Furthermore, I believe opposition to CBI risks politicizing monetary policy. I recommend strengthening legal protections for CBI, enhancing the legal framework and prioritizing long-term stability over short-term political gains. Additionally, we should promote international agreements and cooperation among central banks to effectively manage global economic spillovers. These measures are essential for preserving the integrity and effectiveness of central banks in a rapidly changing global economy.

The role of central bank independence

Central bank independence is essential for maintaining a balanced approach to monetary policy, particularly in managing the trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

According to the (or the Fed), the Federal Reserve System is “independent within the government:” It works within the framework established by Congress. By operating independently of the government, central banks can focus on long-term economic objectives rather than succumbing to short-term political pressures. This independence governments from using monetary policy to achieve electoral gains, such as artificially lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy before an election.

Moreover, an independent central bank is better positioned to manage inflation, which is a critical component of economic stability. When inflation is allowed to rise unchecked, it can purchasing power, destabilize financial markets and harm economic growth. By maintaining a focus on price stability, central banks prevent these negative effects and actively an environment conducive to sustainable economic development. This offers a hopeful outlook for economic growth.

CBI has long been regarded as a cornerstone of sound economic governance, particularly in an increasingly globalized economy. As nations become more integrated through trade, finance and technology, the ability of central banks to operate independently from political influence has become crucial for maintaining economic stability.

One of the key drivers behind the global movement toward CBI is the need to attract and retain foreign investment. In a globalized economy, countries compete for capital and investors seek stability and predictability in monetary policy. Central banks perceived as free from political interference are more likely to inspire confidence among investors. As a result, many countries, particularly emerging markets, adopted or strengthened CBI as part of broader economic reforms aimed at integrating into the global economy.

The experience of countries like and in the 1990s illustrates this. Both nations, seeking to stabilize their economies and attract foreign investment, implemented significant reforms that enhanced the independence of their central banks. These reforms were instrumental in reducing inflation and fostering economic growth, demonstrating the positive impact of CBI in a globalized world.

During the Eurozone debt crisis that began in 2009, the European Central Bank (ECB)’s independence was critical in the collapse of the euro. As several Eurozone countries, including Greece, Ireland and Portugal, faced severe financial difficulties, the ECB resisted political pressure from member states to engage in direct bailout financing. Instead, it implemented unconventional monetary policies, such as the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program. This provided a backstop for sovereign bonds without directly compromising its independence. This approach was pivotal in financial markets and restoring investor confidence, helping to prevent the crisis from spreading further across Europe.

Donald Trump’s opposition to CBI and the risks of weakening it

Former United States President Donald Trump has expressed his that, as president, he should have more influence over monetary policy. He has suggested that his business success gives him better instincts than those at the Fed. He criticized Fed Chairman Jerome Powell for poor timing in policy decisions, asserting that central banking is largely based on “gut feeling.”

During a press conference in August 2024, Trump , “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money. I was very successful. And I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.” Trump’s business success, particularly in the real estate sector, where he has built a multi-billion-dollar empire, gives him a unique perspective on economic growth. Trump’s preference for easy money and low interest rates reflects his background in real estate, where tight money can harm developers.

Trump’s desire for more direct control over the Fed is reminiscent of historical instances where political influence over monetary policy led to disastrous outcomes. A notable example is US President Richard Nixon’s over Fed Chairman Arthur Burns in the 1970s, which resulted in policies that contributed to the stagflation of that era — characterized by high inflation and stagnant economic growth. Trump’s approach risks repeating these mistakes by prioritizing short-term economic gains over long-term stability.

Trump Jerome Powell as Fed Chairman but later him when the Fed did not lower rates. Trump also favors a weak dollar, believing it benefits exports; critics, however, argue that this approach harms Americans. Regardless, Trump would need a legal change to gain more control over the Fed. This is unlikely given the political risks and the Senate’s role in confirming any Fed Chair.

Trump criticized the Fed’s timing on monetary decisions. In particular, he noted that its models are outdated, still relying on a flawed tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. He pointed out that the Fed’s policies, such as quantitative easing (QE) and the expanded balance sheet, have given it excessive influence over the economy. Trump believes a debate over the Fed’s mandate and models would be beneficial. Economists, however, warn that focusing on easy money and a weak dollar could lead to more inflation and economic problems in a potential second term.

Trump’s criticism of the Fed, particularly his calls for lower interest rates and more accessible monetary policy, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of central banks. As a businessman with a background in real estate — a sector that thrives on low interest rates — Trump’s preference for easy money is understandable but misguided when applied to national monetary policy. His critique overlooks the risks associated with such an approach, like the potential for inflation to spiral out of control.

Trump’s advocacy for easy money is particularly concerning in the context of inflation. While low interest rates can stimulate economic growth in the short term, they also increase the risk of inflation if not carefully managed. The Fed’s primary mandate is to balance the goals of maximum employment and price stability. However, political interference that prioritizes growth at any cost could lead to the of this careful balance, resulting in higher inflation and economic instability.

Additionally, weakening CBI could undermine the Fed’s ability to respond effectively to economic crises. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the importance of a strong and independent central bank in stabilizing the economy. The Fed’s swift actions, including quantitative easing and emergency lending facilities, were crucial in preventing a deeper recession. Political influence that hampers the Fed’s ability to act decisively in future crises could have severe consequences for the US and global economies.

Weakening CBI can also exacerbate economic inequality, which is a growing concern in many advanced economies. When political figures influence monetary policy to achieve specific economic outcomes, like lower interest rates to spur growth before an election, the benefits often accrue disproportionately to certain sectors, like those reliant on cheap credit. Meanwhile, the costs — such as higher inflation — can disproportionately impact lower-income households. Inflation erodes the purchasing power of fixed incomes and savings, which can wealth disparities and strain the social fabric.

The Biden administration’s commitment to CBI

The global shift towards CBI is not just a change in monetary policy but a significant evolution that carries the weight of history. It is a response to the devastating inflationary episodes of the 1970s and 1980s, a movement that was a deliberate rethinking of the central banks’ role. This shift is rooted in the understanding that politically driven monetary decisions could lead to destabilizing and unsustainable economic conditions.

In the US, the passing of the Federal Reserve Reform (1977) marked a pivotal moment in this global shift. By enshrining the Fed’s dual mandate — promoting full employment and maintaining price stability — Congress also took crucial steps to protect the central bank from political interference. Incumbent President Joe Biden’s administration, building on Trump-era policies, has pursued significant investments in key industries through initiatives like the CHIPS and Science (2022) and the Inflation Reduction (2022). Some of these major industries include green energy and semiconductor manufacturing.

These initiatives demonstrate a strategic alignment of fiscal and industrial policy, aiming to strengthen domestic supply chains and promote technological leadership. While advocates argue that they enhance economic resilience and innovation, they also raise questions about the potential erosion of CBI. Central banks, traditionally insulated from political pressures, might face increasing demands to coordinate with government-led industrial policies. This would challenge the delicate balance between fiscal and monetary objectives.

Though a more collaborative approach between fiscal and monetary policy could generate short-term economic benefits, it also risks the central bank’s ability to act independently to stabilize inflation and manage long-term economic health. This legislative move was significant because it showcased the importance of allowing the Fed to operate independently. It recognized that short-term political pressures could undermine the economy’s long-term stability.

The US experience set a powerful example that soon influenced global economic policy. In 1997, both the Bank of England (BoE) and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) were granted formal . This signaled a major shift away from the historical norms of political control over monetary policy. Establishing the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1998 exemplified this trend. The ECB’s creation marked a new era in European monetary policy: It replaced national central banks that had been subject to varying degrees of political influence, thereby promoting a standardized and politically neutral approach to monetary governance across the Eurozone.

Empirical evidence robustly supports the benefits of this move towards CBI. It has become increasingly prevalent among advanced economies, connecting with a significant reduction in inflation rates and more firmly anchored long-term inflation expectations. These outcomes tie directly to the enhanced credibility and predictability that independent central banks bring to monetary policy. They allow them to focus on long-term economic health rather than short-term political considerations.

