Posts Tagged 'United States'

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Reader’s Choice: The RPI’s Top 5 Policy Alerts

The RPI recently published its 50th Policy Alert. We’re celebrating by bringing back the top 5 most widely read Policy Alerts. Thank you for your continued readership and support!

  1. Policy Alert #45: Asian Powers Comment on French Intervention in Mali (February 2013)
  2. Policy Alert #48: Lessons from Cyprus: Rising Powers Comment on the Bank Bailout and Financial Globalization (March 2013)
  3. Policy Alert #50: Boston Marathon Bombings Elicit Mixed Reactions from Asian Powers (May 2013)
  4. Policy Alert #33: Sentiments from Asia’s Rising Powers on Winning & losing at the Olympics (July 2012)
  5. Policy Alert #44: Heightened Tensions in the East China Sea: Reactions from China and Japan (January 2013)
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14
MAY
0

Categories: Blog

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Worldviews of Aspiring Powers Review, Meredith Oyen

Reviewed by Meredith Oyen (University of Maryland Baltimore County)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2013)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach 

Cover_LargeThe impact of domestic politics on foreign policy is a subject of long-standing interest for both historians of American foreign relations and political scientists concerned with international relations. A new volume edited by Henry R. Nau and Deepa M. Ollapally, Worldviews of Aspiring Powers: Domestic Foreign Policy Debates in China, India, Iran, Japan, and Russia, brings together prominent scholars from across the world to explore the domestic dimension of foreign policy in five important countries. The core argument of this book is that domestic debates powerfully affect foreign policy, sometimes exerting as much influence as external factors. The authors consider the implications of the contesting worldviews not only for each country’s foreign policy, but also for U.S. foreign policy responses. Worldviews of Aspiring Powers therefore offers both a model for future studies of domestic debates in other rising or aspiring powers as well as some thoughtful advice for policymakers.

In order to develop a common vocabulary for discussing and analyzing these debates across the countries under study, Nau’s introductory chapter discusses three aspects of foreign policy under debate everywhere: the scope, means, and goals of policy. By analyzing these three aspects across three broad categories of worldviews–national, regional, and global–he sets up a broad framework of twenty-seven possible worldviews, which the authors of the individual chapter then use as a guide to explore the unique variations of the country under their consideration. Nau makes clear from the outset that reality does not fit the generalized model perfectly, and each country under consideration possesses attributes that make it unique.  (more…)

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9
MAY
0

Categories: Blog, China, India, Iran, Japan, Russia, United States

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A Few Reasons Why North Korea Won’t Nuke Us

(Pedro Ugarte / AFP /Getty Images / April 2, 2013)

Gregg Brazinsky, RPI author and Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at GWU recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

The North Koreans are at it again. In the past few weeks, their erratic young leader Kim Jong Un, 30, has raised tensions in the Asia Pacific with a string of alarming actions and an almost incessant torrent of threats against the United States and its allies. He has vowed, among other things, to hit American cities with nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, to turn Seoul into a sea of fire and to strike newly elected South Korean President Park Geun-hye with a “bolt of lightning.”

He won’t.

Although Kim’s vitriolic attacks are unprecedented in their intensity and sense of urgency, rhetorical bluster does not necessarily correlate with actions when it comes to North Korean foreign policy. The situation is not without its dangers, but Americans don’t need to stock the shelves in their fallout shelters any time soon. There are a few good reasons to think that the leaders of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea won’t carry through on their threats: (more…)

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Categories: Blog, United States

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India Eyes Membership Debate at Nuclear Suppliers Group

NSG LogoMembers of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) met in Vienna last week to debate the possible inclusion of India into the group. China and several European nations resisted efforts by the United States, France, Britain, and Russia to integrate Asia’s third-largest economy into the NSG, a decision that could reshape the nuclear energy and nonproliferation landscape. The debate is being closely followed within India, who has yet to formally apply but could gain considerable prestige as part of the exclusive nuclear group.

The NSG, established in 1975, is a group of 46 nations who voluntarily agree to coordinate their export controls for transfers of peaceful nuclear material and related equipment and technology to non-nuclear-weapon states. NSG members promise to not transfer these sensitive items to governments outside of the international nuclear safeguards regime.

