“There’s a storm coming,” Police Superintendent Killian Tong is warned in City on Fire, Simon Elegant’s third novel, “and Hong Kong will look very different when it’s over.”

Storm or fire? Whichever apocalypse one prefers, Hong Kong is well into it on the story’s first page.

It’s the summer of 2019. The pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, which got worldwide sympathy a few years earlier with images of middle-aged baldies and students fending off police water cannons with umbrellas from golf courses and 7-11s, has evolved into something more vicious and violent. The state response, especially through the new paramilitary Special Tactical Squad, is even worse. Little tragedies start occurring on a regular basis and it all seems headed to a big one like Tiananmen.

One little tragedy involved Killian, a second-generation British policeman. At a demonstration, a protester took a swing at him with a pole. Killian raised his pistol in the air but another protester pulled it down. The pistol discharged, killing the first protester.

He’s on administrative leave pending an investigation, dealing with guilt and PTSD with his dog in an abandoned police station on Deep Bay, which separates Hong Kong from the mainland city of Shenzhen. In the 1960s, desperate refugees swam across the shark-infested bay to flee to British Hong Kong, and Shenzhen was farmland.

“In the space of a few decades, the obscure Chinese county town had transformed itself into to Hong Kong’s upstart younger sibling,” Elegant writes. “Now it was daaigo, the elder brother. The boss, though most Hong Kongers hadn’t clocked that yet.”

It’s one of the quirks of action stories that when a character is suspended from duties, he reliably manages to get into major trouble, often of a highly significant nature.

A corpse has been found without head, limbs, or genitals in a landfill nearby. The force is stretched thin. “The cockroaches are going crazy tonight,” a colleague explains. “Demos everywhere.” Killian has to lead the murder investigation.

But there are two special circumstances. The murder must be kept secret, ostensibly to avoid inflaming a public that would assume it to be an extrajudicial killing by police. Secondly, it has to be solved before a major announcement about Hong Kong’s National Security Law.

While not exactly a spoiler, a thematic clue to this murder comes from where the body was discovered: on a landfill composed of garbage. “The detritus of urban life: doorless refrigerators; rusting air conditioners; kitchen cabinets covered in a thick layer of nicotine-brown grease from years of stir frying…” A scavenger on the site suffers from a boil on his shoulder and his t-shirt is “soaked with pus.” Killian’s squad car has garbage dumped on it, a sign of contempt for the “garbage police.”

It’s a city of slime. “The reek of decay hung in the air,” Elegant writes. Corruption, both private and public—ultimately at the very highest level—is the solution to the murder mystery.

As he cross-crosses Hong Kong investigating the murder, Killian is also dealing with a family crisis. His younger stepsister Jun has been radicalized and the authorities are watching her—along with everyone else. “There are already five, maybe six hundred thousand cameras,” a colleague explains to him. “In another year there’ll be a million…We have the whole city under surveillance. Every person who is considered a threat is tagged orange or red. A little rectangle appears above their heads when they show up on our screens. Red is for arrest immediately.”

Jun is flashing orange.

The siblings are trapped on ever-receding political positions—peaceful protests for democracy becoming anarchic violence, protecting and serving transforming into political oppression—and much of the tension comes from wondering how their conflict will be resolved.

Though on the opposite pole, Killian grows to appreciate the protesters.

“My generation would have said their only duty was to themselves and their families,” he muses. “It was then I realized how much Hong Kong had changed. It wasn’t the money-grubbing, materialist refugee city that was our default image of ourselves. Somehow, we’d become a people who were ready to fight for their freedoms. Ready to sacrifice.”

Jun does eventually have to make a sacrifice, though not the ultimate one.

Elegant’s first novel, A Chinese Wedding, was an exploration of a claustrophobic cross-cultural marriage in Hong Kong, where he was born and partly raised. His second, A Floating Life, was expansiveness itself. An invented picaresque memoir by Tang Dynasty poet Li Po, it offered the warp and weft of everything Chinese: smells, superstitions, Confucian conformism, mystical Taoism, brigandry, astrology, and how to trap songbirds. Not to mention classical poetic forms and viscous camel urine. Li Po embodies China’s Golden Age, and Elegant dragged him through the low of sloshing through pig feces to a vertiginous flight on the back of an eagle.

City on Fire is being marketed as a “taut thriller,” and Elegant takes to pulp conventions with gusto. Sentences chug along on a series of threes, like the book’s first: “Light flooded into the room and Killian bolted upright, heart hammering, gasping.” Bigwigs with dubious ethics flick specks of dust off bare, polished desktops. Frustration manifests itself familiarly—”Killian reached down and picked up his coffee cup, cradling it, then, without thinking, hurled it against the wall”—as does fear: “Jun felt the icy clutch of doubt on the back of her neck.” A first look at the book’s chief heavy tells all. “Rivulets of sweat ran down the side of his face and into his T-shirt, molding it around his bulging deltoid muscles. His eyes were small in that big, glistening head, flat, black shards.”

But the book’s subtitle is “A novel of Hong Kong,” and it works as a literary novel about a historical turning point told through characters whose futures depend on it. The Hong Kong portrayed in City on Fire is filthy and very dark, but ultimately not without hope. “It was going to be a long, long night,” Elegant writes. “But Hong Kong would survive. And thrive. And be free again. Maybe not this year, or the next. But one day soon.”

The crisis in the Middle East has reinforced for China that, amid ongoing geopolitical fragmentation, economic resilience now depends on diversifying across multiple trade routes rather than relying too heavily on any single corridor. The immediate concern, of course, is energy. Prolonged disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, which appea…

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Reported interference by royal families, infuriating members of his government, could force Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to call for an early general election by year-end despite holding a 68 percent super-majority in the 222-seat parliament.

The issue is very sensitive, given the power of the royal families, particularly from Johor, and a descending attitude toward the press in Malaysia, with editors and reporters frequently being brought in by authorities to answer for their reporting. However, the current crisis is said to have been triggered by Johor Crown Prince Tunku Ismail, currently the state’s regent and acting ruler, who forced the state to dissolve its assembly and call for fresh elections this weekend. The outcome of the election, plus another one in August in the state of Negeri Sembilan, could dictate whether Anwar has to call general elections later this year.

Beyond that, the Selangor ruler has banned pig-farming in his state, causing an uproar among the non-Muslim Chinese who form about 22 per cent of the population and giving Anwar problems in trying to undo the situation. The regent of Pahang and the ruler of Johor are both demanding more share of the federal revenue. Negeri Sembilan has been plunged into constitutional and political crises in a squabble for power between rival wings of the royalty, forcing the dissolution of the state assembly two years ahead of its five-year term and adding to Anwar’s electoral problems.

The 78-year-old Anwar himself is fighting a popularity decline for failure to keep his electoral promises, making him a tempting target for the squabbling royal families. He came to power at the behest of the previous king, the Sultan of Pahang, who ordered him into a “unity government” with the archrival, deeply corrupt United Malays National Organization, after weeks of stalemate from a hung parliament in 2022, when for the first time since independence in 1957, no single political party won the requisite minimum 112 parliamentary seats to form the government. That led the king to offer it to Anwar, who hastily cobbled to gather an ideologically diverse coalition to form a government.

