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  • OPINION

    Belt and Road is China's 'manifest destiny'

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 07/09/2018

    » No national project of global reach carries as much stake and attracts as much attention as China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Conceived in 2013, the BRI is the colossal brainchild of President Xi Jinping and his government.

  • OPINION

    Maintaining what's left of rules-based order

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 20/07/2018

    » For anyone who is alive today, the world as we know it has never been so stirred and shaken. The international order based on a common set of institutions, rules and norms that used to be widely cherished and universally beneficial is unravelling before our collective and helpless eyes. From an emerging United States-China trade war and Beijing's militarised occupation of the South China Sea to Russia's revanchist annexation of Crimea, world order over the past several years has been breaking down. Those who once set the rules, principally the US, are breaking them, while aspiring new rule-setters, mainly China, have not found sufficient international reception. Rule-takers, such as the smaller states in Asean, suffer the most when set rules lose cohesion, lustre and abidance.

  • OPINION

    Prospects after Cambodia's fabricated poll

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 27/07/2018

    » While Thailand has a seemingly indefinite military government with no clear poll date, Cambodia is holding an election on July 29 with a foregone conclusion. After methodically taken apart oppositional forces, the incumbent government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, under the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), is set to win a landslide. At issue now will be what happens after the election. At least three dynamics are in play. How they intersect and enmesh will determine Cambodia's political future.

  • OPINION

    Taking Cambodia's bogus election to task

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 03/08/2018

    » It was always a foregone conclusion that Cambodia's incumbent government of Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People's Party (CPP) were going to win the July 29 election. Yet some observers anticipated a modicum of feigned legitimacy whereby a handful of smaller parties would gain a few seats in the National Assembly. Not bothering with any semblance of legitimacy, the CPP has apparently claimed all 125 parliamentary seats. Cambodia now has an elected dictatorship, naked and bare, in mockery of what passes as a free and fair election anywhere and in defiance of global democratic aspirations.

  • OPINION

    Myanmar needs new generation to lead it

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 10/08/2018

    » Southeast Asia suffers from a crisis of leadership whereby the old guard are unwilling to make way for new and younger leaders to emerge through compromise and accommodation to usher in change and reform while maintaining a measure of continuity.

  • OPINION

    Singapore a lesson for subpar countries

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 29/06/2018

    » It would seem a cliché to say Singapore has figured it out. But it has, more or less, especially when compared to its subpar neighbours.

  • OPINION

    Thai geopolitical balancing compromised

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 06/07/2018

    » Thailand is demonstrably famous for its foreign policy balancing. From the era of imperialism and two World Wars through the Cold War, Thailand's gifted geography and diplomatic finesse and skill shepherded the country's sovereignty and independence through the thick and thin of geopolitical headwinds. Whatever happens out there, the Thais (and their Siamese forebears) had a way to diplomatically navigate and geopolitically balance their national interests to stay out of harm's way.

  • OPINION

    What the rescue of the trapped boys means

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 13/07/2018

    » Global news cycles over the past two weeks have been saturated by Thailand's gripping story of 12 boys from a local youth football team and their 25-year-old coach trapped in a labyrinthine and partially submerged cave complex in the Chiang Rai hills in the north of the country. Even after their successful rescue, the story continues.

  • OPINION

    Southeast Asia-US relations under Trump

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 18/05/2018

    » Widely despised at home and abroad, US President Donald Trump is still in office well over a year into his controversial first term. Daily headlines from the leading media of the world have suggested from the outset that he is likely to be impeached, that his presidency is destined to be derailed due to this or that scandal. In the predominant view of the global intelligentsia more broadly, Mr Trump has been so damaging and toxic to the fabric of American democratic values and to the coherence and longevity of the rules-based liberal international order that has lasted over the past seven decades that he should not be allowed to last a full four-year term.

  • OPINION

    Lasting lessons from Malaysia for SE Asia

    News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 25/05/2018

    » Some have likened it to an "earthquake," while others have called it a "tsunami." However it is billed, Malaysia's election outcome still reverberates far and wide. Its political aftershocks yield lessons and considerations for politics in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, which holds the dubious distinction as the only parliamentary system in this region that does not know when it will next stage a poll.

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