Opinion

This week, Admiral Harry J. Harris, Jr, U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) commander, made headlines for his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the written testimony submitted to the Committee, he articulated his view that China sees the South China Sea as “a strategic front line in their quest to dominate East Asia out to the Second Island Chain.” ...

The United States presented a draft resolution on North Korea to the United Nations Security Council on Thursday. The resolution, which would tighten sanctions on Pyongyang, represents the culmination of nearly two months of negotiations between the United States and China, beginning just after North Korea’s nuclear test on January 6. Final agreement on the resolution came during Chinese Foreign ...

It’s early spring and that means India’s national budget session is in the air. The Indian government will be formally presenting its budget for the next fiscal year on Monday. Last year’s $290 billion budget, as I discussed in The Diplomat at the time, showcased a gradualist approach to reforming India’s fiscal policy. The 2016 budget is the second to ...

None of the remaining Republican presidential candidates has a detailed health-care plan. The one who has done the most to outline an agenda, Senator Marco Rubio, is still a bit lighter on those details even than Barack Obama was when he ran in 2008. But Rubio is at least on the right track, while the other candidates are wandering aimlessly, ...

Last November, in a bid to internationalize its currency, China’s yuan was successfully admitted to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of reserve currencies, joining the Euro, the U.S. dollar, Japanese yen and British sterling in the cohort of elite currencies. The yuan’s ascension is an economic milestone for China and a political victory for the world’s ...

Say it ain’t so, Doug. From 2009 to early 2015, Douglas Elmendorf was the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, where he repeatedly warned lawmakers that chronic deficits are unsustainable, pose long-term dangers — and that shrinking them sooner rather than later would make the task easier. Now, economist Elmendorf, who has become dean of the Kennedy School ...

Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), made a pertinent point when she described tax as “the lifeblood of modern states”. Addressing finance ministers at the recent Arab Fiscal Forum in Abu Dhabi, she drove home the idea of introducing Value Added Tax (VAT) to shore up GCC economies. Her call for the Gulf states to introduce ...

Call it the new normal for European bank earnings. Standard Chartered shares plunged by the most in more than three years on Tuesday after the bank posted a “surprise” 2015 pretax loss of $1.5 billion, somewhat different from the $1.37 billion average profit estimate from 20 analysts. On Monday, HSBC delivered a “surprise” fourth-quarter pretax loss of $858 million, rather ...

Four years into the Obama administration’s “Asia-Pacific Rebalance” and on the eve of a tumultuous national election, questions about the coming consistency of U.S. foreign policy are at the forefront of every policymaker’s mind. Yet even without these disruptive factors, there is one area in which the United States should continue to provide coordination, collaboration, and commitment with allies and ...

Last November, in a bid to internationalize its currency, China’s yuan was successfully admitted to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of reserve currencies, joining the Euro, the US dollar, Japanese yen and British sterling in the cohort of elite currencies. The yuan’s ascension is an economic milestone for China and a political victory for the world’s ...