Technically, it is a “strong government” with more than a two-thirds majority, enough to pull off major constitutional amendments. But in reality, vested interests and ideological differences, many created by UMNO, which continues to seek power in its own right, have prevented Anwar from doing that. In the three and a half years he has been in power, he has always been a whisker away from having his government collapse.

Powerful states like Sarawak, which controls 26-parliamentary seats, and the once powerful UMNO which also has 26 seats, have exerted pressure on Anwar and extracted major concessions. But at the same time, some of the rulers – sensing Anwar’s weakness – have started flexing their muscles, in particular the rulers of Johor, Selangor and Pahang, albeit to a lesser extent.

The situation is a far cry from the interactions of one-time Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who took on the royalty, emasculating their political and legal sway, fomenting a major constitutional crisis in 1983 and following that up with sweeping 1993 constitutional amendments to strip them of the blanket legal immunity conferred on them during the British colonial reign. In 1994, the federal constitution was further updated to remove the king’s remaining power to delay bills, firmly establishing legislative and executive supremacy over the hereditary royalty.

While these moves directed executive power away from the sultans, the monarchy has occasionally seen renewed importance during national and political instability, of which Malaysia has had plenty over the past two decades. There are nine monarchs, each elected king every five years, meaning each gets to be the wearer of the king’s hat, a quite ornate affair, rather than for a lifetime.

Malaysia’s political system is based on the Westminster parliamentary system in combination with features of a federation. Nine of the states are constitutionally headed by traditional Malay rulers, collectively referred to as the Malay states. Of these, seven are hereditary monarchies based on primogeniture, and in Perak and Negri Sembilan. While they are supposed to be constitutional monarchs, the Malaysian rulers wield more power than that and have a large influence on the administration of the country – including in choosing the democratically elected prime minister and chief ministers of the state.

All rulers, except those of Perlis and of Negeri Sembilan, use the title of Sultan. The ruler of Perlis is styled the Raja, whereas the ruler of Negeri Sembilan is known as the Yang di-Pertuan Besar.

While the sultans are publicly venerated as guardians of Islam and protectors of the people, in fact, historically, they were basically warlords selected by the British as representatives to deal with the colonial government. Many have gotten in trouble with gambling and other debts and had to be bailed out by their respective state governments. The Johor royal family partly precipitated Mahathir’s 1994 constitutional move when the then sultan allegedly assaulted a hockey coach amid other allegations of royal interference in politics,

The Johor family, which controls the populous, wealthy state directly across the strait from Singapore, historically has wielded political, economic, and social influence extending far beyond that of Malaysia’s other monarchs. The current Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar serves as the country’s 17th Yang di-Pertuan Agong, or king. The current crisis has partly been created by the family’s demands for a larger share of state tax revenues to remain in Johor despite the fact that Sultan Ibrahim is a billionaire with highly diversified business interests, spanning real estate (including involvement in mega-projects like Forest City Johor, infrastructure, and telecommunications.

Last November, Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, the 41-year-old Crown Prince of Johor, managed to embroil the country in an embarrassing scandal when, frustrated with his country’s decades-long lacklustre performance in the international league tables, he came up with the idea of drafting international players and giving them heritage passports identifying them as Malaysian nationals. The scheme was uncovered by FIFA, and Malaysia was booted out of the World Cup competition.

It was hardly the first time Johor royalty had acted outside Malaysian social norms. Members of the family have frequently been embroiled in nightclub violence and other problems. A Johor Sultan four decades ago allegedly shot and killed a man walking on the Johor beach as a trespasser. He was never prosecuted, although the incident caused a major stir in the country and played a role in Mahathir’s campaign to break the power of the royalty.

Whatever the royals are up to, however, Anwar is fighting a popularity decline stemming from his own problems, compounded by growing disloyalty among the ranks of his coalition. He looks likely to be unable to hold the fort and may be forced to dissolve Parliament soon and call for fresh elections. The prognosis does not look good.

With fertility rates hitting record lows in Asian-Pacific states including China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Singapore, the looming demographic cliff-edge is cutting into the numbers of people filling out their militaries’ uniformed ranks, fundamentally challenging their ability to raise military power centered around the curre…

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Beginning next year, U.S. and UK nuclear-powered attack submarines are scheduled to rotate through Royal Australian Navy base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, with preparations and family relocations already in progress. At the same time, Australia’s submarine builder and maintainer ASC is pushing workforce expansion and the upskilling of Australians, including training in Pearl Harbor, to support future submarine sustainment and build a sovereign nuclear capability. At the recent Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference and Exhibition (IODS) in Perth, Asia Sentinel witnessed Abi Clayton, President of Rolls-Royce Submarines, describing a major production surge for all the new nuclear reactor plants for Australia’s submarine endeavor already being underway.

These developments are the fruits of AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK, and the U.S. launched in 2023, comprising the submarine enterprise (Pillar One) and long-term defense technology cooperation (Pillar Two). The submarine rotation period will be followed by Australia purchasing potentially up to five used Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines from the US starting in 2032, dependent on the US ramping up production to release boats. Then, Australia’s own nuclear-powered attack submarines will be jointly built, initially in the UK and ultimately in South Australia.

With Australia eventually basing up to 18 nuclear-powered attack submarines, the naval balance in the Indo-Pacific will be significantly changed to the detriment of China’s territorial ambitions, observers have told Asia Sentinel.

“The looming start of rotation at HMAS Stirling increases allied submarine presence closer to the South China Sea and the broader region, enhancing deterrence now rather than in a distant future,” said Gordon Flake, founding CEO of the Perth USAsia Centre.

“Given that Australia has one of the world’s largest exclusive economic zones, it will use its small navy mainly for backyard patrols, but the submarine will also have their roles within routine peacetime functions, including freedom of navigation operations alongside allies, translating into a stabilizing regional presence and representing a big shift relevant to Taiwan and the Philippines.”

Flake went on to point out that a key enhancement for deterrence comes from nuclear-powered subs’ improved capacity. As they remain submerged for extraordinarily long periods, their locations are virtually unpredictable, thereby delivering strategic ambiguity. By contrast, Australia’s existing diesel-electric submarines must snorkel every 12–24 hours and have limited depth and duration, making their locations more predictable.

For his part, James R. Holmes, a professor at the U.S.’s Naval War College, said that the AUKUS subs could be “huge” also from alliance and military standpoints.

“From the alliance standpoint, it cements solidarity among a significant fraction of the old British Empire while committing Australia, an external power, to any Taiwan conflict but a significant power, to the island’s defense, and it would seem to commit Great Britain, a really, really outside power, to the same cause,” Holmes said.

“From the military standpoint, to secure Taiwan, you mainly need to deny China control of the Taiwan Strait and adjacent waters. Submarine warfare remains an allied advantage and a sea-denial weapon par excellence.”

The AUKUS partnership is providing a major boost to the industry, with around US$240 billion set to be invested over the next 30 years. A key focal point for this upswing was the Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference and Exhibition (IODS) held in Perth in May 2026. It brought together figures from the military, politics, business, and research sectors.

IODS panel discussions examined the multifaceted challenges of delivering AUKUS, underscoring the need for decisive leadership, rapid workforce and infrastructure build-out, and tightly coordinated trilateral collaboration. Urgent priorities include constructing a dry dock at Henderson near Perth, establishing a single accountable “controlling mind” on the Australian side and releasing contracts to catalyze industry investment. Success hinges on creating an interchangeable workforce and standardized, shared supply chains across Australia, the UK, and the U.S., while building Australia’s sovereign nuclear sustainment capability. Panel participants also stressed the need for a “social license”, meaning the Australian public needs to be made supportive of the costly endeavor.