The global commitment to CBI has only strengthened over time. A comprehensive of 370 central bank reforms from 1923 to 2023 reveals a resurgence in support for CBI since 2016. This underscores its continued relevance as a fundamental pillar of economic stability. The renewed commitment is particularly noteworthy given the complex and evolving challenges facing global economies today, reaffirming CBI as a critical tool in maintaining macroeconomic stability.

Within the Biden administration, the historical context of CBI serves as a crucial guide. The administration’s steadfast support for CBI is not just a matter of policy preference, but a deep-rooted commitment to economic stability. In analyzing the Biden administration’s commitment to CBI, it is essential to recognize the delicate balance between fiscal policy and monetary authority. CBI is often celebrated for its role in safeguarding economies from politically motivated monetary policy that could destabilize inflation control. The separation between monetary and fiscal policy has been vital in maintaining long-term economic stability. The Fed’s autonomy is seen as critical to ensuring that monetary decisions remain focused on inflation and employment targets rather than short-term political gains.

The Biden administration wielded considerable influence over the economy using extensive fiscal policy measures. The American Rescue Plan (2021), the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as strategic executive actions such as the of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves and student-loan debt , reflect a pragmatic approach. They leveraged fiscal tools to influence economic outcomes in ways that monetary policy alone could not have achieved in such a short time.

While CBI remains a pillar of long-term economic stability, the administration likely recognized that, given the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, fiscal measures were indispensable. The unique conditions meant fighting inflation and stabilizing the economy required a broader, more immediate response — one where fiscal and executive action played a leading role, complementing rather than conflicting with the Fed’s independence. This dynamic, while preserving the long-term ideal of CBI, also underscores the reality that fiscal policy and executive power can shape economic outcomes in ways that transcend central bank interventions alone. Therefore, reversing the hard-earned progress towards CBI risks rekindling the inflationary pressures that once wreaked havoc on global economies.

Index of Central Bank Independence (CBI) in Advanced Economies, 1970-2022. Via .

Enhancing coordination and the role of globalization

While CBI is crucial, improving coordination between monetary and fiscal policy is merited, as Trump’s critique suggests. Fiscal policy, controlled by Congress and the executive branch, also significantly influences aggregate demand and inflation. Better communication and coordination between these two arms of economic policy could to more coherent and effective economic management.

One proposal to achieve this without compromising the Fed’s independence is to include the National Economic Council director and the Congressional Budget Office director as ex officio nonvoting members of the Federal Open Market Committee. This would allow for better between monetary and fiscal policies while the Fed’s autonomy in decision-making.

However, private conversations about economic stability are being held. The June 2024 between the BoJ, the Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Agency highlights a critical moment in �����貹��’s economic policy. (Worth noting is the fact that the Minister of Finance, the Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy and their designated delegates cannot . When attending Monetary Policy Meetings, they can express opinions, submit proposals and request the Policy Board to postpone a vote until the next meeting.) The yen’s depreciation against the US dollar has raised concerns about its potential impacts on inflation and overall economic stability in 2024. The discussion about the BoJ’s independence becomes particularly pertinent in this context. Though the BoJ traditionally operates with a degree of autonomy to implement monetary policy based on economic conditions, the yen’s current weakness and its repercussions are stirring discussions of whether more direct government intervention is needed.

The independence of the BoJ is rooted in its mandate to focus on price stability and economic growth without undue political influence. This separation is intended to ensure that monetary policy decisions implement policy with the aim of maintaining price stability with long-term objectives, not short-term political pressures. However, there is a growing sentiment within the government to take more assertive actions. This is evidenced by recent statements from key figures such as Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kohno, who has hiking interest rates in response to the yen’s weakness. Such proposals indicate that some policymakers view the BoJ’s current policy stance as insufficient to address the immediate challenges posed by the depreciating currency.

The involvement of other members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) further complicates the issue. Its discussions about potential interventions, including those that could impact the BoJ’s policy decisions, reflect a broader concern about the yen’s trajectory. While the BoJ has a clear mandate and operational framework, the mounting pressure from the government to align monetary policy with broader economic goals raises serious questions about the feasibility of maintaining its independence. If the government were to exert more influence, it could potentially undermine the BoJ’s ability to focus on long-term economic stability. This would pose significant risks to the economy.

CBI is closely linked to controlling inflation, which is a primary concern in advanced and emerging economies. Independent central banks are better equipped to resist the political pressure to pursue expansionary monetary policies that could increase inflation. This is particularly important in a globalized economy, where trade and financial linkages can transmit inflationary pressures across borders.

Empirical evidence supports the notion that CBI is associated with lower inflation. Countries with more independent central banks tended to experience lower and more stable inflation rates. For example, the relationship between CBI and inflation control became especially evident during the inflationary period of the 1970s and 1980s, when many central banks were subject to political interference, leading to high and persistent . This finding has been corroborated by subsequent research, which has shown that CBI contributes to the anchoring of inflation expectations, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of monetary policy.

The relationship between CBI and inflation control became particularly evident during the inflationary period of the 1970s and 1980s. Many central banks were subject to political interference during this time, leading to high and persistent inflation. Several countries, including the US and Germany, responded by granting greater to their central banks, resulting in a significant decrease in inflation.

Central banks navigate an increasingly complex global environment, balancing domestic objectives with the need to manage the global spillovers of their actions. The independence of central banks is critical to ensure economic stability and long-term growth.

In a globalized economy, the actions of a central bank have implications that reach far beyond national borders. The US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency means that the Fed’s policies global financial markets, international trade and the economic stability of other nations. The importance of a non-politicized Fed in maintaining international confidence in the US dollar cannot be overstated. It helps capital flight, currency volatility and a potential shift away from the dollar as the dominant global currency.

Globalization has fundamentally altered monetary policy dynamics, particularly in the context of central bank independence. As economies intertwine, the actions of one central bank can have profound effects on others, amplifying the importance of independent decision-making. The growing complexity of global financial systems necessitates that central banks adapt rapidly to new challenges, such as capital flow volatility and cross-border financial risks. 

One critical aspect of globalization is the transmission of economic shocks across borders. Central banks must be vigilant in mitigating these shocks while maintaining domestic economic stability. For instance, the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how quickly financial turmoil can spread globally, underscoring the for independent central banks to act swiftly and decisively. The also showcased the of international cooperation among central banks; while this is necessary, it must be balanced with preserving domestic policy autonomy.

Looking forward, central banks must navigate the delicate balance between maintaining independence and participating in global monetary coordination. The potential for conflicts between domestic objectives and international pressures will likely increase, requiring central banks to adopt more sophisticated and transparent communication strategies. Ensuring that these institutions remain insulated from political pressures while engaging in necessary international cooperation will be crucial for economic stability in an increasingly interconnected world.

The Global Financial Crisis and central bank coordination

One historic economic event is especially imperative to study. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009 marked one of the most significant economic downturns in recent memory, with worldwide impact. The crisis began in the US but quickly spread to other economies, highlighting the interconnectedness of global markets.

The US is one of the largest economies in the world, and its trade relations influence other nations’ economies substantially. For instance, during the GFC, the collapse of US demand had a , causing major slowdowns in export-driven economies like those of China, Germany and Japan. This exemplifies how shocks in the US “export” financial stress across the world, while the reverse influence is often less pronounced. The rapid transmission of financial shocks underscored the need for coordinated action among central banks worldwide to stabilize the global economy.

During the GFC, central banks took the following actions:

1. The Fed played a pivotal role by implementing a series of unconventional monetary policies, including lowering to near-zero levels and introducing . These measures involved buying assets to restore liquidity to financial markets and support economic recovery.
2. Faced with a severe sovereign debt crisis in several Eurozone countries, the ECB lowered and provided long-term refinancing operations to banks. The ECB later introduced the , which was crucial in stabilizing bond markets and preventing the collapse of the euro.
3. The BoE reduced interest rates and launched its own to support the UK economy. Its actions were coordinated with those of other major central banks to ensure a unified response to the crisis.
4. The BoJ expanded its asset purchase and maintained a low-interest rate to support the Japanese economy, which was also affected by the global downturn.