Asia is at the center of the current rise in demand for nuclear energy around the globe. India is looking to establish itself as a major player in future nuclear energy trade. Due to U.S. and international sanctions against India stemming from its nuclear weapons program and status outside the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), India developed a largely indigenous nuclear power program. According to the World Nuclear Association, India’s nuclear energy program will have a 14.6 MWe power capacity by 2010 and plans to supply a quarter of its electrical needs from nuclear reactors by the middle of this century.

Membership in the NSG is important to India as its indigenous nuclear energy program was designed from the early stages to take advantage of unique reactor designs and fuel sources, including fast breeder reactors and India’s vast domestic supplies of thorium (around 13 percent of total world supply). Should these technologies prove economically viable, India’s future nuclear trade could benefit from a place at the NSG table. (more…)

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26
MAR
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RPI Author Scott Snyder on the Latest U.N. Sanctions Against North Korea

Li Baodong

China’s Ambassador to the UN, Li Baodong, speaking before the Security Council last year (Credit: Xinhua News Agency)

After several weeks of internal deliberation, the United Nations Security Council agreed on Thursday to expand sanctions against North Korea in response to its February 12 nuclear test. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2094 joins a number of prior resolutions (1695, 1718, 1874, and 2087) issued after past missile experiments and nuclear tests by the reclusive nation.

The latest vote was unsurprisingly met with condemnation by Pyongyang, which announced that it was nullifying nonaggression and denuclearization pacts with South Korea, silencing an emergency hot-line between the two countries, and earlier this week threatened to carry out “a preemptive nuclear strike” on the United States.

RPI Nuclear Debates in Asia author Scott A. Snyder writes that the increasingly punitive resolutions are “designed to cut off flows of nuclear and missile technologies between North Korea and the outside world and to signal international disapproval of North Korea’s nuclear-related activities.” Furthermore, Snyder highlights that the resolution “reaffirms its support to the Six Party Talks, calls for their resumption, urges all the participants to intensify their efforts on the full and expeditious implementation of the 19 September 2005 [Six Party Talks] Joint Statement.”

Despite the unanimous vote on the Security Council, Snyder believes it remains to be seen:

“whether member states, including China, are prepared to implement these new measures, or whether they will be subjected to a combination of strict interpretations and “willful blindness” on the docks that would render the new measures ineffective.”

Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea Studies and director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, advises North Korean leaders that continued brinksmanship which “turns a deaf ear to the international community’s frustrations” could ultimately undermine its strategy of regime survival if these provocations lead to more “vigorous” implementation of current U.N. Security Council resolutions by long-time but increasingly irritated partners such as China.

Read Scott Snyder’s full blog post here.

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8
MAR
0

Categories: Blog

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South Korea: New Government, Old Nuclear Debates

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once declared that “All politics is local.” While he may not have been thinking of nuclear weapons at the time he coined the phrase, debates over nuclear issues take on local characteristics within Asia.

The Rising Power Initiative’s “Nuclear Debates in Asia” project examines how several countries in Asia grapple with these topics at the domestic political and societal level. Positions on nuclear energy, national security, and nuclear nonproliferation are often linked as a wide range of viewpoints compete for prominence.

For a prime example of this debate, one needs only look to South Korea and its newly sworn in government led by President Park Geun-hye. In her inaugural address on Monday, President Park proclaimed that “North Korea’s recent nuclear test is a challenge to the survival and future of the Korean people.” She had campaigned on a pledge to ease tensions with Pyongyang and encouraged the hermit kingdom to denuclearize the peninsula if it wished to escape “self-imposed isolation.”

Despite North Korea’s recent provocations, the Park Administration remains interested in denuclearization talks and continuing Seoul’s status as a non-nuclear weapon state. A few days before this ceremony, however, one of South Korea’s largest newspapers – The Korea JoongAng Daily – reported that members of President Park’s own party suggested the need for an indigenous nuclear weapons capability to counter threats from its northern neighbor. Representative Shim Jae-cheol of the Saenuri Party argued last week that the “only way to defend our survival would be to maintain a balance of terror that confronts nuclear with nuclear.” In June 2012, former party chairman and presidential candidate Chung Mong-joon called for a “comprehensive re-examination of our security policy” that should empower Seoul with “the capability to possess” a nuclear arsenal.