Unsurprisingly, China has been doubling down on anti-AUKUS information operations and psychological warfare to target public opinion domestically and regionally, noted Gordon Flake. China seeks to gain influence through economic coercion, military activities near Australia’s shores, political pressure and intelligence activities.

“However, these efforts are largely counterproductive, as they raise threat perceptions region-wide when combined with assertive behavior,” Flake said.

“Pre-COVID, polls showed roughly 80% saw China as an opportunity; today, it’s more like 80% for threat and 20% for opportunity. This is attributable to daily incidents against the Philippines and Taiwan, surveillance and survey vessel activity around Australia, and overt economic coercion targeting our exports of coal, barley, crayfish, and wine.”

As to whether the Australian government of the day would choose to come to the U.S.’s help in the event of a Taiwan war, Flake noted Australia’s historical pattern of fighting alongside the US since WWI but referenced the Iran war to illustrate non-coordination with the U.S. U.S. President Donald Trump started the war without consulting U.S. allies.

“Australia’s future decisions will hinge on the trajectory of U.S. alliance coordination. Recovery from periods of ‘nontraditional non-coordination’ [under Trump] will shape how readily Australia aligns with U.S. requests,” Flake said.

For more than 80 years, the killing of Father Francis Xavier Trương Bửu Diệp on 12 March 1946 at Tắc Sậy has been contested. In southern Vietnam, one narrative long dominated collective memory: that he was killed by Việt Minh forces amid the chaotic early postwar…

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The Philippine Senate, sitting as an impeachment court, opened Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial on Monday in what could become the country’s most consequential constitutional proceeding since the conviction of former Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012. The stakes extend far beyond Duterte’s political survival, testing not only the allegations against the country’s second-highest official but the resilience of Philippine democratic institutions and their ability to function independently amid deep political polarization.

The proceedings offer a familiar question confronting many Asian democracies: Can constitutional institutions remain credible when legal accountability and political rivalry become inseparable?

Duterte faces charges of betrayal of public trust, culpable violation of the Constitution, misuse of P612.5 million (US$9.98 million) in confidential funds, concealing unexplained wealth, bribery involving Department of Education officials, and public threats against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez. She has denied all allegations and dismissed these as politically motivated.

2028 stakes

The outcome could fundamentally reshape the Philippines’ political landscape ahead of the 2028 presidential election, where Duterte remains one of the strongest prospective candidates. A conviction would remove her from office and could permanently disqualify her from holding public office, eliminating the administration’s most formidable rival in the next presidential race. An acquittal could be equally transformative. Duterte would likely emerge politically strengthened, reinforcing her claim that the impeachment was driven more by politics than evidence and casting the Marcos administration as unable to stop its principal challenger despite commanding the machinery of government.

For Marcos, therefore, the trial presents risks regardless of its outcome. His administration cannot afford to appear as though it is weaponizing impeachment against a political opponent, yet neither can it ignore serious allegations involving one of the country’s highest officials.

The Senate, meanwhile, carries perhaps the greatest burden. Its legitimacy will rest not on whether Duterte is convicted or acquitted but on whether Filipinos believe the verdict was reached fairly and strictly according to law.

Setting the rules

The first day of proceedings reflected both the strengths and vulnerabilities of the process. Senators spent more than an hour debating whether Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian or Sen. Francis Escudero should preside over the proceedings before electing Escudero, 12-8, despite strong objections from the minority led by Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, who was ousted on June 3 as Senate president and subsequently replaced by Gatchalian.

Escudero then settled key procedural issues, including affirming that conviction requires at least 16 votes—the constitutional two-thirds threshold—and that the House prosecution bears the burden of proving its case through clear and convincing evidence.

Those decisions may appear technical, but they establish the legal framework that will govern the months-long trial and reduce uncertainty over procedural disputes that could otherwise undermine the proceedings.

Competing narratives

The opening statements likewise presented two sharply contrasting visions of the case.

Chief prosecutor Gerville Luistro urged senators to set politics aside and judge only the evidence. “This trial matters not to persecute an individual, not to exact revenge on an opponent, and not to win in politics,” she said. “Judge this case by the evidence.”

The prosecution argued that the four Articles of Impeachment collectively depict a pattern of abuse of power, betrayal of public trust, and lack of accountability.

The defense offered an equally forceful counter-narrative. Lead counsel Sheila Sison portrayed the impeachment as an attempt to overturn the democratic mandate given to Duterte by more than 32 million voters in 2022. Invoking the country’s anti-dictatorship slogan “never forget,” she argued that constitutional safeguards, not political passions, must guide the proceedings.

She accused the House of conducting a “mini trial” and a “fishing expedition” before the case reached the Senate and insisted that Duterte remains entitled to the full protection of due process.

Neither narrative should be accepted uncritically. That is precisely why impeachment trials exist—to replace political accusation with judicial examination.

The absent respondent

Yet the day’s biggest political message came not from either legal team but from Duterte herself. The vice president chose not to attend the opening session, instead appearing through her lawyers. She described personal testimony as “a matter of legal strategy and constitutional rights,” while her counsel correctly noted that Senate impeachment rules allow respondents to appear through counsel.

Legally, the decision was entirely permissible. Politically, however, it came at a cost.

Impeachment is more than a legal proceeding; it is also a public exercise in accountability. Citizens reasonably expect senior elected officials facing grave allegations to confront the process directly. Duterte’s absence inevitably fueled criticism from prosecutors who viewed it as disrespectful to the impeachment court.

Still, political optics must not overshadow constitutional principles. The vice president’s decision to stay away cannot be treated as evidence of guilt, just as her presence alone would not establish innocence. The Constitution places the burden squarely on the prosecution. If it proves its allegations through credible documents and witness testimony, conviction would be warranted. If it fails, acquittal must follow regardless of political pressure or public opinion.

The larger test

That principle becomes even more important because the trial unfolds against the collapse of the Marcos-Duterte alliance that swept the 2022 elections. The former running mates now stand on opposite sides of the country’s most significant political divide, fueling competing claims that the impeachment is either a necessary act of accountability or an attempt to sideline the administration’s strongest electoral rival.

The Senate’s credibility will therefore depend less on the final verdict than on whether Filipinos believe every witness was fairly examined, every piece of evidence properly weighed and every ruling anchored in the Constitution rather than partisan calculation.

Only one Philippine official, former Chief Justice Renato Corona, has ever been convicted through impeachment. Former President Joseph Estrada’s trial collapsed amid political upheaval, while other impeachment cases ended in resignation before judgment. Duterte’s trial thus becomes another defining test of the country’s constitutional order.

Its significance extends well beyond Manila. Across Asia, democracies continue to wrestle with the tension between political competition and institutional accountability. Their durability is measured not during periods of consensus but when powerful rivals submit their disputes to constitutional processes rather than political force.

Ultimately, this impeachment is testing two questions at once: whether Sara Duterte remains fit to hold public office, and whether Philippine democratic institutions are strong enough to decide that question through evidence, due process and the rule of law.