Central banks recognized that unilateral actions would be insufficient to address the global nature of the crisis. Therefore, they engaged in unprecedented levels of cooperation, particularly through these mechanisms:

1. Currency Swap Agreements: Central banks, including the Fed, ECB, BoE and BoJ, established currency swap lines to ensure that banks in other countries had access to US dollars, which were in high demand. This move crucially prevented a liquidity crisis and stabilized global markets.
2. Coordinated Interest Rate Cuts: In October 2008, several major central banks, including the Fed, ECB, BoE and BoJ, conducted a coordinated interest rate cut to reduce borrowing costs globally and stimulate economic activity.
3. G20 Summits: The G20, which includes both advanced and emerging economies, played a critical role in facilitating international coordination. The 2009 G20 in London prompted commitments to provide fiscal stimulus, increase resources for the International Monetary Fund and enhance financial regulation to prevent future crises.
4. Bank for International Settlements (BIS): The BIS serves as a platform for central banks to exchange information, coordinate policy responses and discuss strategies for maintaining financial stability. Its role in fostering international cooperation was vital in ensuring a coherent global response to the crisis.

The coordinated efforts of central banks were instrumental in mitigating the worst effects of the GFC. The rapid implementation of monetary easing measures, coupled with international cooperation, helped stabilize financial markets, restore confidence and set the stage for a gradual economic recovery. The crisis demonstrated that in a globalized economy, the actions of one central bank can have significant spillover effects on others, making international cooperation essential.

The experience of the GFC showcases the importance of sustained international cooperation among central banks. As global markets become more interconnected, the potential for spillover effects increases, making coordinated policy responses critical for maintaining global economic stability.

Moving forward, central banks should continue to strengthen their cooperation through global forums like the G20 and BIS, ensuring that their policies are harmonized to prevent adverse cross-border impacts. Additionally, they should work together to develop frameworks for managing future crises. In an interconnected world, the stability of one economy often depends on the stability of others.

What is the solution?

The independence of central banks like the Fed is vital for ensuring sound monetary policy, economic stability and global financial confidence. While Trump’s critique of the Fed highlights legitimate concerns about the need for better coordination between monetary and fiscal policy, his desire for more direct control over monetary policy risks undermining the very foundation of economic stability. A politicized central bank, driven by short-term political goals, would likely lead to higher inflation, economic instability and global volatility.

In an increasingly globalized economy, the role of central bank independence extends beyond national borders. The interconnectedness of global markets means that the actions of central banks can have profound spillover effects on other economies. Central banks must navigate complex global dynamics, where their decisions influence global capital flows, currency stability and international trade.

The solution lies not in reducing central bank independence but in enhancing the mechanisms for policy coordination while preserving the autonomy of institutions critical to the economy’s long-term health. By maintaining a strong, independent Fed, the US can continue navigating the complexities of a globalized economy while safeguarding its economic future. Central bank independence can secure a stable and prosperous economic environment domestically and globally by focusing on policies like the Fed’s : maximum employment and price stability.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Quad is a grouping of four major Indo-Pacific democracies: the United States, India, Japan and Australia. It was relaunched in 2017 to counterbalance China’s growing influence by promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific through cooperation in security, infrastructure and trade.

Despite this ambition, the Quad faces significant limitations. Critics argue it remains a “talking shop,” where dialogue seldom leads to concrete action. Additionally, some members have limited bilateral experience working together, which hampers effective collaboration.

South Korea was notably absent when �����貹��’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe first conceived the Quad in 2007. Abe’s vision was geographically focused; he pictured a rhombus with its corners in Japan (north), Australia (south), the US (east) and India (west). The idea was to cover ground and secure critical shipping lanes. This left South Korea, located in the middle, outside the equation.

Yet, South Korea has considerable strengths. South Korea and Japan, are the only two economic powers in the region that can plausibly compete with China in building infrastructure rapidly and at scale. South Korea is also a strong defense partner of the US, with a technologically advanced military boasting half a million active personnel — ten times the size of Australia’s. Moreover, South Korea is a leader in global industries like shipbuilding, memory chips and electric vehicle batteries, making it not just a regional player but a global one. Most importantly and obviously, it is a vibrant democracy. For all these reasons, it merits membership in the Quad.

The broader context is the growing security threat posed by China, which seeks to control sea lanes in the East and South China Seas and use its economic power to influence its neighbors. While it makes sense for South Korea to join the Quad, it is unlikely to make provocative moves against China, its largest trading partner and greatest military threat, without a security guarantee from the US. Ultimately, the Quad (or Quint) seems destined to evolve into a military alliance.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

[Note: This FO Talks/FO Live is part of the Osaka School of International Public Policy’s “Peace and Human Security in Asia: Toward a Meaningful Japan-Korea Partnership” project supported by the Korea Foundation.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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There is no clear agreement on the Quad’s purpose. Is it a group of friends, or a security alliance? If it serves any purpose, it’s because these democracies, neighboring China, feel the need to unite. While wary of China, they claim not to be forming an alliance to contain it.

If that is the logic, excluding South Korea seems illogical. South Korea, sharing a border with North Korea and with China nearby, is more vulnerable than any Quad member.

Why is South Korea not in the Quad?

It’s important to note that the Quad is originally a Japanese concept. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe envisioned it as a platform for future economic cooperation. India, the US, and Australia were key trading partners for Japan, and protecting sea routes to them was essential. This required international cooperation.

From �����貹��’s perspective, this still makes sense. However, the broader purpose of the Quad has shifted. In 2017, the group “rebooted” and rebranded itself with the slogan “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” — opposing China’s attempts to claim the East and South China Seas as its territorial waters. But if that’s the goal, why exclude South Korea? Or, for that matter, countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, whose maritime sovereignty China threatens?

The AUKUS deal, which includes the US, UK, and Australia, further complicates things. It suggests the US and Australia are moving toward alliances based on cultural ties rather than democracy. Britain has little role in East Asia today, yet it was included while regional powers like France were not. However, Anglo unity doesn’t have to clash with democratic solidarity. The US and Australia could deepen ties with Asian democracies, and including South Korea in the Quad would be a vital step.

Why the Quad needs South Korea

South Korea is more than just one more adversary of China that could cooperate in military matters. Including South Korea is a matter of defining the Quad’s identity. If the grouping aims to be a significant regional actor, it needs to inspire a sense of purpose. Right now, it looks like a ragtag team with little justification beyond each actor’s personal interest. The Quad needs an identity. Democracy is the obvious defining characteristic of the grouping, but if that is the case, South Korea must be involved. If South Korea remain excluded, observers may wonder whether something other than democracy is the real criterion.

There some flies in the ointment, though. South Korea has strong security ties with the US but is economically dependent on China, its largest trading partner. Joining the Quad could strain this relationship, especially since China has a history of using economic pressure to influence political decisions. In 2017, China’s boycott over South Korea’s decision to host the US THAAD system heavily impacted South Korea’s economy.

Another issue is the historical animosity between South Korea and Japan, stemming from �����貹��’s 35-year occupation of Korea. Many Koreans still harbor resentment for �����貹��’s actions during World War II, though tensions have eased since Abe’s tenure.

South Korea is more physically threatened by China than any current Quad member. The threat of a Chinese or North Korean invasion overland is a real danger (and one that has already occured, during the Korean War). For Japan, an island nation, the possibility of a Chinese naval threat to the homeland remains somewhat more theoretical. So, South Korea may hesitate to take a strong stance on issues like maritime freedom. However, due to its ties with the US from the Korean War, South Korea is even more integrated into the US security network than Japan. Will it be willing to join an alliance likely seen by Beijing as anti-China?

