It is my belief that China’s desire for access to islands around the world is to harvest nuclear warheads in secret away from their mainland. This way, when China is done biding their time, they will be ready to show their strength to the “enemy troops…. outside the walls.”

I always looked up to Bismarck as the greatest statesman ever—a foreign policy genius who knew exactly what political moves to make, how to calculate each move, and how each move would play out. A part of me read the books in hopes that I would understand the “secret sauce” that made him such a foreign policy genius, and I found it.

In last two editions of the Marshall Islands Journal, many contributors have expressed their disappointment at the RMI government in voting against a UN Resolution for a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Here, I make the case that the RMI made the right vote.

Tim Bouverie wrote the authoritative book when it comes to Neville Chamberlain’s failed policy of appeasement in the 1930s. After getting through this masterpiece of a book, I had to stop and ask myself: “How did the British refrain from placing Chamberlain’s head on a spike?”

I hate this book; I’m just going to state it from the beginning. I will never write a review for a book having read only half of it—in this case 230 pages. For me, I have to read the entirety of a book to write a good and comprehensive review. But I hate this book so much that I’m willing to make an exception, and I hate it for one simple reason: The title is completely misleading.

Whereas Volume One of Mein Kampf follows Hitler from his youth as a boy in his native Austria to his early career as a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Volume Two is about the political philosophy and guiding principles of the party. It begins with a general philosophy of the state and its citizens and ends with recommendations for German foreign policy.

Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is one of the greatest books I have read in my life. Sometimes I would just shake my head and pause my reading because I had to think about whether Huntington was some sort of fortune teller given how eerily accurate his prediction of the 21st century geopolitical landscape was when he published his book back in 1996.

If one had to compare Xi Jinping with any of his predecessors, the only comparison should be with Mao Zedong. Whereas Mao’s strategy for China was based on continual revolution, Xi’s leadership strategy is based on continual corruption and the need to rid the Communist Party of it. Hence Xi’s amendment of the Constitution in 2018 to abolish the two-term limit on the presidency—if he leaves, then the corruption will only continue, or so goes Xi’s rationale.