Abstract
This article examines the situations in the South China Sea (SCS) and East China Sea (ECS) and the reasons for recent political and strategic attention. As background it reviews the history of maritime activities in Asia where there was no real maritime Great Power with continuity. It then discusses the latest situations in the ECS around the Senkaku Islands, where China’s Coast Guard vessels and fishing boats have made occasional incursions into Japanese waters, and the relatively-less understood Scarborough Shoal and the Pratas Islands in the SCS that have strategic significance in a future powerbalance in the SCS. The article then notes the US rebalance to Asia and the interpretation of the principle of Freedom of Navigation. It continues with the strategic and diplomatic measures and operational and tactical measures that Japan should take. It concludes noting that Japan and the US must prepare a wide range of measures in advance to regain and maintain maritime security and stability.
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Country or Region: United States
Duggan, Michael F
Introduction
Last week’s nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran is the most transformative development in relations between the two nations in decades. But the diplomatic road ahead for the two countries remains uncertain, fraught with difficulties and potential pitfalls. Even triumphant readings of the recent nuclear agreement between the P5+1 and Iran have ignored the elephant in the room. That elephant is the fact that, with or without the talks (and short of a catastrophic regional war or a highly unlikely diplomatic coming-together), Iran will eventually become a nuclear power—and that there is little the United States, Israel, or any other country on Earth can do about it. Instead of trying in vain to prevent a nuclear Iran, the United States and its allies must recognize that, in the case of Iran, national interest increasingly fails to justify further enmity—and that the costs of potential hostilities are simply too high. Sometimes the best way to deal with an enemy is to make a friend.
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Xuetong, Yan
Abstract
A great historical transition is underway from American-led Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 2.0—the interdependence of plural identities where no one power or alliance of powers dominates.
The G-20 is floundering as the immediate global financial crisis has receded. The United Nations and the old Bretton Woods institutions—the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO—have lost their vigor and are struggling to adjust to the global powershift with the rise of the emerging economies. While Europe is paralyzed as the historic project of integration stalls, the world’s two largest economies—the United States and China—are as yet unable to figure out how to share power.
The danger now is that the geopolitical vacuum will invite assertions of national self-interest that will unravel the rules-based order that enabled stability and prosperity over recent decades.
America’s leading geopolitical strategist, China’s most outspoken strategic thinker and one of Asia’s leading global thinkers from Singapore offer their reflections on this state of affairs.
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Wei, Chi-hung
Abstract
Why did President Bill Clinton, while having linked human rights to China’s most-favoured-nation (MFN) status in 1993, delink the two issues in 1994, despite the fact that China had not improved its human rights record? This article explains Clinton’s linkage-delinkage policy reversal in terms of ‘strategic co-constitution’. After Tiananmen, Washington was concerned about China’s human rights abuses, arms proliferation and unfair trade practices. During 1992−3, Clinton initiated a ‘strategic social construction’ process that translated human rights into the linkage policy. Clinton stressed that a humane, democratic China would neither proliferate weapons nor engage in unfair trade practices. In 1994, however, a pro-MFN coalition persuaded Clinton that open trade could better advance US security, economic and human rights interests in China. Framing their rhetoric in ways that resonated with the exiting US concerns over China, pro-MFN actors led a strategic social construction process that redefined Clinton’s China policy toward engagement.
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Wang, Vincent Wei-Cheng
Abstract
This article contends that the Tsai administration will likely be positive for U.S.-Taiwan relations. While the partnership may well require more work than was expended over the last eight years, the yield may be significant.