The answer will shape not only the 2028 presidential race but also public confidence in Philippine democracy for years to come.

Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim could be forced to call for an early general election by year-end despite holding 151 seats, a 68 percent super-majority, in the 222-seat parliament if the Barisan Nasional, the second-largest partner of his Madani Coalition with 30 seats, wins two key state elections with a clandestine pact with its Islamist archrival, PAS.

Landslides in the state polls of Johor (July 11) and Negeri Sembilan (August 1) may embolden Barisan’s anchor party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), to pull out and force Anwar’s hand.

Johor is UMNO’s birthplace, the strongest among the four states in which the party, once Malaysia’s most powerful political party, still holds power following the 2022 national election. Johor is the only state that refused to reciprocate power-sharing with Anwar’s coalition, Pakatan Harapan.

More powerful than UMNO are the Sultan, Sultan Ibrahim, currently Malaysia’s King, and his Crown Prince Tunku Ismail, currently the state’s regent. The father is among Malaysia’s richest men. In the last state election in March 2022, with a low 55 percent turnout, UMNO won 43 percent of the votes and 71 percent of the seats with the popular incumbent Chief Minister Hasni Mohammad as the poster boy. However, Sultan Ibrahim picked a younger politician, Onn Hafiz, as the new chief minister just to make the point that the chief minister is picked by the monarch, not the ruling party.

Days before the nomination, the Crown Prince rejected Anwar Ibrahim’s claim that the wealthy state has suffered significant leakages. He accused the Federal Government of draining the state and demanded that 25-30 percent - not just 5-7.5 percent currently - of the federal revenue collected in the state should be returned to the state government. Dissolving the assembly 10 months before his full term, Onn Hafiz made clear that Barisan would contest all 56 state seats, leaving no room for cooperation with Pakatan. Such a strategic choice made perfect sense: UMNO voters want the party to lead instead of playing second fiddle in a gigantic pact with Pakatan Harapan. UMNO’s non-Malay partners want to challenge Anwar’s coalition in its Chinese-majority and ethnically mixed strongholds.

In reciprocity, on June 5, Pakatan Harapan dissolved the state legislature in Negeri Sembilan, where an intriguing royal feud has the sitting ruler Tuanku Mukhriz and his four elector chiefs trying to unseat each other. UMNO seized the opportunity to attack the pro-Mukhriz Pakatan Harapan chief minister and pulled out as the junior partner of the state government. The dissolution ended a truce that temporarily kept the Pakatan Harapan minority government in office.

Two days later, Oon Hafiz made a gung-ho vow that he would rather not be the chief minister than to “sit on the same table with the Democratic Action Party (DAP)”, the Chinese-dominant, largest component party in Anwar’s coalition. The DAP has long been a punching bag in Malay-Muslim nationalist politics for being assertive on liberal values, minority rights, and reform. However, UMNO and DAP have been sharing power for 43 months in Anwar’s coalition government, and many ministers on both sides have been working respectfully with each other.

Onn Hafiz’s grandstanding was initially puzzling because the Barisan is poised to win a majority and does not need to form a coalition government with Pakatan. Both ethnic relations and inter-party relations between the two have been largely cordial in Johor, not least because the assertive palace actively promotes a mini-nation narrative of Bangsa Johor (the Johor Nation).

However, it soon became clear that Johor may be a testbed for quietly reviving Muafakat Nasional, a short-lived opposition pact between UMNO and PAS after Pakatan unseated Barisan in 2020. Both parties became part of the new federal government when another UMNO splinter, Bersatu, left and collapsed the first PH government in what became known as the Sheraton Putsch in 2020. However, that soon also ended Muafakat as PAS joined Bersatu to form a new coalition, Perikatan Nasional. However, Bersatu has split after being in opposition for three years, and PAS sided with Bersatu’s new splinter over the remnant party.

Now that PAS has ditched the Bersatu remnant, the obstacle to UMNO-PAS rapprochement disappears. PAS unsuccessfully negotiated for PAS and its allies to contest some seats under the Barisan’s logo. Failure in seat allocation forced PAS to resume the Perikatan brand with Bersatu as the estranged partner, contesting only 33 seats in total. Nevertheless, PAS issued clear instructions to its base: first, support the Barisan in 23 constituencies which PN stayed out of; second, no support for Bersatu for 16 seats it contests.

This basically reduces a tripartite battle in 2022 to primarily a straight fight between BN-PAS and PH, with insignificant friendly matches between BN and PAS and allies. For UMNO and PAS, the goal is to eliminate Bersatu, whose president and former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin hails from Johor, and to shrink PH’s presence. Political scientist and former DAP parliamentarian Ong Kian Meng’s likeliest scenario is a landslide of BN’s 53 seats while PH’s seats would plummet from 10 to mere three.

If this formula works out, then UMNO and PAS would take it to Negeri Sembilan and the general election. There is no trust between UMNO and PAS, just as there was none in Muafakat then, but this is not an obstacle for their marriage of convenience. They can fight later after winning together a parliamentary majority by dividing up the Malay-majority seats.

There are caveats, however. First, can PAS carry Perikatan votes to Barisan? Would they stay back or even vote for Pakatan? As part of the federal Government, Pakatan and Barisan tried pooling votes in six state elections in 2023, but it backfired. Where UMNO was not on the ballot, many voters turned to Perikatan instead of Pakatan.

Second, there might be signs of a Malay backlash against the royal overreach, but the size is hard to estimate. The outgoing legislative speaker has quit UMNO in protest and declared his support for Pakatan.

Third, the Malay unity game is a double-edged sword that may also rally the lethargic minority and liberal votes to Pakatan or its reformist splinter Bersama. An enthusiastic turnout by Pakatan’s base may reverse Barisan’s luck. Eight months after BN’s low turn-out landslide, the federal election in November 2022 registered a 20 percent surge in turnout, and BN’s vote share plummeted by 12 percent. If the state election had been held then, BN would have lost 38 percent in state seats.

Wong Chin Huat is a political science professor at Sunway University, Malaysia

When President Prabowo Subianto unveiled Danantara last year, he presented it not merely as another state investment agency but as the financial cornerstone of Indonesia’s economic future. The sovereign wealth fund was designed to marshal trillions of rupiah in state assets, invest in strategic industries and generate the returns needed …

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The spread of South Asia’s modern artistic talent in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India is being demonstrated in the region’s current art boom that has led to a record activity in London this summer. Events have spread from small venues to Tate Britain, Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

This underlines London’s central role that is evident, not just in auctions generating record prices for individual artists, but in the demand for private sales and in not-for-sale exhibitions.

Following the past month’s major £19m Christie’s auction of the Goodricke tea estate’s collection, and the opening of the Hayward gallery’s Anish Kapoor exhibition, Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses both have their first non-auction exhibitions next month.

Shows by many other galleries are under way, almost all leaving aside the famous Progressive group of artists that dominates the top end of auctions.

The latest to open is Sakshi from Mumbai at London’s Mall Galleries, while Delhi-based Vadehra has a show at the Frieze in Mayfair, and Mumbai’s Jhaveri Contemporary opened an exhibition at its small private Kensington gallery last week. London galleries with exhibitions include the Victor Miro in Islington, the Grosvenor in Mayfair, and Tate Britain. Outside London there are exhibitions in Wakefield and Bradford, both adaptations of London shows last year.