For now, it’s unclear. But South Korea’s inclusion would make sense. Both South Korea and Japan have strong infrastructure development sectors and, together, could offer an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. What the Quad needs is a clear identity that other nations can buy into. Without this, it will inspire neither moral nor strategic trust.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

[Note: This FO Talks/FO Live is part of the Osaka School of International Public Policy’s “Peace and Human Security in Asia: Toward a Meaningful Japan-Korea Partnership” project supported by the Korea Foundation.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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A key battleground in this competition is the between the US and China. Both nations recognize the immense importance chip production holds for economics and national security. A secure and reliable supply is crucial for maintaining functioning weapon systems and communication networks, not to mention consumer electronics, automation and healthcare.��

The stakes of the global chip industry

East Asia dominates global chip production, with powerhouses like Taiwan (), South Korea (, ) and Japan (, ) the way. Taiwan over half the world’s most advanced chips, while South Korea boasts a significant memory chip share and heavy research and development investment. Japan critical equipment for over a third of global chip manufacturing. This concentration establishes East Asia as an indispensable tech hub.

China presents an anomaly. It is not a major producer but the world’s consumer, nearly $380 billion in chips annually. The chips fuel China’s booming tech sector, which spans consumer electronics to the telecom and automotive industries. China, however, is now pursuing self-sufficiency in chip production, by significant state-backed investments, positioning semiconductors as a key industry for its future.

The US and China battle for tech supremacy

Chinese President Xi Jinping having a “world-class” People’s Liberation Army () by 2035. This vision of an intelligent military force implies unparalleled technological sophistication, superior combat capabilities and global influence. It relies heavily on autonomous weaponry and extensive artificial intelligence integration. For this, China has AI investment, with a particular focus on military application.

A United States Department of Defense report China’s aggressive pursuit of next-generation capabilities through AI and advanced technologies. US companies have led the development of advanced microchips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and China has historically on US-developed semiconductors to help it progress in high-tech fields like AI. By utilizing these technologies, China has been able to its military modernization and close the gap with other leading powers. The US fears China’s chip advancements could give the nation an edge, built on the back of US engineering.

To counter China’s efforts, the US President Joe Biden’s administration export controls in October 2022. It restricted the nation’s access to US-made chips and chip-making equipment. Now Chinese entities must obtain a special US license to make such purchases. Further tightening its grip, the US the Netherlands and Japan to restrict similar exports to China in January 2023.

The US’s escalating restrictions on chip exports have sent ripples through both the US and global semiconductor industries. Nvidia, the US’s tech company by market capitalization, a significant revenue decline in key markets. Its year-on-year revenue from China and Hong Kong plummeted 20% in the 12 months leading up to February 2023. Tightened US export controls directly this downturn. In response, Nvidia introduced a less advanced A800 chip specifically for the Chinese market. However, subsequent US restrictions this solution ineffective, further straining their regional performance.

The chip war has hit Chinese companies hard as well. Data from China’s General Administration of Customs a near-30% reduction in chip imports during the first five months of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. This decline has disrupted production schedules and hindered technological advancements across numerous sectors. China’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, condemned the US for pursuing a strategy of “containment and suppression.”

In May 2023, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao Japan to reconsider its export controls.

Retaliating against US restrictions, Beijing banned the use of chips from major American semiconductor company in critical infrastructure projects. Chinese businesses have by finding alternative methods to obtain high-quality chips. This includes chip rental, the use of intermediaries and even semiconductor smuggling.��

Beijing has exports of rare earth elements, vital for chip manufacturing. These elements modern technology: Lanthanum aids camera lenses and battery electrodes, neodymium strengthens magnets and dysprosium keeps data storage devices and advanced electronics functioning. This move has escalated tensions with the US.

The chip war endangers the world

This conflict extends beyond chips, encompassing AI and cybersecurity — in this field, technological dominance is a national security issue. While China supplies raw materials for chip production, products like AI algorithms, cybersecurity frameworks and data analytics systems hold greater strategic weight. These advanced technologies shape military and economic power, influencing the trade war’s dynamics. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) research China leads the US in 37 out of 44 key technology sectors. Geopolitical tensions, technological rivalry and supply chain vulnerabilities combine to create a high-stakes global chip industry.

China’s dominance in specific AI applications like facial recognition contrasts with its domestic semiconductor industry’s limitations. Despite significant investments, China to close the gap with leading manufacturers like TSMC and . This is due to technological , including the inability to produce high-end chips that match the precision and efficiency of those made by established industry leaders​. Recognizing this dependency, the government has initiatives to bolster domestic semiconductor production.

The chip war threatens to cripple the global economy. Telecommunications equipment shortages threaten to delay smartphone production and lead manufacturers to hike prices and hinder infrastructure advancements. Governments must address national security concerns by diversifying suppliers. The risk of broader economic disruption looms large; telecommunications troubles could cascade, leading to job losses and economic decline.

Furthermore, the semiconductor dispute could exacerbate trade tensions in other areas as countries retaliate against each other by raising tariffs and barriers. To prevent this, international collaboration is needed.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The VIX index, a measure of volatility, , its third-highest reading in history. Only in 2008, after the demise of Lehman Brothers, and in 2020, during the onslaught of COVID-19, did the index top that number.

A reading of 65 on the VIX is very high. To justify such a high volatility, stock prices would have to move by at least 4% (in either direction) on at least 13 trading days over the following 20 trading days. This would indicate a major economic calamity of global importance, which, to our best knowledge, has not occurred.

What happened?

On Wednesday, July 31, the Bank of Japan interest rates to 0.25%, sparking a rally in the yen that caught hedge funds off guard.

The same day, the US central bank at a possible interest rate cut in September. Two days later followed a worse-than-expected US job market . The unemployment rate reached a 3-year high.

As predicted by futures markets, the probability of a 0.5%-point cut in interest rates by September briefly reached 100%, with some contracts even implying a reduction by 0.75 percentage points. Jeremey Siegel, who lectures on finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, for an immediate 0.75%-point via cut emergency meeting followed by another 0.75%-point cut in September.

Within a few days, the Japanese currency reversed its weakness and compared to the US dollar, causing large losses to the so-called yen carry trade.

A carry trade involves borrowing funds in a low-yielding currency, like the yen, and investing the proceeds in a higher-yielding currency, like the US dollar. Since the summer of 2023, a large difference in interest rates between the US (5.3%) and Japan (-0.1%) attracted plenty of money.

The exact size of the yen carry trade is unknown. Cross-border yen loans as of March. Speculative positioning in yen futures at the CME futures exchange in Chicago contracts at the beginning of July. With each contract being worth ¥12.5 million, a total of ¥2.25 trillion ($15 billion) was thus at stake.

The prospect of rising Japanese interest rates combined with falling US interest rates meant the yen carry trade became less attractive. Higher volatility in the yen/dollar exchange rate led quantitative and trend-following investors to reduce their positions.

Why did the Bank of Japan raise rates?

Around of the Japanese population is aged 65 and older, making Japan the country with the highest share of elderly people globally.

Elderly people are retired and live off their savings or fixed pension payments. Their income usually does not adjust to inflation. Elderly people are hurt by inflation.

Japan had built up a network of 54 nuclear reactors. The Fukushima incident in 2011 led to the shutdown of all 54 reactors, of which only 10 are back in operation today. This has left a wide gap in energy production, leading Japan to import large amounts of fossil fuels, which make up roughly a of Japanese imports.

Fossil fuels are quoted in US dollars. A decline of the Japanese yen thus makes imports more expensive, leading to higher inflation. The further the yen/dollar exchange rate declined, the lower the approval rating of the current government fell.

Throughout May, the Japanese Ministry of Finance in foreign exchange markets with more than $62 billion, which did not help to stop the yen’s slide. Hence the surprise interest rate hike in late July.

After having achieved its goal of stabilizing the yen, the Bank of Japan quickly reverted to damage control by stating it would not raise rates during times of market instability.

What does this mean for investors?

Stock markets quickly recovered from Monday’s shock — the Nikkei Index 10% and the S&P 500 around 1%. Volatility receded; while current reading (about ) is still elevated, it is a far cry from Monday’s panic-driven levels.

