Time for Taiwan to be called Taiwan
It’s August in Pennsylvania. That means kids across the commonwealth are getting ready to return to school. But a talented few from Hollidaysburg are too busy to sharpen their pencils just yet: They’re...
Republic of China
A Diplomat’s Trip to Taiwan Draws the Ire of the CCP
The Chinese foreign ministry has expressed outrage over an ambassador’s visit to discuss the pandemic.
Op-eds
The Face-Off
Donald Trump has promised a foreign policy of muscular retrenchment, in which a better-resourced U.S. military intimidates our enemies without serving as a global cop. More than any pr...
Op-eds
Tiananmen and China’s Long March
In the 66 years since Mao Tse-tung founded the People’s Republic of China, there has been just one brief spell in which the people of China escaped the chains of their rulers, enough to spe...
Op-eds
The Iran Deal: Forget About Stability, Our Strategy Should Be Survival
As you’d expect, ...
Op-eds
The Tiananmen Reckoning
It’s 24 years since China’s government crushed the mass uprising we remember by the name of Tiananmen Square. I was there, reporting then for the Wall Street Journal’s...
Op-eds
Jeane Kirkpatrick Goes to Tahrir Square — Two starkly Different Visions of the Arab Spring
Thirty-three years ago, Commentary magazine published an article by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick that stands as one of the most influential essays in the history of American foreign policy....
Op-eds
Rising Sun and Dark Continent: Japan’s Courtship of Africa
On May 28, forty African heads of state and government trooped into the Pacifico Conference Centre in the Japanese port city of Yokohama to join their host, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukada, in kickin...
Op-eds
Eritrea: The Horn of Africa’s Rogue Regime
Last week, exasperated with Eritrea's continued violations of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and its increasing harassment of representatives at the American Embassy in Asmara...
Op-eds
Winds of War Blow Along Ethiopia-Eritrea Border
Two months ago in this column space, I warned that "a little-known border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia is rapidly escalating and threatens to not only the peace of the neighborhood,...
Op-eds
Thinking about Terrorism and Other Security Challenges in Africa
In last week's column, surveying developments in the former Somalia, Sudan, the Maghreb and Sahel, Nigeria and West Africa, and the rest of the continent, I concluded that "Through the c...
Op-eds
Enabling Mugabe to Cling On
Last Friday was the twenty-eighth anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence, although the country's long-suffering people of the country might be forgiven for not exactly marking the occas...
Op-eds
Botswana’s Success Sparkles amid African Gloom
While the world has been watching the pathetic spectacle being played out in Harare, Zimbabwe, as Robert Mugabe clings desperately to the levers of power he has held for nearly three decades (see...
Op-eds
Zimbabwe Zigzags Onto Another Rough Patch
The ongoing stand-off in Zimbabwe between incumbent President Robert Mugabe and the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, shows how much the political landscape can shift back and forth in t...
Op-eds
UN-Real Assembly
As the contributors to The National Interest symposium in the current issue note, there is an emergent consensus among foreign policy analysts of all political persuasions that “going...
Op-eds
Securing Africa
On February 6, 2007, President George W. Bush launched a major evolution in American military posture when he formally announced that he had directed the Pentagon to establish a new unified...
Op-eds
Kid Kabila and Congo’s Joyless Jubilee
Last week, the United Nations Security Council rescheduled for mid-May a planned fact-finding mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Officially, the trip was cancelled because of the...
Op-eds
What I Saw at Tiananmen
It's now 20 years since I ran through a cross-fire of tracer bullets, heading into Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4 to witness the end of the uprising in which mi...
Op-eds
Paying Tribute
As President George W. Bush departs on a trip to Asia, one wonders if he and the twenty-five other world leaders who plan to attend the opening ceremonies in Beijing are aware that they are participants in a diplomatic ritual older than the ancient Olympiads: the Chinese tradition of tributary diplomacy.
Op-eds
Meanwhile, at Scandals-R-the-UN
One way to bury a scandal is to hold a confidential investigation, ignore the findings and pension off the alleged culprit. The United Nations, helped along by diplo...