S P Seth

The US election result, with Donald Trump as president-elect, has thrown up so many issues and problems that will continue to be debated in the time to come. Both at home in the US and abroad, there will be cause for alarm at the turn the country appears to be taking. Only eight years ago, […]

The recent China visit of the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte created international headlines, as he seemed to upbend his country’s long-time relationship with the United States. Duterte was angry at the US criticism of his no-holds-barred policy of eliminating druggies, both users and pushers, and sought to pre-emptively warn off Barack Obama against raising the […]

Saudi Arabia is a political volcano waiting to implode though, as with most volcanoes, it is difficult to put any time scale on it. Indeed, the Saudi monarchy is aware, at some level, of political combustion and has been, for a long time, preemptively trying to hose down the simmering fire. One such occasion was […]

One doesn’t want to seem alarmist but the sound and fury of recriminations between the US-led west and Russia over Syria is worrying, to put it mildly. Russia’s military intervention on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has made quite a difference, and now they are pushing ahead with seeking control of the entire city of […]

Australia’s China dilemma is getting ever more serious regarding the need to strike the right balance between its strategic relationship with the US and increasingly deeper economic ties with China. Indeed, when a Chinese company was sold a controlling interest in the Port of Darwin in the country’s north, it raised such concern in the […]

What went wrong in Syria after a brief ceasefire, negotiated between the US and Russia, that didn’t hold? The ceasefire was intended to enable UN relief supplies to reach some of besieged people in Aleppo and elsewhere for, what looked like, eternity. There was even some hope at the time that the ceasefire might be […]

Who is this guy Rodrigo Duterte who promised to call President Barack Obama the “son of a whore” to his face? Well, he did say it but not to Obama’s face because he didn’t get the opportunity. Duterte is the new president of the Philippines, recently elected with a comfortable majority. And he won kudos […]

North Korea recently conducted its fifth and most powerful atomic test so far. Coming in the wake of its missile tests, it might soon have the capability to mount nuclear warheads to reach its targets. Its official news agency proclaimed that the nuclear test was retaliation against “US-led hostile forces” and showed “the toughest will […]

The recent European Commission finding that the US corporate giant, Apple, had paid almost no taxes on the sale of their products in Europe over the last decade highlights how the rich and the powerful can get away with murder, metaphorically speaking. On surface, of course, it all appeared legal because they were paying tax […]

Nobody really knows how the South China Sea sovereignty issue will be sorted out. It featured in one way or the other at the recent Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting and the follow-up East Asia summit in Laos. So far, China is resolute about its sovereignty claims regarding islands/islets/rocks that scatter around […]