Many of these exhibitions are aimed at buyers making a mid-summer visit from India and looking for art deals that they might continue negotiating when they return home. Some of the artists and galleries have also been at this year’s Venice Biennale where India had a substantial presence.

Called Unfolding Narratives, Sakshi’s week-long show celebrates the Mumbai gallery’s 40th anniversary and precedes a bigger institutional exhibition in London next year.

Six contemporary artists – Amit Ambalal, Manjunath Kamath, Ravinder Reddy, Rekha Rodwittiya, Shine Shivan and Surendran Nair – reflect the traditions of tribal art by telling stories in a modern setting. “The narrative becomes fertile ground for playful reflection, speculation, autobiographical impulses, feminist resistance and socio-political critique,” says Geetha Mehra, the gallery’s founder and director.

Reddy is perhaps the most widely known with large scale brightly coloured sculptures of heads and female figures. Sakshi says they span secular and sacred crossroads. Reddy told me when we met at the Jaipur literature festival in January that he started by shunning modern sculpture, which was “alien” to him. Instead he looked at folk, tribal and temple art for inspiration, as well as art from places like Egypt, South America and elsewhere.

Other works include Ambalal’s fun depictions of animals including a happy elephant with a bouquet of flowers. Rekha Rodwittya, whose works have been described as “strong, politically vigilant feminist”, has two large water-colours over digital prints, one titled Home is Wherever You Are. Her partner Surendran Nair has striking human figures with distorted animal heads. All three are from Gujarat that is celebrated for its Baroda school of art.

At Jhaveri, Sabrina Tirvengadum, a deaf British Mauritian artist of Indian origin based in London, has works that stem from her family’s history as indentured labour. Using AI and digital printing with collages, she reimagines old family photographs into works that she produces in runs of five. (She was featured on May 9 in the FT Weekend Magazine).

Titled A singular Modernist, Vadehra is showing large paintings, drawings and sculptures by A. Ramachandran, a prolific artist who died in 2024, and is known for his rural and tribal focus on Rajasthan. Uma Nair, a leading Indian art critic, says that “the colours, the odhinis and turbans, dhotis and lehengas and lush tropicana and insects and lotuses all celebrate fauna and flora”. Also at the Frieze is a group show by the Mumbai gallery Project 88.

Two leading artists, American-Pakistani Shahzia Sikander and N.S.Harsha from Mysore in Karnataka, are on show at the Victoria Miro gallery.

All the works by Harsha, who is represented by Mumbai’s Chemould Gallery, are believed to have been placed with collectors. His intricate, large-scale paintings mix Indian miniature traditions with contemporary imagery including people at work in the fields of Karnataka, along with another popular theme of small lamps.

In an exhibition titled High Seas; Closed Skies the works by Lahore-born Sikandar are dominated by a powerful nine-minute animation called 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. This joins the popular negative theme of empire, trade and migration that was the focus of an animation at the Singh Twins exhibition in Kew Gardens six months ago.

Started in 2015 (before the Singh Twins’ work), it is based on hand-painted images and traces the “entangled histories” of the British East India Company, the Mughal Empire and Qing dynasty along with “colonial extraction, the opium trade and contested sovereignty”. Drawing on miniature painting traditions, Sikander questions “power, identity and historical memory while offering poetic visions of resilience and renewal”.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, a young British-Bengali artist, has a small innovative exhibition at Tate Britain titled Never the Same. It consists of two collections of small paintings, enclosed in open-sided timber framed pavilions, based on two works already in the Tate collection. One pavilion titled The Spaghetti House starts with a story the artist created with his six-year-old niece and continues the spaghetti theme inside. The Lovers starts with six people in a tight embrace and continues with a love and creation theme.

Grosvenor Gallery in Mayfair will be showing paintings by Pakistani artist Jamil Naqsh, who is best known for his figurative oil paintings of women with pigeons, from next week.

In Wakefield, there is a continuing exhibition at the well-known Hepworth Gallery of 150 works by Mrinalini Mukherjee and four other leading women sculptors. This moves on from a Mrinalini retrospective in London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA) at the end of last year.

Titled Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms – Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh, it places Mrinalini, who died in 2015, with two other Indian Bengalis – her mother Leela and Meera Mukherjee (no relation) along with Novera Ahmed from Bangladesh and Pilloo Pochkhanawal from Maharashtra

The focus is on Mrinalini’s massive hanging textile sculptures and other striking bronze works. There are also drawings, etchings and watercolours, plus Ahmed’s sculptures. Here and elsewhere in the exhibition there is a backdrop of a strong green wall reminiscent of Bangladesh’s national colour, though officially it was chosen to set off the bronze sculptures.

The star piece, which was also at the RA, is Pakshi, Mrinalini’s iconic 7ft high suspended sculpture of voluminous golden-brown to pinkish red knotted hemp resembling both a deity and a human figure. Some people find works such as this one disturbing; others see sensuality and eroticism or spirituality. It is dramatically set off by larger bronze sculptures that Mrinalini worked on in her final years.

“They were five pioneers of modern art, working in the same direction in terms of craft traditions, spirituality, eroticism and the natural world,” says Laura Smith, the co-curator and Hepworth’s artistic director. “This constellation of interests and techniques is present across all of the work on show, from Mrinalini’s approach to macrame [knotting], the erotic, mythologies and nature, to Meera’s use of very traditional casting techniques and Pilloo’s incorporation of natural materials.”

In Bradford, 20 miles north of Wakefield the works of young contemporary artists from across South Asia are on show, following on from an exhibition at SOAS in London last year. This has drawn attention from the local Pakistani diaspora that makes up 25% of city’s population.

The co-curator, Manmeet Walia, told the BBC that Bradford’s history as the wool capital of the UK led to the inclusion of textiles that had helped increase the number of South Asians visiting the gallery “to explore their shared history”.

Next month’s exhibitions by Sotheby’s and Christie’s will be the first time that the two top international auctioneers have held coinciding exhibitions in London. They follow a large selling exhibition at Philips auction house last year. Both start within three days of each other in mid-July.

Christie’s announcement came first, a month ago, saying it would be displaying not-for-sale works acquired by Kiran Nadar, India’s foremost collector, for her expanding museum activity in New Delhi.

Sotheby’s followed this week, saying it would have works by six famous artists spanning painting, printmaking, sculpture and ceramics. Most will be for sale: those that are not will include works by F.N. Souza, a leading Progressive, from the Delhi-based Alkazi Collection of Art.

Also underlining the role of London is AstaGuru, a Mumbai based online auctioneer, opening an office and small gallery in South Kensington and showing works by Krishen Khanna, a leading member of the Progressives. It generated auction sales of approximately $14m this month. Market leader Saffronart, which has had a gallery in Mayfair since 2008, had $11m sales, while London-based Bonhams had a live £2.1m auction.

In 1789, the framers of the American Constitution returned to Philadelphia to draft a Bill of Rights to protect the new country’s citizens from the government they had just created. James Madison, drawing inspiration from the English Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, wrote the 10 amendments, which contained some of …

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A new book by Japanese physician Dr. Tomoaki Takei, The Life Expectancy Gap Trap, takes up a subject that is becoming increasingly important in aging societies: how ordinary people can avoid bad medical choices and build a more reliable relationship with the right doctor.

