Some people who know me don’t believe it, but as a child I wasn’t interested in international politics. But, like most people in Britain in the 1970s, I knew the name of the Saudi oil minister, because he was a household name. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, known in the West as Sheikh Yamani, was the oil… Continue Reading
Tag Archives: Geopolitics
Has the US “lost” China a second time?
The shift of US attitudes on China owes as much to American disappointments as it does to changes in China’s behaviour * After the revolution that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949, a shocked US foreign policy establishment began an internal blame game as to who “lost” China. The US had previously… Continue Reading
India and China
Recent news of increasingly lethal clashes on the long and disputed border between India and China raises a question, how have the two most populous nations on Earth previously mostly kept the peace? * “Good fences make good neighbours” Robert Frost, Mending Wall Western journalists and commentators often refer to Asia as if it were… Continue Reading