2016 outlook

“Who is Trump?” asks a Chinese official close to the country’s military. “We don’t really know.” China’s leaders are perplexed by the Republican candidate for president, and they look, depending on the moment, angered, fascinated, or terrified. Yet even though Donald Trump incessantly vilifies China, state media comments suggest the ...

The intelligence briefings scheduled for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, perhaps as early as this week, may cause some serious reality to be injected into the current presidential campaign rhetoric – but I doubt it. In fact, because the proposed briefings have already become a political football, I believe they ...

The Republican National Convention ended Thursday night with nominee Donald Trump vowing to be the “law and order candidate.” His speech was peppered with national security pronouncements, from criticizing Democratic president candidate Hillary Clinton’s legacy as Secretary of State to declaring that under his plan the United States will destroy ...

President Vladimir Putin opened his marathon year-ender news conference in December with comments on the state of the Russian economy, and immediately began coughing. Some political observers noted that Mr. Putin tends to cough when he’s uncomfortable about something. If so, he had plenty to be nervous about. His number ...

China enters 2016 facing an increasingly complicated domestic political and economic environment and growing challenges to its assertive foreign policy. Since becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has sought to consolidate his power and rejuvenate the Party through a sweeping campaign against ...

We humans are fond of organizing our lives around arbitrary constructs. Like calendars for example. Many businesses and government departments engage in strategic thinking only at the start of a new year, as if social and economic forces were governed by calendrical functions. And so we have the tradition of ...