Dr. Takei, a physician trained in both pediatrics and internal medi…

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The 27-country European Union has avoided a trade war with China through a conditional truce despite EU complaints over its huge trade deficit with Beijing, giving China, its second biggest trading partner after the US, till October to reduce the deficit, which rose by nearly 20 percent to €360 billion (US$412 billion) in 2025 from 2024,…

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Myanmar’s civil war has settled into a pulverizing, multi-front stalemate in which neither side appears capable of a military victory with the Tatmadaw, as the junta’s military are known, seemingly having halted prior territorial losses and stabilized their position. Armed resistance groups, however, are said to control or contest up to 80 percent of the country of 55 million people, while the Tatmadaw control most of the cities and the sinews of commerce.

While tens of thousands have died on both sides in the conflict, it is a war that has been forgotten by the outside world, receiving a fraction of the news coverage or international aid afforded to other global crises. The brutal reality of the war—now well into its sixth year—is thus that it is largely unfolding in the dark.

More than two years ago, anti-junta forces launched a combined offensive that put the country in a severe political, economic and humanitarian crisis. One of the powerful resistance groups, the Arakan Army (AA), occupies and rules over 70 percent of the landmass of Rakhine State, with AA fighters continuing to target junta forces to take control over the state capital city of Sittwe. But the rebels received a rude shock in early June when the junta’s military leader Min Aung Hlaing, bolstered by the fig leaf of a sham January election, paid a five-day state visit to India, his first since leading the 2021 military coup that ousted the democratically led government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi. Discussions with Delhi are said to have ranged over trade, defense, security cooperation, border management, and “bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest.”

India’s interests are both strategic – countering China’s regional dominance – and commercial. New Delhi anticipates benefits from the ambitious Kaladan multi-modal transit-transport project it has sponsored on Myanmar’s western border, which would connect India’s landlocked north-eastern region with western Myanmar’s Sittwe port in the Bay of Bengal. An India-Myanmar-Thailand highway spanning over 1,360 km is expected to enhance regional connectivity and trading activities. The riverine project was supposed to be operational 10 years ago, but it continues to face difficulties primarily due to political turmoil in Rakhine and Chin States of Myanmar.

Both China and Russia have already taken sides, providing diplomatic, economic and military support to the junta, formally known as the State Security and Peace Commission. Lacking an international sponsor, the rebels are forced to source their weapons through a combination of domestic production, black-market purchases, battlefield captures and alliances with longtime ethnic rebel groups. But if the rebels are in stalemate, it is worth remembering that minorities have been carrying on civil wars in Burma and Myanmar for over 78 years, making it the longest ongoing civil war in the world.

In the meantime, Myanmar is being cut to pieces by strife. Global aid organizations claim that more than 5.3 million Myanmarese people are now living in distress. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees recently revealed that 1.6 million had already fled to the neighboring countries. Around 3.7 million internally displaced residents continue to live in border areas with no regular access to food, healthcare or shelter. Chronic poverty now affects nearly 80 percent of the population. Refugees have sought shelters in neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and India, putting pressure on their border economies.

Min Aung Hlaing has positioned himself as the civilian head after the disputed national election, which took place without the participation of opposition parties including the National League for Democracy. His recently concluded official visits to India and China have earned some dubious respectability. Although both giant neighbors welcomed Hlaing with red carpets, the ground reality remains the same. It remains one of the world’s most discredited regimes.

The ongoing conflicts have resulted in heavy casualties, with the United Nations estimating that more than 75,000 people have died over the past five years. Other estimates range above 100,000. The Rakhine region and central Myanmar continue to face the brunt of military atrocities. The UNHCR recently stated that civilians in both regions face continuing brutality, with junta forces using fighter jets and drones to drop explosives on civilian areas, even targeting schools, hospitals and refugee camps.

Students remain silent sufferers, with more than six million children and young people staying out of school in the 2026-2027 academic year. Thus, almost half of the country’s children (around 13 million) are now deprived of formal education. The healthcare sector has also collapsed as many doctors and health workers have died in repeated aerial attacks on clinics. Private hospitals have also been shuttered by the administrations and large numbers of healthcare professionals who allied with the opposition leaders have been arrested and prosecuted.

The media face the most critical period since independence, with at least 215 journalists arrested in the last five years. Some 15 remain in detention. The Geneva-based global media rights body, Press Emblem Campaign recently demanded their urgent and unconditional release. PEC President Blaise Lempen told Asia Sentinel that 97 media outlets have been subjected to legal harassment. Lempen urged authorities to revoke all bans, restriction and de-licensing of news outlets. Lempen’s demand is likely to fall on deaf ears, as all other such demands have done since the junta took over the country.

Likewise, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been urged to demand the unconditional discharge of all political prisoners, said to number 31,100 people since the 2021 coup, with more than 22,000 detainees remaining in military custody. Rights groups also have repeatedly asked ASEAN to condemn the forceful conscription of young people to fight against the anti-junta forces on the frontline.

Suu Kyi’s son Kim Aris has appealed to international governments and organizations to seek the 81-year-old woman’s whereabouts and to confirm that she is receiving appropriate medical care. The European Union, Yangon-based foreign embassies and diplomatic missions belonging to Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, the United Kingdom and Netherlands, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners and the UN special envoy on Myanmar echoed concerns while calling for her urgent release along with other political prisoners. The rebel National Unity Government joined the chorus for the release of all political prisoners

During Hlaing’s recent visit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also raised the issue of Suu Kyi and democracy, saying he supports an initiative for resolving security concern in the entire 1,643 km Indo-Myanmar border areas. North-eastern separatist militants have engaged in disruptive activities in the eastern part of India and then run to the safe hideouts inside Myanmar.

The killing and maiming of children globally has increased to alarming levels, particularly in the murderous struggle between Israel and its foes, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Myanmar and Somalia as out-of-control conflicts continue on the boil, according to a series of UN and other reports. The investigations into childre…

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When Indonesia’s most recognizable tech entrepreneur accepted the job of education minister in the Indonesian government of Joko Widodo in 2019, many people at the time warned him that the stultifying bureaucracy of a ministry that presides over mostly second-rate primary and secondary schools would smother fresh ideas.

But Nadiem Makarim, a sometimes brash and cocky tech-savvy businessman, told friends he could make a difference by using his technology background to modernize and improve a school system that still relies on rote learning and churns out graduates who, by most accounts, are ill-equipped for modern industry.

He was wrong.

At the end of a 10-month-long criminal trial, Nadiem, the Harvard-educated co-founder of GoJek, the ride-hailing, delivery and payments app that has transformed urban life in Indonesia, was sentenced on June 30 to 10 years in prison on corruption charges related to the procurement of Chromebook laptop computers to aid in remote learning during the Covid 19 pandemic. Prosecutors said the Chromebook deal caused 1.57 trillion (US$87.6 million) in state losses. State losses are the usual measure of corruption in Indonesian law.

The case hinged on the problem that Chromebooks require a reliable internet connection to function, something that doesn’t exist in some remote parts of the country. Allegedly, Nadiem and his ministry ignored this issue, and in doing so, both caused state losses and enriched themselves. Prosecutors contended that the procurement of Chromebook laptops from the IT giant Google was in exchange for Google investing US$60 million in Nadiem’s Gojek technology group when he was education minister.

