Category: Diplomacy

The leaders of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, members of the so-called AUKUS alliance, signed a landmark pact valued at nearly $400 billion that will allow Australia to deploy long-range nuclear-powered submarines for the first time. Australia will procure at ...

The Chinese government warned that the deployment of nuclear-powered attack submarines to Australia would provoke a dangerous new arms race and undermine the increasingly fragile stability in the Asia-Pacific region. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin issued a blunt response when ...

This year-old map produced by the UK-based think tank Council on Geostrategy is circulating widely on Twitter this week following Tuesday's AUKUS summit in California and last week's comments by President Xi Jinping that the U.S. and its allies are "encircling" China.

For the second time in a week, the Chinese government has issued a warning to the Philippines not to grant the U.S. military access to more bases in the country. An editorial in Tuesday's edition of the state-run China Daily ...

New details are emerging about the landmark diplomatic deal brokered by China for Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations. The initial excitement about the prospects for peace between these two Persian Gulf rivals has given way to a more ...

China will host a summit between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council later this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. The summit with the six-country bloc (made up of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait) will further solidify the normalization of diplomatic ...

The U.S. State Department dismissed suggestions that China’s brokering of a diplomatic thaw between Iran and Saudi Arabia reflects a diminishment of the United States’s influence in the Middle East. Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that: “In any way you look at it, America is deeply engaged with the ...

Few countries are as directly affected by the Saudi-Iran deal as Israel. The announcement seemed to have caught the Netanyahu government off guard and occasioned intense discussion, with incumbent and opposition politicians blaming each other for appearing “weak” and lessening Israel’s clout in the region. ...

As Israel’s famously feisty commentariat lays into the China-brokered Iran-Saudi thaw, the country’s reactions will likely have broader impacts. Israel’s own role in the region’s security landscape is at play, but its close relationship with the United States will also influence how Washington deals with the broader ...

India has asked banks and traders to avoid using Chinese yuan to pay for Russian imports, three government officials involved in policy making and two banking sources said, because of long-running political differences with its neighbor. India, which has emerged as ...

Friday's news that China brokered the final stage of a diplomatic détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia triggered a torrent of analysis in major news publications around the world. From Asia to the Middle East to the United States, two consistent ...

Given that China and the Mideast are two of the three primary obsessions among U.S.-based national security think tanks (Russia being the third, of course), it shouldn't be a huge surprise that analysts reacted very fast with their assessment of Friday's rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. ...