Every New Year, Xi Jinping gives a televised address from his office, in which two bookshelves can be partially seen in the background. The event prompts an online scurry to identify which new books the leader is reading. 

At his last address Xi had included, in addition to classics such as Marx’s Das Kapital, two books about …

Until last Friday, Donald Trump’s trade war with China had been relatively easy to ignore. Trump’s US$50 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese-produced goods, announced in June, were quickly matched by China, which caused pain to select groups such as vehicle manufacturers and farmers. But the damage could soon spread.

Trump’s plan to …

Unlike Jacinda Ardern, who left her eleven-week-old baby at home to make her first foreign trip as a mother, Scott Morrison chose not to attend this week’s Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru. Instead, Morrison will be represented by Marise Payne, the foreign minister, who insisted the prime minister’s absence from the eighteen-nation summit was not …

Courage and vision have been in short supply in Canberra of late, so it might be unfair to judge Australia’s most recent foreign minister by standards we have learnt not to expect.

Julie Bishop was not particularly creative or adventurous in the foreign ministry, and did little to reshape Australia’s relations with the region. She is known …

China tends to do everything on a grand scale – building huge high-speed rail networks, say, or globe-spanning trade routes – and this has extended to its vast abuse of human rights.

Earlier this month, a United Nations committee reported that more than a million people have been detained and another two million forced to attend indoctrination …

Australia’s currency and stock market dropped in recent days due to the activities of a fifty-year-old pastor from North Carolina, who has a congregation of twenty-five.

In 2016, Pastor Andrew Brunson was arrested in the Turkish city of Izmir after being accused of spying and of supporting a thwarted coup. His arrest angered American evangelicals …

Five years ago, China’s president, Xi Jinping, announced his “project of the century”: the Belt and Road Initiative, a trillion-dollar globe-spanning infrastructure scheme. It appeared to be a Sinocentric trade blueprint, or an attempt to extend Beijing’s influence, or a vague branding exercise – and it is probably a little bit of each.

The …

In one of the least surprising election results in recent history, Cambodia’s Hun Sen, who is among the world’s longest-serving prime ministers, extended his thirty-three-year reign by another five years on Sunday. The result was assured by the dissolving of the opposition last year, the jailing of its leader and a crackdown on the media. 

Seeking …

This week at California’s Stanford University – about as far from the White House as possible – Australia’s foreign affairs and defence ministers held two days of talks with their US counterparts.

Typically, this annual meeting receives little public attention. It is, like the Australia–United States alliance itself, an unremarkable …

Hours after he finished hosting a football World Cup that he allegedly secured through bribery, Vladimir Putin flew to Helsinki for a summit with US president Donald Trump, whose election he helped to secure through electoral meddling.

Since becoming leader unexpectedly in 1999, Putin has been on a quest to restore Russia’s status as a global …