No Google executives were charged – just Nadiem and a handful of ministry aides and consultants.

While the Attorney General’s Office initially wanted Nadiem to pay Rp5.6 trillion in restitution to the state, the court instead ordered him to pay Rp809 billion, or US$45 million, in restitution and a Rp1 billion fine. Nadiem has said he cannot afford to pay that amount, but if he doesn’t, the court will add 5 years to his sentence.

“The Chromebook laptop procurement was not optimal because the devices could not be used due to the lack of internet access in many regions in Indonesia,” said a judge reading out the verdict. “As a result, many Chromebooks could not function as intended, meaning the state budget did not generate benefits in line with the amount spent.”

Two of the judges on the five-judge panel dissented, with one, Judge Andi Saputra, saying he saw no evidence that Nadiem was corrupt.

In a normal world, getting the Chromebook limitations wrong might be a policy error at worst. Maybe somebody gets fired. But in Indonesia, it became a crime. A tech entrepreneur who has been hailed as a hero for creating Indonesia’s first billion-dollar start-up is being treated like a common criminal and a threat to the nation. Nadiem has denied all charges and at one point called the case “crazy”.

In his defense in early June, Nadiem asked the judges to acquit him, arguing that the case was a matter of bureaucratic resentment rather than criminal intent. He denied enriching himself and said that the Chromebook project had actually saved the state Rp3.9 trillion.

“Today, we are asking a big question of our legal system. Do truth and justice still matter? Today, it has been answered; all the court facts were ignored,” Nadiem told reporters after hearing the verdict.

Attending the sentencing hearing in support of Nadiem were former finance minister Chatib Basri, prominent lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis and human rights activist Delpedro Marhaen. Dozens of GoJek motorcycle-taxi drivers staged a rally supporting Nadiem outside the court and filled the court’s lobby. Out of sight, prominent Indonesian business leaders and others bitterly lamented the sentencing. Many people in Jakarta have been asking throughout the entire, deeply embarrassing ordeal who Nadiem pissed off to get hit with such a legal sledgehammer. Nadiem has not commented about why the case was brought, other than to point to an angry bureaucracy.

But the case has echoes of the 2025 conviction and sentencing to four years in prison of former Trade Minister Thomas Lembong, another Harvard graduate, on charges related to sugar imports from a decade earlier when he was serving under Jokowi, or the conviction of Hasto Kristiyanto, an official of the opposition Indonesia Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), on bribery charges. Lembong and Hasto, however, had both bitterly split with Widodo over politics and those cases reeked of revenge. Current President Prabowo Subianto pardoned the two men in 2025, shortly after they were sentenced, supposedly to calm a public backlash against the prosecutions. That may be an option in Nadiem’s case and would allow Prabowo, who has not commented on the case, to appear magnanimous.

In addition, Nadiem is not openly political and he doesn’t appear to have done anything to upset the famously thin-skinned Prabowo, although some say Nadiem is perceived in political circles as “arrogant,” which is not a crime even in Indonesia. But a case like this, which has focused the worries of investors on the Indonesian justice system and kicked off bad publicity worldwide, could not have ended up in court without the imprimatur of someone powerful.

In the end, regardless of whether Nadiem languishes in prison or is pardoned, the damage the case has done to Indonesia’s reputation is substantial. That the co-founder of one of the country’s most recognizable and iconic companies should end up in the dock on charges that appear questionable on the surface, sends a message to other bright young people who may be tempted to try and do good by serving the country: proceed at your own risk.

The Pentagon’s mid-June decision to restore “US Pacific Command,” reversing a 2018 decision to rename the command as the Indo-Pacific Command, is not merely a bureaucratic rebranding. It is the clearest institutional signal yet that Washington is narrowing its strategic horizon.

The 2018 choice was deliberately political, reflecting an emerging strategic consensus that the Indian and Pacific Oceans constituted a single geopolitical theatre and that India would become indispensable to maintaining a favorable balance of power against China. Then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis described the decision as recognizing the “increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” while the Trump administration’s subsequent Indo-Pacific Strategy Report placed India at the center of its vision for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The command’s new name institutionalized this strategic imagination within the US military itself.

That institutional commitment now appears to be receding. In June, the Department of War, restored the command’s historical designation while explicitly retaining its existing area of responsibility. Officially, the change is presented as a return to tradition rather than a change in mission. Yet strategic institutions rarely rename themselves without purpose. Military commands embody particular conceptions of geography, priorities, and threats. While operational responsibilities remain unchanged, the vocabulary through which Washington defines its principal theatre of competition has unmistakably changed. The question, therefore, is not whether the command’s map has changed, but whether America’s strategic imagination has. The answer increasingly appears to be yes.

The Indo-Pacific concept emerged at a moment when Washington believed that balancing China required integrating the entire maritime space stretching from the eastern coast of Africa to the western shores of the Americas. India occupied a central place in this vision. It was expected to serve as the western anchor of an emerging coalition alongside Japan, Australia and the United States. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), revived in 2017, complemented this broader strategic architecture by projecting the image of four major democracies collectively shaping regional order. Eight years later, many of the assumptions underpinning that vision have weakened.

Most importantly, the military challenge posed by China has become significantly more immediate. Taiwan has shifted from being one contingency among many to becoming the organizing principle of US defense planning in Asia. The Pentagon’s force posture, alliance coordination and operational concepts increasingly revolve around deterring a Chinese attempt to alter the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. This has inevitably concentrated American attention on the first and second island chains, particularly Japan, the Philippines and Guam, where military assets can directly influence a potential conflict. As strategic urgency has narrowed geographically, so too has Washington’s conception of which partners matter most.

Why India No Longer Occupies the Center

The restoration of the Pacific Command designation doesn’t suggest that India has become strategically irrelevant. It remains indispensable to American efforts in technology cooperation, supply-chain resilience, intelligence sharing and long-term balancing against China. However, strategic importance and operational centrality are not the same. Washington’s earlier Indo-Pacific strategy assumed that India would gradually emerge as an increasingly integrated security partner capable of anchoring the Indian Ocean component of regional deterrence. That expectation has encountered important structural limits.

India has consistently preserved its doctrine of strategic autonomy. It has refused formal military alliances, maintained longstanding defense relations with Russia despite Western pressure, and repeatedly demonstrated that it will align with Washington only where its own national interests converge. None of these policies are surprising; they simply reflect India’s longstanding foreign policy tradition.

From the perspective of US military planners, however, these realities carry important implications. In the event of a Taiwan contingency, treaty allies such as Japan and Australia provide legally institutionalized commitments, established command structures and integrated military planning. The Philippines has similarly assumed renewed strategic significance by expanding American access to military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. These partnerships translate directly into operational planning.

India occupies a different category. Its value lies less in participating in immediate military contingencies than in shaping China’s long-term strategic environment. That distinction matters because Washington increasingly appears to be prioritizing the former over the latter.

The restoration of the original name, therefore, reflects more than nostalgia. It suggests that American strategy is moving from an expansive geopolitical vision toward a more concentrated military geography. The decisive theatre is no longer conceived primarily as the vast Indo-Pacific; it is increasingly the Western Pacific.

