The US push to promote “burden sharing” among its allies in the Indo-Pacific has seen it focusing on increasing its military capacity while lowering the political temperature in an effort to reassure its allies. But some analysts have questioned its chances of succeeding, arguing that this deterrence strategy has intensified great power rivalry and polarisation in the region, while driving deeper bilateral cooperation between China and Russia on the one hand and Russia and North Korea on the...

The security pact signed on Friday by three of the world’s most powerful Muslim nations with a vow to enhance collective deterrence remains far from what many are calling an Islamic Nato, according to experts. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf’s top oil exporter, Nato member Turkey and Pakistan, a nuclear-armed South Asian state, would be challenged by diverging strategic interests and weak mutual defence capacity, they said. The Mecca pact’s statement that...

Though the relationship between the Chinese and Indian governments has been thawing, Beijing has yet to win over the Indian public as it lacked a long-term strategy and communication channels, according to Chinese researchers. Beijing needed to find common ground by expanding its bottom-up strategies as “a matter of urgency”, Zhou Qingan, dean of Tsinghua University’s school of journalism, and Li Yiming, a research assistant at the school argued in a recent article. In a June paper published in...