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Suslov, Dmitry
Abstract
Although the US–Russia relations are hardly the central axis of contemporary international relations, the systemic confrontation between Moscow and Washington, which began in 2014, will become a decisive factor for the emerging international order. This confrontation was caused by factors much deeper than a mere clash of national interests in Ukraine or Syria. It came as a result of their fundamental disagreement about the basic rules and norms of international relations and a clash of the visions of international order which Moscow and Washington have been promoting since the end of the Cold War. Moreover, this confrontation is a part—and currently the epicentre—of a broader rift between the US and major non-Western centres of power about the nature of a post-hegemonic international order. It put an end to the post-Cold War period of the International System development, and reflects unwillingness of the non-Western power centres to accept the US’ global leadership, and US attempts to restore it. Since none of the sides is ready for one-way compromise and all bet on the weakening of the opponent, continuation of the US–Russia confrontation will deepen the split in the Atlantic and Pacific, and intensify the general tendency of global governance bifurcation and emergence of a global divide into two major political and economic communities.
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Schake, Kori
Abstract
Donald Trump’s supporters are genuinely questioning America’s role in the world. Republicans owe them persuasive answers on their own terms.
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Roy, Denny
Abstract
Pyongyang will likely achieve a credible nuclear-ICBM capability in the next few years. This development, though frightening and unwelcome, will not be a game-changer.
The crisis over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme, now stretching into a third decade, is worsening. There seems little chance that North Korea will give up its arsenal absent a drastic change in circumstances. Pyongyang has repeatedly said its status as a nuclear-weapons state is permanent, even writing this into its constitution in 2012. In the minds of the North Korean people, elevating the country into the nuclear-weapons club is perhaps the greatest tangible accomplishment of the late Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il (father of current leader Kim Jong-un), as economic development foundered during his tenure. Hopes that Pyongyang might have considered its nuclear-weapons programme as a bargaining chip to be traded away for improved relations with its adversaries have largely faded.
Instead, Pyongyang is working toward producing a reliable, nucleararmed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could threaten the US homeland. North Korean technicians are making steady progress. A test of the Taepodong-2 rocket, which theoretically has the range to reach parts of the United States, failed in 2006, but a civilian variant of the missile successfully carried a payload into space in 2012. Some US intelligence analysts think North Korea is already able to make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit in the nose cone of a ballistic missile. Admiral William Gortney, the commander of US forces responsible for defending North America, said in 2016, ‘it’s the prudent decision on my part to assume that [North Korea] has the capability to … miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM’ that can reach ‘all of the states of the United States and Canada’. In March 2016 an anonymous South Korean official told Reuters that the North can now mount a nuclear warhead on intermediate-range missiles that can reach all of South Korea and parts of Japan.
The general populations in the countries with which North Korea has poor relations can be expected to react strongly to this development. The US mass media have already begun discussing the idea of North Korea being able to strike the US homeland with a nuclear weapon. If asked to describe the North Korean government as they know it, most Americans would say two things. The first is that the government is irrational (or unstable, crazy or unpredictable). The second is that the country is obsessively hostile to the United States. Indeed, Pyongyang has cultivated this view, apparently anxious for Americans to view North Korean nuclear weapons as a threat to the United States. The messaging is typically unsubtle. In 2013, the North Korean government distributed a video depicting the destruction of Manhattan by a North Korean nuclear missile. Another North Koreamade video released in 2016 featured a nuclear explosion in Washington DC. As Americans come to believe that North Korea can strike their homeland, there will be increased pressure from the US public for Washington to address the new danger. Neglecting North Korea was relatively easy for Americans when it threatened only US allies South Korea and Japan, but it will not be so if Pyongyang can turn Los Angeles into a ‘sea of fire’.
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Rao, Radhakrishna
Abstract
There never seems to be a dull moment in so far as the raging controversy over the strategically located South China Sea is concerned. The most recent development in the high voltage melodrama surrounding the Sea China Sea was the slamming of US by Beijing for the escalation of tension in this disputed oceanic stretch. Beijing believes that it was the US influence peddling that has resulted in one time adversaries, Philippines and Vietnam, joining hands to strengthen the security ties for mounting a joint, coordinated response to the aggressive posturing by China in the disputed South China Sea region.
