Q & A Archive

This week, a Chinese airline, China Eastern, canceled 106 round-trip flights to Taiwan around the busy Lunar New Year, citing a refusal by Taiwanese authorities to approve the flights. The spat is the latest in an escalating row between Beijing and Taipei at a time when the Trump administration’s policies in East Asia are raising concerns among some U.S. allies in the region. In an email interview, Joel Atkinson, an associate professor of East Asian international relations at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea, discusses what’s behind the heightened tensions, how Washington fits in, and what […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss the Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy, which declares that “inter-state competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern of U.S. national security.” For the Report, Peter Gill talks with Peter Dörrie about Nepal’s Muslim minority, which remains marginalized despite the country’s recent progress in promoting religious pluralism. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get some of our uncompromising analysis delivered […]

In late December, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had a tense meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, during a visit to Moscow—the first by a British foreign secretary in five years. Johnson and Lavrov clashed over allegations of Russian meddling in European elections and the U.K.’s Brexit referendum. Lavrov admitted it was “not a secret” that the relationship between Russia and the U.K. was at a “very low point.” In an email interview, Duncan Allan, an associate fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House in London, discusses the nature of the tensions, their economic impact and […]