Category: Global Politics
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The Ant Has Bad Dreams
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space”, Hamlet said in his namesake play. This year, ASEAN has been Thailand’s nutshell and its chairmanship has allowed the government to exercise a degree of leadership over an unwieldy coalition. Given that Thailand’s previous chairmanship of ASE1AN in 2009 was borderline…
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Hierarchy Is What States Make Of It
My article on international relations and the rise of China won an Honorable Mention award from the John Quincy Adams/National Interest 2019 essay competition! It is featured on the Realist Review and on the John Quincy Adams Society website.
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Autocracy Hits a Roadblock
“The end of the republic has never looked better”, Barack Obama joked at his last White House Correspondent’s Dinner. That was back in 2016, the year that saw Donald Trump win the presidency despite what seemed like insurmountable odds. Early 2017 saw a flurry of gloomy predictions. David Frum wrote hypothetically in his piece in…
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The Republican Party is Complicit
“You must think Americans are so stupid,” an American friend said to me in a state of despair that the American president is hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly stupid, or hopelessly blackmailed, or all three. President Donald Trump’s terrible, no good, very bad European trip has concluded, and it was, possibly, the most disastrous overseas visit by…
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What Does Kim Jong-un Want?
By this point, there is little need to state that President Donald Trump was completely out-negotiated by Kim Jong-un. Trump got little in return other than a rerun of statements already made in 1992 and 2005, except in even weaker terms, including a vague commitment to denuclearisation. The president, on the other hand, was played…
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The Day America Abdicated World Leadership
I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump…I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness…Imagine Trump doing Brexit. He’d go in bloody hard… There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.…
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Trump, Thaksin and Democracy
Some years ago, I enabled the snowing plugin on this blog so that every December, it snows on the posts that I publish. Perhaps lost in the busyness of college life has been my sense of time, and it took me by surprise when I opened this site and found snow falling on Paul Ryan’s…
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China Steps Forward
It is common to refer to the President of the United States as the most powerful man in the world. This, after all, is not unreasonable; the United States since the end of the Cold War has been the undisputed leader of a unipolar world, possessing the greatest wealth and military muscle the world has…
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All the President’s Nannies
It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning. — Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) October 8, 2017 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Adult Day Care Centre. That was the term Senator Bob Corker chose for the White House after President Donald Trump unleashed an early morning…
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Vanquished, Not Vanished
“Stronger Together” was the slogan that Hillary Clinton had chosen for her election campaign. It was a firmly inclusive message, but it was an ironic one for the candidate. She has never really been a unifier. Whether or not the hatred for her from both the left and the right can be justified is another…
Ken Mathis Lohatepanont 