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Rao, Radhakrishna
Abstract
The short sighted US foreign policy initiative and flawed diplomatic strategy have proved to be instrumental in creating Frankenstein. Beginning from the covert intervention in Afghanistan in 1980s to counteract growing Soviet presence in this backward, mountainous country to the 2003 outright, naked aggression on Iraq, presumably to locate weapons of “mass destruction”, US has only succeeded in creating conditions conducive for the rapid growth of fundamentalist forces that continue to wreak havoc on the world.
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Nyman, J
Abstract
Energy is becoming more and more important to state survival and economic development, and is increasingly considered an issue of ‘national security’. In 2005, the bid by China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) for US energy company Unocal was securitised by US elite actors, who called for presidential action on the grounds of ‘national security’. This article argues that securitisation of energy is problematic, as it impedes cooperation and encourages strategic and/or economic competition between states over energy supplies by tying energy to a national security ‘us vs. them’ scenario. Moreover, it limits the energy security debate. The article will use a securitisation approach to analyse the discourse of the Unocal affair, together with a smaller complementary case study of US–China cooperation on shale gas to show the possibility of dealing with energy in desecuritised terms. It argues that the current literature on energy ‘security’ analyses policy in overly simplistic competition/cooperation terms and fails to recognise the policy implications of securitising energy. In contrast, a securitisation approach to energy can explain the (re)presentation of energy as a policy issue and allows an analysis of how using particular discourse makes particular policy possible, while silencing alternative policy options. This has implications for policy-making in this area as energy policy/practice should be desecuritised.
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Louth, John, and Trevor Taylor
Abstract
The US third offset strategy (3OS) may transform the way in which Western powers generate future battle-winning capabilities and the technologies that enable and sustain them. In this article, John Louth and Trevor Taylor explore the nature of the 3OS, the strategic thinking that is driving it forward and the ambitions it seeks to satisfy. They discuss the key technologies within the strategy and explore the impact that their emergence will have on allies of the US. They conclude by discussing the opportunities and challenges presented to decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Katoch, Prakash
Abstract
While the US DoD posted a clip on the internet showing a Russian SU-24 attack aircraft conducting a simulated attack on USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea flying just 30 feet away from the destroyer, speculation arose whether the Chinese will act similarly against US forces in the SCS. But the Chinese actually did so 15 years back. The incident occurred on April 1, 2001 in international airspace some 112 kms off China’s Hainan Island when a US Navy EP-3E turboprop reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese F-8II jet fighter collided. The US EP-3E made an emergency landing of the damaged plane on China’s Lingshui airfield. China’s F-8II crashed into the sea with the pilot. China detained 24 military crew members of the US EP-3E for 11 days. China claimed the US EP-3 caused the accident but the US assessment was that the PLA pilot, executing a close passes in an apparent attempt to impress or intimidate the EP-3 crew, made a fatal error in judgment.
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Kakar, Harsha
Abstract
Terrorists have always desired to obtain weapons of mass destruction or raw material enabling them to manufacture a dirty bomb, which though crude, would however cause high casualties. Simultaneously they would continue to attempt to strike any nuclear installation. Any single successful action would prompt the world to respond with force against the responsible group, as also lead to mass counter actions against select communities resulting in a mass counter actions against select communities resulting in a mass divide across the world. This could be a worst case scenario for the world. Nuclear proliferation was the agenda of the recently concluded Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.
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Irwin Crookes, Paul
Abstract
This article explores the political and security implications for relations between Beijing and Taipei in light of the recent election of a new Taiwanese president. Due to be inaugurated in May 2016, Tsai Ing-wen hails from a different point on the political spectrum to that of the outgoing leadership, introducing uncertainties in the political relationship with the mainland and casting light on the continuing importance of the United States as a security actor in the region. Concurrent with outlining the nature of this political change and the uncertainties this introduces, Paul Irwin Crookes evaluates evidence of a shift in the balance of military power across the Taiwan Strait, potentially changing the dynamics of decision-making for all sides in the event of future conflict.
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