It’s been a big day here on Capitol Hill, with Ambassador Crocker and General Petraus testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the situation in Iraq. The briefing provided prospective presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain with an opportunity to validate their own strategic perspectives on the war. Predictably, Clinton highlighted the practical problems associated with an open-ended military commitment, while McCain sought to capitialise on Petraus’s view that a premature withdrawal would be detrimental to US national security. Barack Obama is scheduled to have his turn soon. 

Beyond the political jockeying, the political and military outlook in Iraq is pretty bleak, and despite some positive developments, the general security situation is, according to Petraus, 'fragile and reversible.' More...

Greg Sheridan is right to be skeptical about the near-term prospects for turning the Six Party Talks into a more formal and permanent regional security institution. That the Talks have thus far failed to achieve North Korean denuclearization is perhaps less significant than Washington and Beijing’s capacity for engagement over shared interests. But, as Rory Medcalf points out, there are other practical impediments, not least of which is the exclusion of important actors such as India and ASEAN, and the elevated position such an institution would afford Pyongyang.

China’s willingness to engage in such an institution will depend on the degree to which it perceives such a mechanism as enhancing or constraining China’s regional freedom of action. More...

Greg Sheridan is right that China has been ‘brutal and clumsy’ in its ‘mismanagement of Tibet.’ What is especially puzzling about this latest overreaction is that it comes at a time when everything else seems to be going China’s way.

After all, Beijing is approaching the final stages in its preparation for the Olympics, an event widely seen as an international coming of age. Not only does the Chinese economy continue to steam along at an impressive rate, but new governments eager to assuage Beijing’s diplomatic sensitivities have emerged right across the region. Indeed, most countries, including Australia, have largely set aside concerns about China’s human rights in recent years, in the interest of cultivating broader relations with Asia’s rising power.

Why, then, has Beijing miscalculated so badly on Tibet, risking widespread international criticism and incurring the wrath of people like Nancy Pelosi? Two related explanations come to mind. More...

Sam Roggeveen said yesterday that: 

The Rudd Government did not 'kill' the quadrilateral dialogue with the US, Japan and India at the behest of China. As my colleague Rory Medcalf has noted, nobody was proposing a new round of that dialogue anyway.

I read the situation a little differently. More...

In response to my recent post about North Korean denuclearization, reader David Callard comments:

I have long wondered if there might not be a third possibility to those raised by Raoul Heinrichs; that the North Korean regime has some ultra-secret facility buried in a mountain somewhere that we have failed to detect, despite our best surveillance activities. Is this even a remote possibility?

Having been wrong on Iraq, Iran, and perhaps on North Korea’s uranium program, the US intelligence community’s track record on clandestine nuclear programs does not inspire confidence. Though I am in no position to know about the existence of secret facilities, I doubt very much, given North Korean concealment efforts, whether the US intelligence community could reliably account for the exact whereabouts of all the fissile material that is known to exist, let alone the nuclear devices that Pyongyang may possess. Herein lies the ‘Six Party’ strategic dilemma. More...

Christopher Hill is set to meet with his North Korean counterparts in Geneva in the coming days to re-energize the diplomatic process driving North Korea’s denuclearization. Negotiations have largely stalled since the New Year, as a result of a dispute over Pyongyang’s unwillingness to disclose the full extent of its nuclear program, particularly its uranium enrichment activities. Another key sticking point relates to Pyongyang’s proliferation activities, particularly as they pertain to Syria, which is suspected of having pursued its own nuclear program.

There are a couple of possible explanations for Pyongyang’s intransigence: More...

The Pentagon has handed down its annual report to Congress on China’s military power. Given that it is now in its eighth edition and beginning to get a little tedious, the release of this year’s report appears to have been nicely timed to coincide with an official Chinese announcement, ahead of its National People’s Congress meeting, that the PRC plans once again to increase its annual military spending by a whopping 17 percent. More...