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

Japan’s Glacial Ascendance

For such a historic transition of power, the handover from Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving and most powerful postwar prime minister, to Yoshihide Suga was always going to be short on drama. Suga, Abe’s longtime chief of staff, faced only token competition from a handful of other ruling party bigwigs. His ruling Liberal Democratic Party commands […]

Can China Still Export Its People’s War?

Earlier this summer, as the Indian government scrambled to curry support both at home and abroad for its bare-knuckle standoff against China in the Himalayas, it began reviving another...

What We’re Reading: The Beginning of an Era and the End of the American Century

Not so long ago, some friends and I were debating when exactly whatever political era we are currently living through began. The end of the Cold War is a...

China’s Trial by Fire

From the COVID-19 outbreak to the subsequent economic crisis, with catastrophic flooding of the Yangtze River thrown in for good measure, 2020 has subjected the Communist Party of China...

The Communist Party of Every Last Inch of China

In July, Chinese authorities announced a three-year plan to phase out Mongolian-language instruction for grade schoolers in the nominally autonomous northern region of Inner Mongolia. Beijing had imposed similar...

What We’re Reading: Succession and Mutilation

Waiting for Eden By Elliot Ackerman War stories are often gruesome, heart-wrenching and generally hard to read. What tends to go overlooked, though, is that the way they’re told tells us...

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