Latest news with #FreemanSpogliInstituteforInternationalStudies
Washington Post
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
‘At this point, we are a liberal democracy in decline'
With President Donald Trump now having been in office for more than 100 days, concern is growing that he is accumulating so much executive authority that American democracy is in peril. A New Yorker headline asks — in reference to 'other countries' that 'have watched their democracies slip away gradually' — 'Is It Happening Here?' I put the question last week to one of the world's foremost authorities on democracy. Larry Diamond is the Mosbacher senior fellow of global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
South China Morning Post
26-03-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Beijing would not attack Taiwan if it believed trade would suffer, senators hear
Beijing would not invade Taiwan if it believed that US allies and partners would respond by severing trade ties, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard on Wednesday, as expert witnesses urged lawmakers to acknowledge that allies' strategic contributions go beyond defence spending. Advertisement Noting that China is 'an export-driven economy', Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said that 'if they believed trade with US allies and partners would stop if they attacked Taiwan, they would never do it'. Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province, to be eventually united with the mainland, by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island militarily. Mastro and other witnesses at the committee hearing stressed that US allies and partners could provide Washington much more than just financial aid to help deter China militarily. 'Too often burden-sharing is scoped down to a single figure, which is, 'how much is a country spending [as a] percentage of GDP on defence?'' said Randall Shriver, board chairman of the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington-based think tank. Advertisement 'That doesn't always tell the whole story,' he said, noting that the Philippines has been making more military sites available to the US despite only spending 1.5 per cent of its GDP on defence. Since his return to the White House in January, US President Donald Trump and his advisers have emphasised requiring allies and partners to spend specific percentages of their GDPs on defence, at times threatening to withdraw US military support if they fail to do so.