Monday’s sell-off can be explained by technical factors. But what about fundamentals? The market value of all US equities amounted to as of December 2023, or nearly twice the US . In the past, this has been considered an “expensive” ratio.

Market breadth, or the number of shares participating in a trend, has narrowed down to a few mega-cap stocks. The weight of the ten largest US companies makes up around of the S&P 500, a proportion that has been growing for at least 50 years. The weight of the largest stock compared to the stock in the 75 percentile even levels seen in 1929.

Microsoft trades at operating cash flow while NVIDIA is valued at . Few market observers dispute that US stock valuations are exceptionally high, and therefore vulnerable to setbacks.

But what about the economy?

Market turmoil, if sustained, can feed into the “real” economy. Initial public offerings might get postponed due to a lack of risk appetite. Financial costs for corporations might increase as the risk premium over (presumably risk-free) US Treasury bond yields widens. Leveraged takeovers might fail due to lack of financing.

A recent survey of purchasing managers in the manufacturing sector (ISM) showed many companies reporting a noticeable slowdown in business. On the other hand, the (much more important) service sector painted a more benign picture.

Undoubtedly, employment growth is slowing down, while the rate of unemployment has begun to increase slightly. Consumer confidence is between mediocre and abhorrent. Adjusted for inflation, retail sales in 15 out of the past 20 months. While personal disposable incomes are still by a low single-digit percentage, little is left after accounting for inflation.

Even the current large fiscal deficit of of GDP fails to stimulate the economy; the government sector deficit instead translates into a surplus for the foreign sector (a mirror image of the US trade deficit).

Investors hoping that falling interest rates benefit stocks might be disappointed. Financial markets have anticipated those cuts for years, as evidenced by the negative slope in the .

Now would be a good time to go through portfolios and ask questions. “Would I buy this entire company at this price?” (the question of valuation) and “Would I be comfortable holding this company if the stock market closed for 10 years?” (question of quality).

Yes, in the long run, stocks go up, thanks to the inflationary bias of our fiat system. In the short- and medium-term, the stock market doesn’t owe you anything.

[ edited this piece.]

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Japan is growing richer and more confident. Thus, the island nation is becoming increasingly assertive abroad. It is flexing its economic muscles, deepening relationships with Western firms and pouring investments into Africa. Tokyo is simultaneously staking out a foreign policy independent from Washington’s. The Kantei has been more proactive in isolating China than the White House has been. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Japan, US, Australia and India) was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s brainchild. Recently, Tokyo called the independence of Taiwan an issue of Japanese national security.

In parallel, Japan is shifting its military posture from defense to offense. Tokyo is doubling its military budget over a five-year period. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force is developing two aircraft carriers. These warships are useful, not only for defending the homeland, but for projecting power overseas. The Japanese military is also stockpiling billions of dollars’ worth of Tomahawk missiles.

Foreign investments increase

As �����貹��’s internal economy resurges, it is an increasingly attractive destination for foreign capital. Major American firms like Microsoft, Oracle, Micron and Blackstone have ramped up their investments. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) opened its first plant in the country and has announced plans for a second. Additionally, esteemed British boarding schools Malvern College, Rugby School and Harrow International School have established locations in Japan in recent years. This has led to an influx of foreign students, especially from China.

Japan is making its own investments abroad. The nation has invested approximately $120 billion in Africa, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs promising an additional $30 billion over the next three years. This move boldly counters Chinese influence on the continent. Observers are wary that China’s Belt and Road infrastructure development program is a tool for economic coercion in developing nations.

However, it’s important to note that Japanese investment alone is not enough to outpace China. Japan and the UK are also set to make a in mining critical minerals like cobalt, lithium, copper and graphite in Africa and Latin America. These raw materials are key as the world transitions toward electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Private investors are also taking notice. The African Development Bank has begun pitching to Japanese investors. Private Japanese , such as Mitsui and Sumitomo, are now looking to expand their global economic footprint in resource-rich African and Latin American countries.

Shinzo Abe’s faction pushes a more engaged foreign policy

In �����貹��’s domestic political sphere, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has weathered its party-funding scandal and remains firmly in power until 2025. The LDP, now dominated by the faction of late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is pushing the nation towards greater nationalism and international assertiveness. Historically, Japanese foreign policy had been heavily influenced by US interests. However, the United States’ apparent defense dependability has declined, particularly in light of Donald Trump’s isolationist tendencies. The LDP is asking: How can Japan fend for itself?

Tokyo has found part of the answer in strengthening its regional alliances. Japan negotiated a rapprochement with South Korea and has bolstered strategic relations with India. It has also made repeated pledges to defend Taiwan and even “liberate” it from Chinese aggression if necessary, demonstrating a newfound assertiveness and willingness to deploy units abroad.

Japan remains a close alliance with the US, but it is now cooperating with the US as a sovereign an independent partner, not as a vassal state.

A majority of members in the National Diet now support Japan taking a more active defense role. Late last year, �����貹��’s Cabinet approved a record $55.9 billion (7.95 trillion yen) for the 2024 fiscal year — a 16.9% increase from 2023. This amount will increase each year until it reaches $47.7 billion (6.6 trillion yen), making each defense budget until 2027 the highest ever recorded. Anti-militarism has significantly receded, marking a notable shift in the nation. 

This comes amid rising regional threats from North Korea, China, and Russia. Chinese military movements in the East and South China Seas have increased, North Korea continues to test its armaments, and most notably, a conducted a naval exercise circumnavigating Honshu, �����貹��’s main island. Meanwhile, the US is preoccupied with its own domestic elections and political polarization, which makes it seem less able to protect Japan. These factors have heightened �����貹��’s threat perception, necessitating a more robust and sovereign defense strategy.

Military Shift from Defense to Offense

Due to increased perceptions and realities of threat, recent military actions in Japan represent revolutionary changes since 1945. From 1952 to 2020, Japan’s military capabilities were limited strictly to defensive weapons that served as complementary support units to US combat fleets. Now, �����貹��’s defense doctrine has undergone a clear strategic shift, allowing for more offensive actions and weapons. 

There has been a substantial rise in military expenditure from the increased budget. Japan is in the process of building , JS Kaga and JS Izumo, set to host 28 F-35 jets. This will not only enhance defense capabilities but also project offensive power overseas. Additionally, Japan has invested $2.3 billion in a deal with the US to purchase 400 missiles. Possession of these long-range missiles allows the island nation to strike targets up to 1,500 miles (2,500 km) away — which can reach deep into mainland China.

Technological advancements in missile interception, radar detection and robotics further bolster �����貹��’s security and provide valuable support to its allies. 

What’s on the horizon for the Land of the Rising Sun?

Despite these strides, Japan faces enduring challenges. Economically, although interest rates have turned positive, they remain close to zero. The nation is not yet firmly on a growth path. Additionally, it still grapples with high debt and significant demographic issues. An aging population and declining birth rates pose substantial obstacles to labor force growth and economic sustainability.

Japan is in a troubled neighborhood. Its proximity to Russia, North Korea and China heighten the risks of a conflict which could further complicate its strategic plans. 

Yet there are many reasons for hope. Reflecting on the global changes over the past few years, it’s evident that even if Japan itself has not fundamentally altered, the world’s perception of it has, and Japan is taking a new role in it. 

Today, Japan stands as a truly sovereign state for the first time since 1945. The nation is reclaiming a level of autonomy and influence not seen since the 1920s. This newfound sovereignty marks a significant departure from its post-war stance and sets the stage for Japan to play a more prominent role on the global stage. 

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

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These demographic changes have profound implications for the labor market. Those unfamiliar with it often think of the market as something abstract, but we forget that the market is made by and embedded in society and thus influenced by political and social factors. An analysis of the business environment is expected to focus on economic factors: GDP, unemployment, balance of payments, exchange rate and inflation; social and political factors are wrongly left in the background.

For example, some societies are more productive than others. The reason is multifactorial; however, that answer cannot be merely economic because productivity is not only a function of available resources and their proper allocation. The productivity of an economy also depends on political and social factors; among these, it is essential to mention the customs and habits of a society, the work culture and the formal and informal rules that shape a given social environment.

