Phillip Orchard

Phillip Orchard is an analyst at Geopolitical Futures. Prior to joining the company, Mr. Orchard spent nearly six years at Stratfor, working as an editor and writing about East Asian geopolitics. He’s spent more than six years abroad, primarily in Southeast Asia and Latin America, where he’s had formative, immersive experiences with the problems arising from mass political upheaval, civil conflict and human migration. Mr. Orchard holds a master’s degree in Security, Law and Diplomacy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, where he focused on energy and national security, Chinese foreign policy, intelligence analysis, and institutional pathologies. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas. He speaks Spanish and some Thai and Lao.

Latest From Author

Rolling in the Deep of the Indo-Pacific

In a landmark announcement Thursday, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom unveiled a new trilateral Indo-Pacific security alliance. The pact is expected to focus on all sorts of things, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. The centerpiece of the pact, though, is good, old-fashioned hard power: The British and U.S. are going […]

Xi Jinping’s War on Everything

Each August, the Communist Party of China’s top powerbrokers slip away for a super-secret conclave at a beachfront resort in the city of Beidaihe. The event tends to spark...

US Credibility After Afghanistan

Over the past week, there's been a perplexing amount of consternation and, in some corners, elation about how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might damage U.S. credibility elsewhere in...

The Nagging Question in the Indo-Pacific

Senior U.S. diplomats were fanned out across the Indo-Pacific last week. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin toured Southeast Asia, outlining to circumspect U.S. partners a vision for “integrated deterrence”...

What We’re Reading: Taking Cyber Seriously

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War By Fred Kaplan A reader recommended Fred Kaplan's “Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War” to me, and it turned out to...

The Trouble With China’s Tech Titans

When Jack Ma got slapped down by the Communist Party of China late last year, the natural assumption was that his biggest sin was having the gall to question...

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