Author: Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University

Donald Trump’s Republican Party has received a stunning rebuke in the US midterm elections. Republicans went into the evening hoping that the polls might be wrong and that they could at least cling on to control of the Senate. But by midnight in Washington, the GOP was staring down what looked like its worst defeat […]

Iran fired barrages of missiles at Israel for the first time in two months on June 7. The initial trigger was an Israeli strike against a Hezbollah target in the Lebanese capital of Beirut earlier that day, an attack that Donald Trump had only recently asked the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to avoid carrying […]

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are likely to discuss many issues as they meet this week in Beijing. But alongside trade, technology and the war in Iran, one topic of conversation will stand out – the future of Taiwan. Taiwan has long been a sensitive issue in Sino-American relations. Beijing regards the island as a […]

If Israel and the US hoped their attack on Iran would force the country to capitulate quickly, they were wrong. Despite the death of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many other senior figures, Iran has managed to continue firing drones and missiles at targets across the Middle East. This poses a challenge for […]