Demographics are the most overlooked factor for understanding productivity, innovation and the direction of economies in the coming decades. What is the relationship between aging demographic trends and productivity and innovation in the context of the fourth industrial revolution? This is the central question of this article. 

The dominance of 65+: the beginning of the silver economy

The labor force participation rate (among those aged 20–64) will in most member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as Russia and China among non-OECD countries, in the coming years. By 2060, the number of dependents per 100 working-age people will increase from around 1:20 in 1980 to 1:58.

This trend will have the most acute effects in countries like Japan, Finland and Italy (the three aging the most), while other countries with accelerated aging will follow close behind. These countries include Greece, South Korea, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia.

The “demographic dividend,” broadly understood as the economic benefits of a demographic pyramid where the share of the working age population is much larger than the dependent population, is now ending. Baby Boomers are retiring. The benefits of the demographic dividend, such as high demand for goods and services, low interest rates, cheap labor and abundant liquidity for savings funds, are fading. When societies age, governments face unsustainable social and healthcare expenditures, and companies lose innovation and productivity.

Japan: a laboratory of the future to come

As previously mentioned, Japan is among the three oldest populations in the world: 30% of its citizens are already over 65 years old. According to , its labor market will lose eight million workers in the next six years. In 20 years, it will go from 67 to 52 million people working — in a country of more than 130 million inhabitants. By 2060, its population pyramid will look more like an obelisk. This is already evident as unemployment in Japan is at its lowest point in 26 years, with 1.5 job vacancies for every applicant.

The government recognizes that the country is aging and losing strength. However, the national development strategies seek to return to 4% productivity and growth above 3%. Japan to achieve this by relying more on advanced technologies, shoring up labor discipline and productivity, and adopting global best practices.

There are many exciting new technologies and practices in Japan that offer tailor-made solutions to the growing segment of the 65+ population. Curves International, Kozo SNS Village and Club Tourism offer leisure activities and travel packages that take into account the specific needs and interests of the “platinum segment.” Companies such as 7-once and Benry Convenience Services specialize in food delivery, home maintenance and daily errands. While these kind of solutions are valuable to society at large, they are particularly meaningful in case of the 65-and-older. Going out to do shopping, walking your dog or even taking the trash out may be a challenge for some elderly people. Whill Corporation provides short-distance automobility solutions. Whereas there are plenty of medium to long-distance shared mobility services to get to the airport, to the doctor or to your office, there are very limited transportation options when it comes to buying groceries in your convenience store “just behind the corner”. Whill’s solutions allow people to remain mobile, active and independent within a few miles around home. Mysteryminds offers inter-company mobility services, which become especially important when talent is scarce and there is a clear need to build highly flexible multi-generational teams that pool together different skills and experience. 

If one sector in particular is changing dramatically, it is undoubtedly the health sector. Medical care is expensive, and hospital stays are often three times longer in Japan than the US average. Hospital treatments are not sustainable for either public or private spending, especially with chronic conditions. Increased robotization and automation of various tasks are necessary to meet the demand. Humanoid are being employed in remote patient management, assisting with self-medication and automating administrative support. The average nurse in a nursing home can take up to 90 seconds to move an older adult. With a robot to help stabilize hip issues and provide leverage, this goes from 90 to 40 seconds. In an aging society, the difference of 50 seconds adds up quickly.

Not having “healthy” demographics is a severe structural problem for the future of any country. Because the classic options such as pro-family, pro-equality and pro-immigration policies have not yielded significant results, Japan has moved from denial to correction, mitigation and adaptation. In the near future, the government will use technology to remain among the most advanced economies even with an inverted demographic pyramid.

Technology advances v social customs: an ongoing battle

The case of Japan provides an insight into the relationship between society and technology, which can be both positive and negative. One way of looking at this relationship is a two-axis matrix. On the vertical axis is technological sophistication, and on the horizontal axis are the types of social uses and customs, from upbeat and creative to harmful and destructive. This combination gives us four quadrants.

Of course, it is not in any society’s interest to be in the quadrant with the double negative: low technological advances and, at the same time, destructive habits and customs. In the adjacent quadrants, there is a lack of alignment between the degree of technological advancement and the prevailing customs and practices, which prevents progress. For many countries, the challenge is that a lot of technology that could lead to more productivity is available, and yet society may reject those technological advances for fear of losing relative social status and acquired legal privileges. 

What society wants may be very different from what the public sector sees as a national priority. The case of Japan is relevant here. On the one hand, there is the national agenda: Japan wants to remain among the seven most advanced economies in the world. On the other hand, there are the priorities and personal expectations of millions of people who want to retire, or work less which conflicts with that national agenda.

Because of this, Japan is a social experiment reshaping the society–technology relationship as a means of satisfying both sides. However, these complex issues such as the broader social contract in terms of public policy and social obligations will not be so easily solved. The public sector is facing the sociocultural limits of necessary reforms regarding gender parity, immigration and social diversity and pro-family policies. This is why other sectors, especially business, should be involved in mitigating the impacts of rapid aging and adopting the economy to a new social reality.

Lessons for the world

The social experiment conducted in Japan is a cautionary tale future economies should try to avoid. Although Japan seems to have the resources, know-how and political will to make the combination of aged society and advanced technologies work, the risks of failure are high. Advanced technologies are not an easy substitute for structural reforms. In an aging population, the state will probably have to privatize more and invite more foreign direct investment to have economic growth and maintain state revenues.��

The silver economy will certainly have many new opportunities in terms of products and services. But in an aging society, there will be a risk of lower actual returns for investors because they have a smaller economy, less growth and fewer young people (who are more disruptive). That lack of dynamism can lead to capital outflows, lower dividends and financial crises.

The next decade or so will tell us whether technology will help Japan cope successfully with an aging population.

[ edited this piece.]

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In the air war against the Nazi regime, the British Royal Air Force (RAF)’s Bomber Command initially sought to attack specific German military and industrial targets. This effort proved too costly and relatively ineffective. Then under its new leader, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, Bomber Command turned to a new tactic: “area bombing.” In effect, area bombing meant largely indiscriminate on German cities in an attempt to “de-house” the civilian population and break its morale. In 1943, an estimated 40,000 civilians were killed in the two-day Bombing of Hamburg, known by the code name “.”

Initially, US decision-makers had other ideas. Equipped with new, more accurate bombsights, the Eighth Air Force’s commanders were determined to Germany’s industrial infrastructure. These attacks were more successful, especially those that targeted the country’s oil refineries and synthetic rubber facilities. Yet by the war’s final years (1944–1945), the Eighth Air Force was carrying out almost daily raids on Berlin, a target with limited economic value. By the time of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Berlin and other German looked like the surface of the moon.

There is also the case of Dresden. A city with very limited economic value, both the RAF’s Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force targeted it. Between February 13 and 15, 1945, they a series of ruinous attacks that killed approximately 35,000 civilians. Winston Churchill supposedly decided he wanted Dresden bombed to Joseph Stalin the power of his arsenal.

Historical devastation unleashed on Japan

The strategic bombing campaign launched against Japan during the war was almost exclusively a US operation. It began in April 1942 with the famous on Tokyo. Physically, it did little overall damage. Psychologically, however, it was a spectacular for the US. They saw it as payback for the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. It also showed the Japanese public how vulnerable their home islands were to aerial assaults.

Serious air operations against Japan only began in the middle of June 1944, following the US of the Mariana Islands, notably Guam, Tinian and Saipan. The Marianas were close enough to Japan to permit the US Air Force to launch strategic bombing raids on Japanese cities. These attacks were also made possible by the deployment of the new Boeing B-29 bomber.

After some experimentation with its use, this craft was employed by General Curtis LeMay’s 509th Composite Group to stage firebombing raids on Japanese cities. The most lethal of these was the bombing of Tokyo, otherwise known by the code name “,” from March 9–10, 1945. One estimate is that approximately 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed during this one offensive. From March–August 1945, the US Air Force was also employed in mine-laying operations, under the code name “Operation Starvation,” with the goal to prevent fishing in the seas surrounding Japan.