(more…)

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Consequences abound in N. Korea’s obsession with nuclear weapons

Kim Jong UnThe passage of a resolution by the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 22 condemning North Korea’s missile launch of Dec. 12, 2012, and expanding sanctions against the country, has brought about a defiant and ferocious response from Pyongyang.

North Korea issued a series of pronouncements declaring the nullification of the Sept. 19, 2005, agreement on denuclearization, the end of further talks on denuclearization including the six-party talks, and vowing to strengthen its nuclear and missile capabilities by continuing rocket launching and nuclear testing, which North Korea declared explicitly as targeted against the United States.

That North Korea would respond with fury to a U.N. resolution was anticipated, but the barrage of intensified anti-American rhetoric and the blunt declaration to continue the quest for nuclear weapons with ICBM capabilities, especially at this juncture in time, probably came as a surprise to many analysts.

Given North Korea’s explicit renunciation of the agreement on denuclearization, it would be impossible for the United States to entertain any thought of altering the existing policy variously labeled “manage and contain” or “sanctions with limited dialogue” toward a policy of dialogue and engagement. For South Korea, despite President-elect Park Geun-hye’s professed willingness to resume talks with the North without preconditions and to improve the relations with North Korea through a confidence-building process, she will be constrained from pursuing a conciliatory policy of engagement.

It will be so especially since she has insisted she will not tolerate the North’s nuclear program and will deal sternly with North Korean provocations. Similarly for Japan, it is inconceivable for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to consider moderating his hard-line stance toward North Korea.

The impact of North Korea’s policy pronouncements on the policies of China and Russia will be no less significant.

(more…)

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A realistic approach to issues in Japan

ST ILLUSTRATION: MANNY FRANCISCO

RPI Author Narushige Michishita recently wrote in The Straits Times:

Since Mr Shinzo Abe was elected Prime Minister in December, observers both in Japan and overseas have predicted that he will take the country “to the right”. Will he? My short answer is yes and no. Here is what I mean.

Mr Abe is trying to break away from some traditions of a post- war “pacifist” Japan. He seeks to revise the Constitution drafted by American occupiers after Japan was defeated in the Pacific War. He likes to put a new name, the “National Defence Force”, to Japan’s technically non-military defence organisation – the Self-Defence Force (SDF), and give it a full-fledged military status.

He also wishes to make it possible for Japan to start exercising the “right of collective self-defence”, which is prohibited under the Constitution.

However, true right-wing hardliners would be disappointed to learn what these changes might mean in practice.

Read the full story here.

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Japan’s Shifting Strategic Discourse

In our latest Policy Brief, Richard Samuels writes:

After decades of accepting US supremacy in Asia as the foundation of its foreign and security policies, finding the right distance between the U.S. and China is the most important strategic choice facing Japan today. “Getting it just right” with these two powers will require both military and economic readjustments. But it will not be easy. Some in Japan fret about a Washington-Beijing “G-2” condominium. Others doubt U.S. capabilities and commitments going forward. There are also those who insist that unless Japan accommodates to Chinese power, it will lose influence in the region and globally. Still others are concerned that rivalry with China is unavoidable. Because the debate is often so clamorous, and because the Sino-Japanese relationship is so frequently punctuated by tension, the possibility that improved relations with China might be compatible with sustained close relations with the United States is often lost in the noise.

Read the full Policy Brief here.

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RPI Author Gregg Brazinsky on Containing North Korea

Tim Brinton IllustrationIn a recent Chicago Tribune op-ed, RPI Author and GWU Associate Professor of History and International Affairs Gregg Brazinsky writes:

“In recent months, North Korea has been the problem that nobody in the Obama administration wants to deal with. Since the Kim regime defied Washington last April and went ahead with its previous rocket launch attempt, the United States has had no consistent approach for dealing with the reclusive regime. South Korean strategy has not been much better. Guided by the conservative Lee Myung-bak government, Seoul has often rung alarm bells about North Korea’s behavior without a workable plan for changing it. Together, their policies have served only to confirm the adage that ignoring problems makes them worse.”

Read the full article here.

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