In 1973, US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, following a period of American preoccupation with Vietnam and China, declared a “year of Europe”.More recently, after President Barack Obama announced a US strategic “pivot”, or rebalancing, towards Asia, many Europeans worried abou

When US President Barack Obama recently spoke at the United Nations about countering Daesh, many of his critics complained that he put too much emphasis on diplomacy and not enough on the use of force.Comparisons were made with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military interven

When a US Navy P8-A surveillance aircraft recently flew near Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, it was warned eight times by the Chinese navy to leave the area.Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said: “China’s determination to safeguard its sovereignty

As Europe debates whether to maintain its sanctions regime against Russia, the Kremlin’s policy of aggression towards Ukraine continues unabated. Russia is in long-term decline, but it still poses a very real threat to the international order in Europe and beyond. Indeed,

No country in modern history has possessed as much global military power as the United States.

At the World Economic Forum’s recent annual meeting in Davos, I participated in a panel of defence leaders to discuss the future of the military. The issue we addressed is a critical one: What kind of war should militaries today be preparing to fight? Governments have a v

The World Bank recently announced that China’s economy will surpass that of the United States this year, measured according to purchasing power parity (PPP). But this is far from a holistic depiction of China’s global economic standing. Though PPP can serve some pur

Last month, in his address to the graduating cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point, President Barack Obama stated that some of America’s most costly mistakes since World War II were the result not of restraint, but of a “willingness to rush into military adv

Brazil recently hosted NETmundial, the first global conference on Internet governance, attended by 800 representatives of governments, corporations, civil-society organisations and technologists. Based on the notion of “multi-stakeholderism”, the meeting produced a 1