Before we turn to our 12 things to watch in the global economy in 2020, let us briefly review 2019. The deterioration in the global economic and geopolitical environments continued unabated last year. In a tumultuous year that has now drawn to a close, the global economy experienced its slowest growth rates in a decade,...Read More

This year’s G7 annual gathering of developed economies in Biarritz, France, yielded very little in the way of solutions for a sagging and troubled global economy, and the various social and environmental challenges facing globalisation. The ineffectiveness of this select group in influencing the course of world development is doubtless due to a variety of...Read More

The escalating USA trade war must be seen as part of a much wider US push-back against a rising China, and indeed much of the global system that is considered not to be acting in the American interest. For China, this raises concerns over the impact on its economy and highly integrated domestic and international...Read More

Just days before the Islamic Republic of Iran celebrates its 40th anniversary on February 11, Europe has offered it a gift. Ever since last May, when Washington pulled out of the nuclear deal signed under then-President Barack Obama and reimposed sanctions on Iran, Europe has promised to soften the economic blow by offering Iran a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV). Last week, after months of...Read More

We need to get real about Russia and China—or risk being led into another disastrous war. Realism, as a theory of foreign policy, has been linked in the popular mind of the west both to cynical Realpolitik—in the mould of Henry Kissinger—and to a propensity to wage war. The first charge has a superficial validity....Read More

For many years, it has been a standard trope of liberal writing on hostilities between nations and ethnicities that these are not rooted either in inherited conflicts or real contemporary clashes of interest but are rather “constructed” by wicked political elites to serve their own political and economic ends. This is an argument that has...Read More

Trump’s Iran threats pull from the playbook he used for North Korea, but Iran is a different kind of adversary altogether. US President Donald Trump’s tweet in all capitals, warning Iranian President Hassan Rouhani of a catastrophic war and to “BE CAUTIOUS!”, was, some would say, typical Trumpian bluster, and not dissimilar to his first...Read More

It is increasingly clear that for powerful elements of the Trump administration backed by the Israel lobby, the demand for a renegotiation of the Iran nuclear deal is only a thin cover for a strategy of regime change in Iran. This has been explicitly stated by some of them. Mike Pompeo’s twelve demands to Iran...Read More

After President Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal in early May, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, later in the same month, announced that crushing new sanctions against Iran are coming in a speech at the Heritage Foundation – unless Iran effectively agrees to a ‘self regime-change’, in the words of Jonathan Cristol writing for...Read More

The UK’s Centre of Economic and Business Research said in its recently released 2018 World Economic League Table that China’s economy will overtake that of the US, in exchange rate terms, by 2032. Some… THE FULL ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE ON THE WEBSITE OF THE BANGKOK POST.Read More