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| 1 |
ID:
192151
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| Summary/Abstract |
On March 18, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin strode into the Kremlin’s gold-drenched Georgievsky reception hall to announce the annexation of Crimea. Kyiv was aghast, and western capitals spluttered with indignation, but the applause in Moscow was as thunderous as anything anyone had heard in decades. The takeover of Crimea relied more on influence than brute force. The Kremlin had spent years subjugating domestic media, honing its prowess at cyber operations, dispatching armies of bots to manipulate discourse on the internet, and putting a friendly spin on the news outside Russia with well-produced television broadcasts. In February 2014, Russia used its manipulation machine to pull off the largest land grab in Europe since the Second World War without losing a single soldier.
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| 2 |
ID:
192150
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China’s historic 20th Party Congress in 2022 was principally noteworthy because Xi Jinping successfully secured a third term, but Beijing also tellingly postponed releasing GDP and other key economic statistics during the Congress. This deliberate obfuscation could not conceal that the Chinese economy has been in trouble for quite a while now. Media stories in recent years have increasingly reported on Chinese home buyers refusing to pay mortgages,Footnote1 depositors lining up to retrieve savings,Footnote2 central authorities cracking down on large private firms,Footnote3 and local governments becoming constrained by debt and shrinking revenue.Footnote4 The list goes on.
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| 3 |
ID:
192152
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In meetings with their US counterparts, South Korean policymakers have repeatedly raised the same question: can South Korea trust the United States? The answer is a resounding and increasingly exasperated “yes” from American officials and experts. However, doubts have surfaced over the past year on the Korean side regarding US commitments to the US-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance, despite Seoul and Washington publicly reaffirming the ironclad nature of their 70-year alliance. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s April 2023 state visit to Washington DC and his summit meeting with President Joseph Biden, their second in as many years, was aimed at demonstrating the importance of the US-ROK alliance to both Americans and South Koreans, while also acknowledging South Korea’s growing role in the Indo-Pacific. Although the Yoon-Biden summit may have been meaningful in helping the two governments and their respective domestic audiences think about the future value of the alliance, it did not necessarily resolve some of the underlying bilateral tensions.
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| 4 |
ID:
192148
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The politics of multilateral emissions treaties are pathological. To succeed, such treaties must overcome: (1) the free-rider problem in the international sphere; (2) domestic constituencies that favor the production and sale of fossil fuels, the most important of which is often the general public; (3) resentment from developing nations asked to sacrifice their growth to mitigate the historic emissions of wealthy countries; (4) an increasingly hostile national security environment; and (5) a skeptical Republican Party, which often leads the most important country for global cooperation. It is no surprise, then, that a 2021 study of 36 countries representing 80 percent of the world’s emissions found that only one country—Gambia—had made commitments in line with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.Footnote1 That temperature is the accepted, if somewhat arbitrary, tipping point after which the most serious and likely irreversible effects of warming will emerge.Footnote2 We currently sit at 1.1 degrees above such levels,Footnote3 and every year the average atmospheric carbon dioxide level increases like clockwork.Footnote4 Tick tock. Indeed, despite the economic drag from the COVID-19 pandemic, we humans released 36.8 billion tons of carbon in 2022 due to energy combustion and industrial processes—the highest ever annual level.Footnote
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| 5 |
ID:
192155
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It makes sense that the United States has significantly downgraded relations with Pakistan since the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The anger in Washington toward Islamabad for its support of the Afghan Taliban during the US war was palpable and justified. Absent a need to rely on Pakistan to access Afghanistan to prosecute the war, and with the broader decline of counterterrorism as a priority, the US only sees the need for a minimum viable bilateral relationship. The US shift to near peer competition has exacerbated the distance as Pakistan’s close relationship with China—now the preeminent US national security concern—is juxtaposed with US efforts to foster closer ties with Pakistan’s rival, India, as a regional counterweight to China.
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| 6 |
ID:
192147
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| Summary/Abstract |
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984—which has become a bestseller among Russians after their country invaded Ukraine in February 2022Footnote1—a dictatorship wages war not to achieve any foreign policy objective nor grand utopian vision, but to distract the population and break its desire to resist oppression and injustice at home. “[T]he consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger,” as Orwell put it, “makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”Footnote2 Hijacked by a self-serving governing class, war is a callous hoax, its sole purpose to keep society in check and autocratic rule intact.
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| 7 |
ID:
192153
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A nuclear armed-state enjoys enormous benefits in world politics including near-absolute security, security policymaking autonomy and independence, heightened international bargaining power, and a high probability of emerging victorious in disputes with non-nuclear states.Footnote1 Given the abundant benefits, it is understandable that non-nuclear states would desire to become nuclear. In particular, when a state is threatened by an enemy armed with nuclear weapons, the desire to be similarly nuclear-armed for the sake of its own survival increases substantially.
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| 8 |
ID:
192154
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| Summary/Abstract |
South Korea has long been on the list of potential over-the-horizon proliferation challenges, but growing debates in Seoul about its nuclear options are quickly moving it toward the front of the US nonproliferation agenda. Indeed, proliferation concerns featured prominently at the April 2023 Republic of Korea (ROK)-US summit, where Washington sought South Korean reaffirmation of its “longstanding commitment to its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty” in return for efforts to bolster extended nuclear deterrence.Footnote1 For decades, calls in South Korea for nuclear armament remained relegated to the political fringes and did not receive serious policy attention. That has begun to change in recent years.Footnote2 South Korean nuclear weapons advocates and those sympathetic to the idea are becoming more numerous, louder, and are increasingly drawn from a broader cross-section of the national security community.Footnote3 In January 2023, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol publicly stated that if threats continue to worsen, South Korea might develop nuclear weapons.Footnote4 This is the first time a South Korean president has made such comments. Perhaps most importantly, there has been a subtle evolution of the public discourse, from basic arguments about why nuclear weapons may be desirable to nascent articulations of how South Korea might go about developing them: Seoul’s proliferation strategy.
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| 9 |
ID:
192149
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| Summary/Abstract |
At the 2022 Shangri-La Dialogue, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned defense ministers from across the Indo-Pacific region that “Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow.” Russia’s war of aggression and China’s tacit support for the invasion have amplified the urgency of the threat posed by China’s economic and military rise and have informed material changes to Japanese defense policy.
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| 10 |
ID:
192156
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| Summary/Abstract |
In recent years, US-Pakistan relations seemed to have been one of the many casualties of the Global War on Terror. The two countries had developed an extremely close strategic relationship following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the United States going so far as to make Pakistan a major non-NATO ally in return for its counterterrorism (CT) support and assistance with stabilization efforts in Afghanistan. But Pakistani double-dealing—which included continuing aid to the Taliban and associated militant groups in Afghanistan as well as extensive use of terrorists to promote Pakistani interests in South Asia—badly damaged the relationship. The United States became convinced that it had been duped into supporting a country that, for decades, had been working against it. Bitter public statements and substantial cuts in US aid ensued during the Trump administration, followed by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan after President Biden took office in 2021. By this point, US-Pakistan relations were at an all-time low, and appeared unlikely to recover in the foreseeable future.
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