The theme of last year’s Shangri-La dialogue was the need to build trust and confidence. As Vietnam’s Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, said then: ‘If trust is lost, all is lost’. Well, trust is lost. This …
The unfolding strategic environment in Asia is generating two strategic competitions: one horizontal and one vertical. The horizontal competition is highly visible: indeed, we see the evidence of it almost daily, as regional countries contest …
In the last two weeks, there have been a number of articles circulating (including here, here, here and here) that Indonesia has formally recognised a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea. This …
‘China’s maritime mastery of the South China Sea appears unstoppable’ proclaimed a DefenseNews article reporting on the current naval stand-off between the Philippines and China. Such thinking feeds into a growing perception among analysts that …
While much of the world was busy watching Russia swallow Crimea, few realised that an also dangerous territorial tit-for-tat had begun to unfold earlier this month more in the South China Sea. At Second Thomas …