The weapons used against Tokyo and the other cities were conventional weapons: incendiaries. The on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945, respectively) were something different. They were the first and so far only use of atomic weaponry in wartime. Not only this, but against a helpless civilian population.

These nuclear attacks and the radiation they left behind an estimated 214,000 people. They contributed to the Japanese government’s decision to surrender unconditionally to the Allies, bringing an end to the war.

Allies approved civilian slaughter

Seen in retrospect, one of the most striking things about indiscriminate British and US air attacks on civilian populations was the virtual absence of public criticism. It is true a handful of US nuclear scientists, led by Leo Szilard, circulated a to some of their peers objecting to the impending use of the atomic bomb. In Britain, the question was retrospectively about the need for the attack on Dresden. But at the time, there were no widespread public demonstrations about the Allied air attacks on civilians, nor any US or British radio commentators objecting to the carnage. If anything, Allied journalists tended to the bombing operations as significant achievements.

Why was there no public opposition or objections from Anglo-American newspaper or radio journalists and their attentive publics? Certainly, part of the answer was the widespread desire to retaliate. British civilians wanted revenge for the Nazi firebombing of major cities, especially London, during the Blitz. The US demanded payback for �����貹��’s attack on Pearl Harbor, followed by the “fight to the death” response of the Japanese military as it struggled to prevent the Allied conquest of its occupied islands.

German and Japanese propaganda efforts to weaken British and US morale were unsuccessful. In Nazi Germany and Italy, British Fascist William Joyce and US turncoats Mildred Gillars and Rita Zucca — using the nicknames, “” and “,” respectively — made regular radio broadcasts stating the invincibility of the Axis Powers. In the Pacific, Iva Toguri D’Aquino, using the nickname, “,” made similar and equally unsuccessful attempts to undermine US morale — especially that of GIs fighting there.

To a significant extent, British and US journalists tended to define themselves as part of the war effort. There were exceptions here and there, however: In 1943, the isolationist Chicago Tribune the fact that US codebreakers had deciphered �����貹��’s Naval Code. That same year, journalist Drew Pearson made headlines when he a story that General George S Patton had slapped a soldier convalescing at a Sicilian hospital.

Substantial opposition to the Allied bombing of civilian targets developed well after World War II. The 1957 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marked a shift among Western intellectuals against strategic bombing. This retrospective opposition appeared in the context of the Cold War conflict between NATO and the Soviet Bloc countries.

The Israel–Hamas war: How does history compare?

To what degree does the current Israel–Hamas war resemble the exponentially larger struggle of World War II? At first glance, the answer would be little. The battle between the two sides is restricted to a small corner of the Middle East, while the scope of World War II was practically global. The same applies to the number of soldiers directly involved in the fighting: thousands, not millions.

The drones, missiles and other weapons being used by the Israelis and Hamas fighters are far more sophisticated than those available to either side in World War II. And the Israeli Iron Dome air defense would have been the envy of the soldiers of yesteryear. And, althought the Israelis do not advertise this fact, they possess nuclear weapons and the means to launch them.

There are no Hamas equivalents of “Lord Haw-Haw,” “Axis Sally” or “Tokyo Rose” employed to weaken Israeli morale. This is not because Hamas lacks the means, such as social media, to convey such messages. Rather, it is because the organization leaders regard their members as engaged in a holy war not only with Israelis, but with altogether. So, there is no point in surrendering. Hamas does not recognize any distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Israeli civilians, following the October 7, 2023 attacks, are not susceptible to such an appeal.

Aside from the scale and scope of the conflict, a crucial distinction between the two wars is the reactions of their audiences. With the possible exceptions of pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, his Indian followers and a few Axis wartime collaborators, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan enjoyed little popular support around the world.

The opposite is true for Hamas. Almost the entire ummah — the worldwide community of Muslim believers — and their religious and political leaders have for Hamas and its holy war with Israel. Strengthening their support is the fact that Israel controls Jerusalem, the location of many Muslim holy sites.

During World War II, most print journalists and radio reporters behaved as cheerleaders for the Allies’ cause. In the current conflict, with the technologies of mass communication being more varied and vastly superior, many journalists and influential people active in the West are now cheerleaders for Hamas. After briefly expressing sympathy for the Israelis murdered or kidnapped by Hamas fighters on October 7, major news outlets in Britain, the US and elsewhere reacted with thinly disguised hostility once the Israeli Air Force began bombarding Gaza. This malice was not confined to the civilian casualties involved, but to the existence of Israel itself. Antisemitism loomed large in both conflicts.

Antisemitism persists

One similarity between then and now, sadly, is antisemitism.

Hatred of Jews had no meaning in the war on Japan, but in the European conflict, it certainly did. In addition to the destruction of around two-thirds of the European Jewish community by the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe, the Western Allies were hardly immune to Jew-hatred. In Britain, foreign office officials repeatedly how tired they were of listening to the “wailing Jews” that sought their assistance.

Throughout World War II, the Royal Navy His Majesty’s Government’s White Paper of 1939. This seriously restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine. In other words, just as many European Jews were fleeing the Nazis, the British blocked the ports and sealed the exits.

The situation in the US was different. Figures in the Roosevelt Administration voiced sympathy for the ordeal of European Jews. But for the most part, their hands were tied. Surveys of US public opinion reflected widespread antisemitism. In view of this outlook, Congress was to modify immigration laws to permit more European refugees to enter the country. State Department officers controlling entry also did their best to deny visas to European Jews.

In the current Israel–Hamas war, the Jewish state has few friends aside from political leaders in the US and Britain. Even in these two countries, the present conflict has unleashed a wave of widespread antisemitism among professors, university students and Internet users that has not been seen in decades.

Animosity towards Jews appears to be a latent phenomenon throughout the Western world , needing only a stimulus to set it off, e.g.,�� the Israeli response to October 7. Among Muslims, on the other hand, antisemitism appears to be something visible and constant, reflected by the fact that Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to be throughout the Middle East.

What lessons should Israeli Jews and Westerners learn from these two wars? The obvious answers that come to mind are these: When the chips are down, you are on your own. And if you wish to survive, you had better learn to fight.

[ edited this piece.]

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Osteoclasts are a particularly important type of cell involved in bone maintenance. These cells absorb old or damaged bone and digest it, allowing the body to reuse important materials like calcium and giving way to new bones. As one might expect, various bone diseases arise when osteoclasts do not fulfill their role properly. Scientists have been investigating the mechanisms that regulate the proliferation and differentiation of precursor cells into osteoclasts.

In a published in 2020, researchers from Tokyo University of Science (TUS) led by Professor Tadayoshi Hayata revealed that the cytoplasmic polyadenylation element-binding protein 4 (Cpeb4) is essential in osteoclast differentiation. (Differentiation is the process by which cells develop into particular cell types, such as osteoclasts.) The researchers also discovered that this protein, which regulates the stability and translation of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules, transported into specific structures within the nucleus of the cell when osteoclast differentiation was induced. However, just how this relocation occurs and what Cpeb4 exactly does within these nuclear structures still remains a mystery.

Now, in a recent published in the Journal of Cellular Physiology on January 29, 2024, Hayata and Yasuhiro Arasaki, also from from TUS, tackled these knowledge gaps. Interested in the intricate and complex process of osteoclast differentiation, they sought to more thoroughly understand how the “life cycle” of mRNA, i.e., mRNA metabolism, is involved.

How was the study conducted?

First, the researchers introduced strategic modifications into Cpeb4 proteins and performed a series of experiments in cell cultures. They found that the localization of Cpbe4 in the abovementioned nuclear bodies occurred owing to its ability to bind to RNA molecules.

Afterwards, seeking to understand the role of Cpeb4 in the nucleus, the researchers demonstrated that Cpeb4 co-localized with certain mRNA splicing factors. These proteins are involved in the process of mRNA splicing, which is a key step in mRNA metabolism. Put simply, it enables a cell to produce diverse mature mRNA molecules (and eventually proteins) from a single gene. 

