The U.S. State Department has imposed visa sanctions on an unspecified number of current and former Thai officials for their role in last month’s deportation of 40 Uyghur asylum seekers to China. In a statement on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was immediately moving to impose visaContinue Reading
Until recently, the United States has been at the forefront of the fight to stop China’s atrocity crimes against Uyghurs. The U.S. Congress passed landmark legislation such as the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). The government placed 144 Chinese companies on theContinue Reading
In late 2021, Typhoon Rai, locally known as Supertyphoon Odette, rocked the Caraga and Southern Leyte regions of the Philippines. The Category 5 storm brought torrential rain, landslides, and storm surges that killed more than 400 people and temporarily displaced hundreds of thousands. It was just one of many “onceContinue Reading
On February 27, authorities in Thailand forcibly returned 40 Uyghurs to China. The United States didn’t want to see them sent back. Congressional offices had issued statements of concern in the weeks leading up to the deportation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in his January confirmation hearing that aContinue Reading
The U.S. and Japanese governments have warned their citizens against traveling to Thailand, in the wake of the government’s secretive deportation of 40 Muslim Uyghur asylum seekers to China. In an amended security alert posted on the U.S. embassy’s website on Friday, it said that the February 27 deportation hadContinue Reading
Thailand has ignored international pleas for mercy and secretly deported at least 40 Uyghurs to China, prompting an angry response from Washington and accusations that Bangkok has bowed to pressure from Beijing. Their deportation, after 11 years of “inhumane” detention in the Thai capital, dashed their hopes for political asylumContinue Reading
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul held a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on February 15 in Munich, Germany on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. The Cho-Rubio bilateral meeting is the first meeting between the top diplomats of South Korea and the United States sinceContinue Reading
Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, summarizing a key belief of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy thinking, said in an interview that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the ColdContinue Reading
The return of Donald Trump as U.S. president marks an important crossroads in the future of two emergent Indo-Pacific security frameworks: the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States; and AUKUS, the trilateral partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Both institutions played a keyContinue Reading
One of the Trump administration’s first foreign policy acts, less than a day after the inauguration, was convening the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (FMM) on January 21. The FMM involved wide-ranging discussions addressing different dimensions of the Indo-Pacific, culminating with a consensus on the salience of “thinking bigger,” and aContinue Reading
