Tag: Jonah Lo
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A sustainable “Chinese Asia” is a wrong, US-centric idea
It is often fashionable, in present political discourse, to claim that the 21st century will be a Chinese century, and that in some great return to historical norm, mastery of Asia, if not the entire world, has swung back to the Chinese. However, does China really have what it takes to maintain control over Asia?…
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Cowardly Eagle: Germany’s Geopolitical Weakness despite Economic Dominance
By all economic measures, Germany should be the unquestioned European superpower, with all the nations of the world rushing to court or accommodate it. However, Germany’s lack of political and military engagement have made it a frustrating ally and a tempting target. This article shall analyse the nature, reasons and implications of this geopolitical weakness…
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Returning Empire: Pan-Europa, African Order and other French Ambitions
With a retreating and increasingly politically unreliable United States, France has sought to accelerate American withdrawal from Europe and fill that void with French influence, especially with regard to replacing NATO with a de facto French-controlled EU military. In doing so, it seeks to live up to its proud history as the principal geopolitical force…
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DotA: Conceptualizing Tactical and Operational Dynamics of war
Gaming has had a long history in relation to the exploration and teaching of military concepts. While extremely old games such as chess and its global variants have tangential or thematic relationships to war, the first game designed to deliberately represent military concepts was the Prussian Kriegsspiel, a map-based game with two teams and an…
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Sid Meier’s Civilization: Geopolitical Realism vs Constructivism
Sid Meier’s Civilization is a turn-based strategy game about controlling a Civilization from the dawn of history to the modern and future age, incorporating ideas of military conquest, cultural imperialism and economic base building. It is a “4X” game, a term that broadly refers to the core actions of Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. While…
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Korean Reunification would be Catastrophic for Asia
Korea Reunification has been long been the principal objective of both North and South Korean foreign policy. However, even if South Korea’s perfect scenario can be achieved, and the two Koreas were able to reunify peacefully under a South Korean democratic government, this would result in massive problems for regional order. This piece will aim…
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Tyranny as Necessity: Syria’s social immolation for regime preservation
Through fomenting racial and religious hatred, Bashar al Assad engineered a situation wherein all minorities would be forced to support him for fear of retribution from the majority Sunni Arab population, thus allowing him to build a broad coalition of minority sects willing to die for him to protect their own people. Along the way,…
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Identity as Adversary: Russia as Anti West
In an effort to compensate for its material deficiencies, Russia has constructed an ideology and national identity structured around opposition to a perceived West. This has allowed it to construct otherwise unlikely alliances with state actors and become ideological bedfellows with populist nationalists and anarcho-communists, in exchange for limiting its diplomatic flexibility and forcing it…
UnderStated 