Media Mentions

“What Modi has demonstrated, and what the U.S. is leaning into, is a leader who is willing to make bets on the future of the country,” Nirav Patel, the chief executive of the Asia Group and deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific under President Barack Obama, said in an interview. “The diplomatic as well as political stability that Modi enjoys allows this relationship to be more fruitful, and Biden has leaned into that.”

“The president’s visit, in some ways, is really just a victory lap against a lot of critics and skeptics in Asia, particularly those who believe that the U.S. is in relative decline,” said Nirav Patel, CEO of the U.S.-based Asia Group consultancy.

“The president’s visit, in some ways, is really just a victory lap against a lot of critics and skeptics in Asia, particularly those who believe that the U.S. is in relative decline,” he said.

Over the past three decades, Japan has battled persistent economic stagnation, reckoned with depopulation, rising inequality, voter disengagement, and endured threats to Asia’s long peace. Remarkably, Japan has emerged from its “lost decades” unscathed from the populist wave that today permeates several major democracies and as a far more consequential actor in the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific. The country has reinvented itself as a network power to overcome the harsh realities of diminishing relative capabilities. How has Japan accomplished this reinvention? What lessons can be learned from how it has coped with slow growth, adverse demographics, adjustment to economic globalization, and the emergence of a powerful and assertive China? And how can Japan handle the hurdles ahead?

Chinese policymakers’ preference for national security over economic growth risks plunging the country into a period of sustained deflation, they write.

“I do sense there is a real desire in Beijing to stabilize the relationship, both because of the geopolitical relationship but also, perhaps more important, the doldrums on the economic side,” he said.

“The steady drumbeat of senior meetings between the U.S. and China increases comfort for collaboration at the working levels,” he said.

Space and space exploration have “always evoked a lot of interest in Prime Minister Modi personally,” he said.

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation is now “in an uncomfortable spotlight as a proxy for China’s commitment to market access for foreign investors,” he said.

“There is a very different risk appetite for China at the head-office level compared to that of the China team on the ground,” he said.