The growing closeness between the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) sends some very mixed messages. The California venue for last week’s first-ever U.S.-hosted summit with ASEAN heads of state—the Sunnylands Resort at Rancho Mirage—seemed to illustrate the essential confusion: Is the relationship bright and hopeful, or just illusory? Prior to the summit, U.S. State Department officials were at pains to declare that it was “not about China,” which became more difficult to maintain with the revelation, late in the summit’s proceedings, that Beijing had placed surface-to-air missiles on an island in the South China Sea. [...]
Six months after suffering one of the greatest embarrassments of his term, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto breathed a sigh of relief early last month. “Mission accomplished: we have him,” he announced on Twitter: Drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most wanted man, had been recaptured by Mexican marines in the state of Sinaloa. But the implications of El Chapo’s escape and arrest do not just end at the border. The episode has reinvigorated security cooperation between the United States and Mexico, while shining a light on the partnership’s economic benefits, as well. El Chapo’s brazen July 2015 escape [...]
An iconic cover illustration of the New Yorker magazine once purported to show the stereotypical Manhattan resident’s view of the world: Looking west from 9th Avenue, half the page consists of a relatively detailed rendering of the city’s buildings and streets leading up to the Hudson River. Beyond that, a small patch of land, featureless but for several cartoonish mountains and place names, passes for America. Faintly visible in the distance beyond the Pacific Ocean are landmasses helpfully labeled as China, Japan and Russia. If one were to draw a similar cartoon illustration to represent how this year’s U.S. presidential [...]
