Welcome to Third Institute
This is From the Network, Third Institute's weekly briefing — analysis, reporting, and regional intelligence from contributors across seven regions, written from inside the places they cover.
Digests through the week, the briefing notes, and the longer analytical pieces, all gathered here every Wednesday. Our first flagship briefing lands on 7 September.
Weekly Briefing
East Asia
Is Growing Uncertainty Over U.S. Commitments Driving East Asia Toward Military Self-Reliance?
East Asia is entering a period of growing strategic uncertainty. Rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait, intensifying U.S.-China's competition, North Korea’s nuclear program, and Japan’s military normalisation are placing increasing pressure on the region’s security order.
Across the Network
OPPORTUNITIES
Applications remain open for both Network Contributors and Analysis Editors. We are actively building across all seven regions — if you have regional expertise and a perspective worth sharing, we want to hear from you.
EDITORS NOTE
Welcome back to From the Network.
It's been another full week. This week we've had analysis on how Myanmar's worsening conflict is fuelling illegal rare-earth mining, and what that says about the supply chains running quietly into China, a close read of the 25th round of India–China boundary talks in Beijing and what slow stabilisation between the two means for the smaller Himalayan states caught in between, coverage of the US, Japan and South Korea confirming fresh trilateral drills just as Washington wound down a separate exercise with Seoul, and a piece on Armenia stepping back from Russia, dropping it from its own account of who it counts as a strategic partner.
On Monday, 7 September, we publish our first flagship briefing. Edition One is what all of this has been building towards: original analysis across all seven regions, each piece written by a contributor reporting from inside the region they cover, brought together into a single designed briefing.
Arabella, Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for reading,
Foreign policy beyond the first take.