Headlines

There is no military solution to the Middle East’s imbroglio

Back when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, I asked National Security Council officials, “Why are you expending all of your economic leverage, and political and diplomatic resources on stopping Iran from developing a bomb they don’t have

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China risks dirty hands from Prabowo’s tainted meal deal

For more than a decade, China’s relationship with Indonesia has been defined by railways, industrial parks, nickel processing plants and large-scale infrastructure. Now, China is beginning to associate itself with something far more politically sensitive: President Prabowo

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Beyond transparency: a better model for sovereign debt crises

For decades, the global financial community has treated sovereign debt crises like a broken thermometer: if we just improve the reading (transparency) and hold the technician accountable (through regulation and monitoring), the fever will break. Yet, from the streets of Colombo

Asia •

Bad timing for Indonesia to be living dangerously again

Bank Indonesia’s off‑cycle rate hike on June 9 underscored just how alarmed policymakers are about the trajectory of Southeast Asia’s largest economy. It also serves as an early warning to the rest of the world about the financial and economic storm clouds gathering over

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A question of trust in Prabowo’s Indonesia

A few weeks ago, I heard two seemingly contradictory views about Indonesia. One came from a business executive who has spent decades operating in the Southeast Asian nation. His broad assessment was that Indonesia is still too important to ignore. The market is large, the

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How Saudis really view the US-Iran war

Since the beginning of the Iran war, Saudi Arabia has been grappling with how best to respond to the expansion of Middle East conflict. Having issued condemnations of Tehran’s strikes on the kingdom – and other Gulf states – in response to the initial US and Israeli action in

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Will the Ukraine war bring regime change to Russia?

Volodymyr Zelensky recently suggested that the war in Ukraine was beginning to turn in his country’s favor. The Ukrainian president insisted that Russia was “losing the initiative each day.” These comments came days after Zelensky wrote an open letter to his Russian

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