While China’s influence in Southeast Asia is inevitable, the region welcomed Secretary Blinken’s recent trip as a counterweight to Beijing, says USIP’s Brian Harding: “[The region] wants balance, which means they want the United States to be as engaged as possible.”
U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.
An uptick in the conflict between Myanmar’s military and an ethnic armed organization in western Rakhine State is raising new concerns about the fate of the Rohingya population. In 2017, over 800,000 Rohingya, a mostly Muslim community, fled to Bangladesh to escape genocide committed against them by members of Myanmar’s military in Rakhine State. Now, emboldened by the military’s increasing vulnerability in the face of an armed resistance, the Arakan Army has vowed to push aggressively to expand its territorial and administrative control across the state. But its leaders have been unclear about their plans to address the Rohingya issue.
On April 17, Solomon Islands held an election that was closely watched by China and the United States and its partners. In the following weeks, members of parliament (MPs) jockeyed to form a governing coalition, finally electing Jeremiah Manele as prime minister on May 2.
Despite obvious distractions from crises in other corners of the world, Haiti’s deepening disaster is belatedly drawing wider international attention. Critics of U.S. policy toward Haiti are emerging from all corners of the political spectrum — and there is much to be critical of, particularly if the timeframe is stretched to cover Haiti's political experience since the late 1980s and the transition from the Duvalier dictatorships. But in the here and now, these assessments short charge the admittedly tough odds of the most recent Caribbean Community- (CARICOM) managed mediation efforts from which has emerged Haiti’s Presidential Council, a transitional governance structure for the country.
A rising risk in southeast Europe is Russia’s sharpening of conflicts to block Moldova’s effort to join the European Union. The Kremlin is escalating a hybrid campaign to manipulate three Moldovan elections over the next 15 months. Moscow last week hosted the formation of a political bloc around its primary Moldovan ally, a fugitive billionaire convicted of the country’s worst-ever bank fraud — and sent a startling flood of pre-election cash that police seized at Moldova’s main airport. This is a critical season for Moldova’s democratic allies to help it defeat Russian disinformation and election subversion.