Headlines

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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Ex-CIA disguise chief says AI elevates spy wars to new heights

Artificial intelligence (AI) has sharpened the tools of espionage and deception on all sides, giving spy agencies new power to identify and groom human sources while also arming adversaries with synthetic identities and deepfakes that are increasingly difficult to detect.

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Patron problem: Kim Jong Un played Russia, rattled China and won

President Xi Jinping has, over the years, drastically cut short his foreign travels. More like Chairman Mao, he prefers to host world leaders in Beijing. His foreign visits that averaged about 14 trips a year during 2013–19 fell to one during the pandemic year 2020, to zero for

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India should think twice about a US trade deal

Even as American negotiators were sitting across the table in New Delhi this week discussing the contours of an interim trade agreement, Washington simultaneously unveiled additional Section 301 tariff proposals against India and 60 other countries. The timing itself reveals

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