Smart Competition: Adapting U.S. Strategy Toward China at 40 Years

May 8, 2019

Professor Aaron L. Friedberg testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee at the hearing “Smart Competition: Adapting U.S. Strategy Toward China at 40 Years.” Friedberg is a Counselor for the National Bureau of Asian Research and Co-chair of the NBR Taskforce on Transforming the Economic Dimension of U.S. China Strategy. He is also Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Read Friedberg’s prepared statement below or view the webcast on the House Foreign Affairs Committee website: Hearing on Smart Competition: Adapting U.S. Strategy Toward China at 40 Years.

Read full statement…

Trade alliances caught in crossfire as the giants clash

April 5, 2019

Will they or won’t they? The gyrations of Theresa May’s discombobulated government have dominated the headlines as British parliamentarians agonise over whether to leave the EU or remain. But the same question also is being asked of trade negotiations between the US and China as the two countries inch their way towards a deal that many believe will determine the trajectory of the most important relationship in the world.
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Jaw-Jaw: Aaron Friedberg on Asking the Right Questions About Chinese Ambitions

March 19, 2019

What are China’s grand ambitions? Did the United States get China “wrong”? And what policies should the United States adopt against a newly assertive China? What Western strategists are on the Chinese Communist Party’s reading list? Professor Aaron Friedberg and Brad Carson discuss these issues and much more in the new episode of “Jaw-Jaw.”
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Insult to Trump’s own intelligence

February 4, 2019

Donald Trump’s apparent belief that his intelligence community is conspiring against him is one of the most worrying aspects of his mercurial presidency. In last week’s Twitter storm against the Worldwide Threat Assessment presented by his intelligence chiefs to a congressional committee, the US President took issue with several of their key judgments, Read more

West at risk as US loses military edge

January 26, 2019

The West is slowly losing the contest for pre-eminence in the emerging international order. Brexit is just one manifestation of the crisis of confidence enveloping liberal democracies beset by a rising tide of dissent, self-doubt, identity pol­itics and a loss of trust in the foundational institutions of the post-World War II order. Read more

US-China clash a reminder of ideals lost in cyberspace

December 14, 2018

Welcome to the tech wars. Despite her release on bail, the arrest of senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou has ratcheted up simmering tensions between China and the US in a global contest for technological supremacy between the leaders of competing and increasingly incompatible systems of governance. This quest for information dominance is a driver of global cyber conflict, a shadowy undeclared war that is intensifying and becoming a serious security concern for Australia. Read more

Gloves off in US pushback against China

June 2, 2018

In the unceasing competition between the great powers, this century’s dominant economic and foreign policy story has been China’s breathtaking rise from relative obscurity to the threshold of superpower status.

The accompanying narrative, which has become conventional wisdom in Australia and much of the world, is that the US is in decline and soon will be surpassed by an ascendant and economically irresistible China.
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Korean summit between Kim and Moon crucial to peace

April 20, 2018

The next act in the immensely consequential decades-long Korean nuclear drama takes place on Friday, when the two Koreas launch their much-anticipated summit in the tiny Potemkin village of Panmunjom that straddles the demarcation line separating the divided nation.

The stakes could not be higher. A successful Korean summit is an essential prerequisite and road map for an even more important summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump. Read more

Australia is the meat in the US-China trade war sandwich

April 7, 2018

US President Donald Trump has brought the world closer to a trade war that could plunge the rules-based global order into an existential crisis. The imposition of tariffs on imported steel and aluminium last month were the opening shots in Trump’s campaign “to level the playing field” for US firms. But his threat to impose punitive tariffs on China, including $US100 billion ($130bn) of additional tariffs on Thursday, risks triggering a serious confrontation with global implications that would be bad news for Australia. Read more

Tweets aside, US North Korea strategy is working.

October 8, 2017

The escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un has fuelled concerns that the region is on a dangerous trajectory to a nuclear conflict that could have calamitous global consequences. Since 1947, nuclear scientists have maintained a ‘Doomsday Clock’ that symbolically measures how close the world is to a man-made global cataclysm, represented by midnight. The clock now shows two and a half minutes to midnight and ticking, the closest it has been to catastrophe since the US exploded the first hydrogen bomb in 1953. Read more