The chair and secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plan to travel to Myanmar this week even as the 10-nation group remains divided on how to respond to the military coup there, four diplomatic sources have said. Myanmar is a member of ASEAN which has a policy of non-interference in the affairs of members, but it has led the main diplomatic effort to resolve the crisis that has engulfed the country since 1 February when the military staged a

The late George Shultz, United States (US) Secretary of the Treasury under President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, was one of the finest public servants in recent American history. When I was the last British governor of Hong Kong, he once offered me wise advice about dealing with the People’s Republic of China.

The special ASEAN leaders meeting conducted on Saturday 24 April indicates a collective attempt by the regional organisation to seriously deal with the deteriorating situation in Myanmar based on “the ASEAN way”. The face-to-face forum, hosted by Indonesia at the ASEAN secretariat in Jakarta, resulted in a five-point-consensus; summarising plans to stabilise the political turmoil in Myanmar. This agenda, however, has attracted supports as well as criticisms towards ASEAN.

Philippines and China have long shared histories, kinships, and cultural affinities, which could be traced back to pre-colonial times in the Philippines, meaning before the Spanish colonisation.

Time and again, the deceptive and misleading “Chinese Threat” rhetoric has been hyped-up by the political detractors of the Duterte administration and by some mainstream media outlets; capitalising on the current skirmish in the South China Sea (SCS) involving the alleged more than 200 Chinese fishing vessels spotted in the Whitsun Reef or commonly known to Filipinos as the Julian Felipe Reef. One of the obvious reasons is to discredit President Rodrigo Duterte’s “rapprochement” poli

United States (US) President Joe Biden has signed an executive order that imposes a slate of new sanctions against Russia, as well as expelling 10 diplomats from the US, in response to a massive Russian hacking campaign that breached vital federal agencies, as well as for election interference.President Biden said he warned Russia President Vladimir Putin about the sanctions when they spoke by telephone in a “candid, respectful conversation” on 13 April.

India will produce more than one billion more COVID vaccine doses by the end of next year in an initiative launched Friday with the United States (US), Japan and Australia, challenging China as the four leaders held their first-ever joint summit.US President Joe Biden, who has vowed to reinvigorate alliances in the face of growing worries about China, met virtually with the three nations' prime ministers as they pledged together to defend a "free and open" Indo-Pacific region.&

I don’t know whether United States (US) President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their foreign-policy advisers have read Robert Axelrod’s classic book on international relations, The Evolution of Cooperation.

Directly or indirectly, the military has always called the shots in Myanmar.

Several issues involving China and the Philippines had once again threatened the flourishing and warm bilateral relations between the two countries and these include: (a) the alleged harassment of a Filipino Fisherman by the Chinese Coast Guard; (b) the alleged intrusion of a Chinese survey ship which was reported as intruding Philippine maritime territory; (c) the seizure of a dredger off Bataan by the Philippine Coast Guard and the Bureau of Customs for illegal and unauthorised presence abo