When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on August 7, one sentence did most of the work. "An armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against all three." Commentators reached for the obvious comparison: this is NATO's Article 5, transplanted to the three main military powers of the Muslim world.

In February 2026, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) delivered findings that had the potential to reorder the region's sustainability conversation. At the present pace, the Asia-Pacific will miss 103 of 117 measurable Sustainable Development Goals targets by 2030, or 88 percent. The familiar explanations of insufficient finance, short electoral cycles, and the competing pressures of poverty reduction are not wrong. But they s

Selective enforcement by governments that identify themselves as defenders of the rules-based international order may impose substantial costs on that order's credibility. Open challenges from Russia, China and other revisionist powers remain significant, but perceived inconsistency among established powers creates a different problem: states may come to view international law as shaped by strategic alignment rather than applied as a common standard.

A vibrant crowd in yellow and green fills the street, waving Brazilian flags among city buildings. (Photo: Unsplash) Brazil’s presidential election is being framed as another battle between left and right. But beneath the familiar political divide lies a question with consequences far beyond Brazil’s borders: can Latin America pursue its own interests without being pulled into the orbit of one great power or another? On October 4, Brazilians will head to the polls to vote for

Ever since the war between the United States and Iran started in February 2026, Washington’s ability to maintain its security commitments in the Indo-Pacific has come under renewed scrutiny. The U.S. has recently shifted significant military assets toward the Middle East to sustain its military campaign against Iran including the redeployment of the USS George Washington from Indo-Pacific to the Middle East to help its counterpart the USS Abraham Lincoln. The pressure is al

It was not surprising when I learned that my niece was prioritising American universities as her first choice, considering that she is studying in a private high school in the US. Like many affluent Chinese families , her parents encouraged her to pursue her studies in the US, believing that the US offers better education than China and possibly a higher quality of life, with more opportunities to progress in professional life after graduation.

The 2026 V-Dem Democracy Report identifies just 18 countries as democratising in 2025 after fifteen years of global stagnation. Yet it also shows that democratic “U-turns” are possible. The urgent question is not only why democracies backslide, but why some elected right-wing populist projects are much harder to reverse than others, even after their leaders lose office.

Contemporary discussion of the technology rivalry between the United States and China often centers on chips and the critical minerals used to make them. The phrase "chip war" became prominent in 2022, when Chris Miller published a book titled “Chip War”, which explained how central semiconductors had become to nearly every industry. That importance has only grown since OpenAI released ChatGPT weeks later. The subsequent AI race between the two countries has pushed semiconduc

Last week, the United States and Canada came within an hour of finalizing a new trade agreement. Then the deal collapsed. Washington imposed 50% tariffs on billions of dollars of Canadian goods, and Ottawa promised to hit back “dollar for dollar.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he walked away because the United States asked “too much, offered too little.” Leaked details of the American demands read less like a compromise between allies and more like a blueprint for

The joint defence agreement signed in Mecca on August 7 between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan is one of the most important developments in the changing security architecture of the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. The agreement was signed by Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Regional security and stability have been the raison d’etre of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and these propelled its decades-old brand of regionalism. The evolution of the global security landscape—from state to human security—has called for the shift to a flexible process and challenged the bloc’s conventional ASEAN Way. This movement has been long recognized by leaders but attempts to reshape remain challenging as ASEAN is and remains a dependent variab

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) should be understood not only as a neutral cooperation platform and more as China’s strategic hedge against Western‑dominated AI governance. By establishing a China‑centered intergovernmental organization with open membership, a focus on sovereignty, and a development‑first agenda, Beijing is seeking an alternative venue to set AI rules and norms on its own terms, rather than simply adapting to standards emerg

During my legal education and professional career, I have had the opportunity to study and work across multiple legal traditions. From legal studies in the Netherlands and Poland, a short stint at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in Phnom Penh, to practicing law in Indonesia, pursuing a Juris Master degree in Chinese Law at Tsinghua University, and participating in international arbitration and cross-border commercial matters, I have come to appreci

One of the most significant trends shaping international affairs today is the rise of economic security as a central pillar of foreign policy. Increasingly, countries no longer view trade, investment, energy, technology, and supply chains solely through an economic lens. These issues are now inseparable from national resilience, strategic competitiveness, and security.

Ambassador Gurjit Singh's recent book on India–ASEAN relations borrows its title from Southeast Asia's most polarising fruit, ‘The Durian’, intoxicating or repellent depending entirely on the palate doing the tasting. Similarly, the same book was published in Singapore under a different name altogether, “The Mango Flavour”, after India's own iconic fruit instead. Even the author couldn't describe this relationship the same way to both audiences, which is a fitting place to st

In recent years, alarming growth has been seen in India’s nuclear arsenal, facilitated and supported by its Western partners with wilful oversight. According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), India possessed 190 nuclear warheads as of January 2026, up from 180 the previous year. The SIPRI Yearbook 2026 has further authenticated these number. In addition, the SIPRI report has revealed that India had zero deployed nuclear warheads in 2025 and 12 deployed in early

The ink hasn’t even dried, if there’s ink at all. President of the United States Donald Trump declared that the US and Iran have agreed to a peace treaty, which means that free passage will now start through the Strait of Hormuz. It was blocked until February 28 when the US and Israel attacked Iran. Trump characteristically declared it a triumph. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” he wrote on Truth Social.

When the United States left the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, many Americans were told a better agreement would follow. Years later, the question is not only whether that promise was kept. The question is whether the collapse of that diplomatic framework helped create a crisis whose costs may now reach American families through gasoline prices, inflation, interest rates, credit-card debt, taxes, and market instability.

The Quad, often incorrectly yet famously known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is a grouping comprising the United States, Australia, Japan, and India. With its origins tracing to the Tsunami Core Group (TCG) formed in 2004, the purpose of the grouping is to coordinate in the domains of maritime security, supply chains, technology, climate, and humanitarian assistance, with the larger goal to promote a free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific.

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from reading history and feeling it describe the present. Pick up Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, his meticulous account of how Europe stumbled into the First World War and you will find yourself underlining sentences not because they are about 1914, but because they feel uncomfortably relevant to 2025. Leaders operating on assumption rather than understanding. Alliances that constrain more than they protect. A system hum