Maritime Awareness Project

A new website that I’ve helped to develop, the Maritime Awareness Project, launched yesterday. The main feature is an interactive map that allows users to depict different dimensions of the dispute.  The goal is to illuminate the complexity and consequences of maritime disputes in the South China Sea and East China Sea.

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China’s Nuclear Strategy

In a new article in International Security, Fiona Cunningham and I examine whether China will abandon its long-standing nuclear strategy of assured retaliation for a first-use posture. We reach three conclusions:

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China’s New Military Strategy

In a new article in the China Brief, I show that terminology in the 2015 defense white paper indicates that China has officially changed its national military strategy.  The goal of the new strategy is “winning informationized local wars,” with an emphasis on the maritime domain. This marks only the ninth military strategy that China …

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Conflict and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region

Last week, the Carnegie Endowment issued a strategic net assessment of the Asia-Pacific region that I and many others contributed to writing. The report takes a long view, looking out over the next 5-25 years, and outlines five possible futures that range for more cooperative to more conflictual outcomes as well as recommendations for avoiding …

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The Myth of China’s Counter-intervention Strategy

Chris Twomey and I have just published an article in The Washington Quarterly on Chinese military strategy. Increasingly, journalists, policy analysts and scholars as well as selected U.S. government documents describe China as pursuing a ”counter-intervention” strategy to forestall the U.S. ability to operate in a regional conflict.  Moreover, the concept of counter-intervention (fan ganyu) is …

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Territorial and Maritime Boundary Disputes in Asia

My contribution to newly published The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia is a chapter on territorial and maritime boundary disputes in the region. The main findings from the chapter are: Since 1945, Asia has been more prone to conflict over territory than other regions in the world. Asia accounts for the greatest number of disputes …

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