New Alliance System

If the restoration reflects a narrowing of America’s strategic geography, it also points towards an evolving hierarchy of alliances. The beneficiaries of this shift are unlikely to be new partners, but existing treaty allies situated closest to the prospective theatre of conflict.

Japan has embarked upon its most ambitious military modernization since WWII, significantly increasing defense spending and adopting a new National Security Strategy that explicitly identifies China as the greatest strategic challenge. Australia has become central to American force posture through the AUKUS partnership and expanded rotational deployments. Meanwhile, the Philippines has assumed renewed importance by granting the United States access to additional military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, providing critical logistical depth for any Taiwan-related contingency.

The restoration of the Pacific Command designation also hints at an emerging hierarchy within America’s regional partnerships. Washington’s treaty allies—Japan, Australia and the Philippines—are becoming increasingly central because they occupy the immediate theatre of any potential conflict with China. These relationships are underpinned by mutual defense treaties, integrated command structures, forward military deployments and operational planning. They are designed not only to preserve regional stability but also to wage war should deterrence fail.

The Quad occupies a fundamentally different strategic space. Since its revival in 2017, it has evolved into an important diplomatic framework promoting cooperation on critical technologies, resilient supply chains, maritime domain awareness, infrastructure and public goods. Yet it has never developed into a military alliance, nor does it possess the institutional architecture necessary for collective defense or integrated war planning. Its value lies in shaping the strategic environment rather than preparing for combat.

That distinction acquires greater significance if Washington is indeed narrowing its strategic focus from the broader Indo-Pacific to the Western Pacific. A strategy centered on deterring Chinese action against Taiwan naturally privileges partners capable of contributing directly to military operations in East Asia. In such a framework, the Quad is unlikely to disappear, but its relative importance could diminish as operational alliances assume greater prominence.

Whether this marks a lasting strategic reorientation or merely a response to today’s security environment remains uncertain. What is already evident, however, is that Washington’s strategic vocabulary is changing. In 2018, adding “Indo” to the command’s name institutionalized the belief that the Indian and Pacific Oceans constituted a single strategic theatre and that India would occupy a central place within it. Restoring “Pacific” does not erase that geography, but it suggests a different hierarchy of priorities—one in which the decisive arena of competition is increasingly conceived as the Western Pacific rather than the wider Indo-Pacific.

The significance of this shift, therefore, lies not in the command’s new-old name, but in the strategic logic it reflects. If the United States is redefining the geography of great-power competition, regional states will inevitably recalibrate their own strategic assumptions. For India, the challenge will not simply be preserving close ties with Washington but adapting to the possibility that the Indo-Pacific may no longer serve as the organizing principle of American strategy. Whether a more narrowly defined Pacific order ultimately replaces it will shape the future of alliance politics, defense planning and regional diplomacy across Asia.

Dr Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor on diplomatic affairs to Asia Sentinel.

US authorities, in recent operations coordinated with Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia and Cambodia, have sanctioned individuals and companies, arrested suspects connected to the notorious Cambodia-based Prince Holding Group and seized the financial infrastructure of Huione G…

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The arrest last week of journalist and bookseller Leticia Wong Man-huen on sedition charges brings to at least 29 journalists who have been arrested in Hong Kong since China ordered its sweeping crackdown on the city in 2020. At least nine journalists and press freedom defenders are currently imprisoned, according to data compiled by press freedom organizations, including Jimmy Lai, the founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, six of his former editors and executives, and additional journalists and editors such as those from Stand News.

Wong, the owner of Hunter Bookstore, was arrested by National Security Police along with an unnamed 32-year-old male, reportedly her husband, according to news reports. Police said Wong, a former Sing Tao Daily political reporter and proprietor of Hunter Bookstore in Sham Shui Po in northwestern Kowloon, had been arrested for displaying items with seditious intent and selling publications that incited hatred against the Hong Kong government, judiciary, and law enforcement agencies.

They were also accused of violating Section 25 of the Organized and Serious Crimes Ordinance for receiving remittances funded by foreign political organizations. Wong and her companion posted bail and were released from Sham Shui Po police station the next day. They must report back to the police on July 24.

In addition to running the bookshop, Wong had been the editor-in-chief of Status Quo, a magazine that features interviews, essays, and reporting on Hong Kong society and culture. Among the allegedly seditious items and books that police seized in Wong’s shop was a copy of “The Troublemaker,” a biography written by former journalist Mark Clifford of Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2026, news reports said. Clifford is now president of the New York-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, created to work for freedom in and the release of all political prisoners.

“The arrest of a journalist and editor over items sold through an independent bookstore shows Hong Kong authorities are expanding national security laws ever deeper into the city’s publishing sector,” said Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Authorities should immediately release Wong and stop treating publishing activities as threats to national security.”

Beijing imposed the harsh national security law on the city in 2020 after months of virulent anti-government protests over China’s refusal to allow democratic processes to go ahead, as promised in the 1997 agreement between the UK and China that ended colonial rule, ​sparking international criticism that the freedoms promised to the city at the ​handover were being curtailed.

Hardline Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu, a former police commissioner, and authorities in Beijing have ignored demands by the Group of Seven, the European Union, the US State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a long list of other international critics regarding what they describe as a severe and ongoing deterioration of civil liberties under the sweeping “patriots-only” law. The drumbeat of criticism from overseas has increased over the past couple of years as authorities have begun targeting the families and associates of exiled activists in an attempt to suppress overseas dissent, especially in the UK and the United States, where domestic authorities have arrested Chinese nationals harassing those who have left the onetime British colony.

China consistently ranks as the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 50 behind bars, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In Hong Kong, despite international complaints, more than 60 organizations including unions, churches, media groups, and political parties, many of them decades old, have been disbanded, according to a study by the independent publication Hong Kong Free Press, which said the trend accelerated in the second half of 2021, with bastions of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement crumbling within months. The New York-based Human Rights Watch put the figure even higher, estimating that more than 100 NGOs, independent media outlets, and labor unions have been forced to disband or relocate entirely, resulting in the establishment of overseas advocacy hubs, adding to Beijing’s irritation.

The crackdown has reduced what was once one of Asia’s most vibrant cities in regard to human rights and protest against the government to sullen conformity, despite upbeat pronunciations by local civic leaders and other boosters. Any criticism of the government, either in the press or among the civic organizations including unions and churches, has simply stopped. The American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong describes public sentiment as “mixed, marked by a contrast between a stabilizing macroeconomic environment and underlying social strain. While many appreciate the city’s strengthened physical security and economic resilience, residents continue to grapple with elevated stress levels and cautious public optimism.”

“For months, authorities waged an administrative campaign against Hunter Bookstore co-owner Leticia Wong, hoping to exhaust her resolve to keep selling books Hong Kongers have a right to read, but the regime would rather they didn’t,” according to a statement by the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation. “They gave up the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach and just arrested Wong, a former journalist and Civic Party district councillor, for alleged sedition and money laundering linked to remittances from foreign organizations.”

In a statement to AFP, Clifford said, “When authorities target booksellers for carrying a biography, they’re sending a message that even peaceful ideas and documented facts are no longer safe. A government that fears a book fears the truth.”

As Bangkok undergoes its gubernatorial election today, two front-running candidates are proposing sharply different visions for the city. Chadchart Sittipunt, the former Pheu Thai transport minister, now an independent and an incumbent known for steady administration, faces Chaiwat Sathawo…

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