkey’s border with Syria. Over the past five years it has become an epicentre for the unfinished business of the Syrian civil war. Read more