Watershed year in Asia

Nuclear sabre-rattling shook Asia's security foundations, but 2017 heralded breakthroughs for EVs and LNG

Parts of Asia felt like a tinderbox ready to light for much of 2017. North Korea's Kim Jong-un grabbed the world's attention with a series of muscle-flexing nuclear and missile tests. The US, under its neophyte leader Donald Trump, was all too eager to engage in the tit-for-tat one-upmanship, culminating in a mission that saw American bombers buzz the DMZ for the first time since the 1950s. Most unsettling was the bombastic war of words between Kim and Trump, which seemed to push the peninsula perilously close to another war. Meanwhile, China continued pushing its spurious claims over the vast majority of the oil-and-gas-rich South China Sea, agitating relations with Japan, Vietnam, the Phil