Through RNA sequencing and gene analysis in Cpeb4-depleted cells, the researchers found that Cpeb4 alters the expression of multiple genes associated with splicing events in freshly differentiated osteoclasts.

Finally, through further experiments, they concluded that Cpeb4 only altered the splicing patterns of Id2 mRNA, an important protein known to regulate osteoclast differentiation and development.

What is the significance of these findings?

Overall, this study sheds important light on the mechanisms that regulate osteoclast differentiation. “Through this research, we were able to identify important factors involved in regulating mRNA splicing during the osteoclast differentiation process and obtained new knowledge regarding the control of mRNA splicing during osteoclast differentiation,” Hayata commented.

While the contribution of Cpeb4 is smaller than that of RANKL, a signaling factor that induces osteoclast differentiation, targeting Cpeb4 may have the advantage of reducing the side effects of existing drugs as excessive inhibition of osteoclast differentiation with RANKL inhibitory antibodies would halt bone remodeling.

Importantly, the results contribute to a more detailed understanding of how bones are maintained. “Although we used cultured mouse cells in our study, there are also research reports that show a correlation between variations in the Cpeb4 gene and bone density in humans,” Hayata said. “We hope that our findings will help clarify the relationship between these two in the near future.”

Most importantly, the findings of the present study may prove to be a crucial stepping stone for advancing diagnostic techniques and treatments for bone and joint diseases. Use of genome-wide association study has evidenced a correlation between single nucleotide polymorphisms in introns of the Cpeb4 gene region and the estimated bone density. Therefore, it is possible that Cpeb4 expression and activity can be used as diagnostic criteria.

However, the researchers note that it is unclear whether Cpeb4 actually regulates bone metabolism in vivo. Therefore, clarification of the molecular basis of Cpeb4 in bone metabolism in mice would help to establish a therapeutic approach. Additionally, recent studies have reported that Cpeb4 is expressed in various cancer cells and contributes to cancer cell survival. In cancer, Cpeb4 contributes to mRNA stability, although splicing regulation may exist.

“The discovery of part of the mechanisms by which Cpeb4 controls osteoclast differentiation could lead to the elucidation of pathologies, including osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, and ultimately become the foundation for the development of new therapeutic drugs,” a hopeful Hayata concluded.

We too hope these efforts will pave the way for a brighter future for the millions of people suffering from osteoporosis and similar disorders, enabling them to live more active and fulfilling lives. 

For more information, you can read the original paper .

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So far, however, Trump and the media that follow his every word have been largely silent about what his reelection would mean for US foreign policy. Citing his recent promise of “a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods,” The New York Times did recently that a renewed trade war with China “would significantly disrupt the U.S. economy,” leading to a loss of 744,000 jobs and $1.6 trillion in GDP. Economic relations with China are, however, but one piece of a far larger puzzle when it comes to future American global power, a subject on which media reporting and commentary have been surprisingly reticent.

So let me take the plunge by starting with a I made in a December 2010 TomDispatch piece that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.” I added then that a “realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could be all over except for the shouting.”

I also offered a scenario hinged on — yes! — next November’s elections. “Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair,” I wrote then, “a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Back then, of course, 2025 was so far off that any prediction should have been a safe bet. After all, 15 years ago, I was already in my mid-60s, which should have given me a “get-out-of-jail-free” card — that is, a reasonable chance of dying before I could be held accountable. But with 2025 now less than a year away, I’m still here (unlike all too many of my old friends) and still responsible for that prediction.

So, let’s imagine that “a far-right patriot,” one Donald Trump, does indeed “capture the presidency with thundering rhetoric” next November. Let me then don the seven-league boots of the historical imagination and, drawing on Trump’s previous presidential record, offer some thoughts about how his second shot at an America-first foreign policy — one based on “demanding respect for American authority” — might affect this country’s global power, already distinctly on the decline.

As our Lonely Planet Guide to a country called the future, let’s take along a classi former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in retirement in 1997. Drawing on his view that Eurasia remained the “central basis for global primacy,” he argued that Washington had to do just three things to maintain world leadership: first, preserve its position in Western Europe through the NATO alliance; second, maintain its military bases along the Pacific littoral to check China; and finally, prevent any “assertive single entity” like China or Russia from controlling the critical “middle space” of Central Asia and the Middle East. Given his past record and current statements, it seems all too likely that Trump will indeed badly damage, if not destroy, those very pillars of American global power.

Wrecking the NATO alliance

Trump’s hostility to alliances in general and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in particular is a matter of historical record. His hostility to NATO’s crucial mutual-defense clause () — requiring all signatories to respond if one were attacked — could prove fatal. Just days after his 2018 sycophantic summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump, “Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?”

Weighing his words with uncharacteristic care, Trump : “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question.” He then offered what could, in a second term, prove a virtual death sentence for NATO. “Montenegro,” he said, “is a tiny country with very strong people … They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War Three.”

Since then, of course, Putin has invaded Ukraine and Biden’s White House has rallied NATO to defend that frontline European state. Although Congress a massive $111 billion in aid (including $67 billion in military aid) for Ukraine in the war’s first 18 months, the Republican-led House has recently stalled President Biden’s request for an additional $67 billion critical to Kyiv’s continued resistance. As the campaign for his party’s nomination gathers momentum, Trump’s pro-Putin sentiments have helped persuade Republican legislators to break with our NATO allies on this critical issue.

Keep in mind that, right after Russia invaded in February 2022, Trump Putin’s move “genius,” adding, “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” Last September, after Putin thanked him for claiming that, were he still president, he could end the war in 24 hours, Trump Meet the Press: “I would get him into a room. I’d get Zelensky into a room. Then I’d bring them together. And I’d have a deal worked out.”

In reality, a reelected Trump would undoubtedly simply abandon Ukraine, at best forcing it into negotiations that would be tantamount to surrender. As formerly neutral nations Finland and Sweden have to NATO and alliance stalwarts like Britain and Germany make major to Ukraine, Europe has clearly labeled Russia’s invasion and war an existential threat. Under such circumstances, a future Trump tilt toward Putin could swing a wrecking ball through the NATO alliance, which, for the past 75 years, has served as a singular pillar in the architecture of US global power.

Alienating allies on the Pacific littoral

Just as NATO has long served as a strategic pillar at the western end of the vast Eurasian landmass, so four bilateral alliances along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines have proven a geopolitical fulcrum for dominance over the eastern end of Eurasia and the defense of North America. Here, the record of the first Trump administration was, at best, mixed. On the credit side of history’s ledger, he did “the Quad,” a loose alliance with Australia, India and Japan, which has gained greater coherence under President Biden.

But only time spared Trump’s overall Asian diplomacy from utter disaster. His obsessive personal of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, marked by two meaningless meetings and the exchange of 27 mash notes, failed to produce any sign of Pyongyang’s (nuclear) disarmament, while weakening America’s alliance with long-standing ally South Korea. Although �����貹��’s prime minister obsequiously paid court to Trump, he battered that classic bilateral alliance with constant about its cost, even slapping a punitive duty on Japanese steel imports.

Ignoring the pleas of close Asian allies, Trump also the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving the door open for China to conclude its own Regional Comprehensive Economic with 15 Asia-Pacific countries that now account for nearly a third of Beijing’s foreign trade. Another four years of Trump’s “America first” diplomacy in the Pacific could do irreparable damage to those key strategic alliances.

Further south, by Taiwan to both confront and court Chinese President Xi Jinping, while letting the Philippines drift toward Beijing’s orbit and launching a misbegotten with China, Trump’s version of Asian “diplomacy” allowed Beijing to make some real diplomatic, economic, and military gains, while distinctly the American position in the region. Biden, by contrast, has at least partially it, a strengthening reflected in a surprisingly amicable San Francisco last November with President Xi.

In South Asia, where the bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan dominates all diplomacy, Trump trashed a 70-year military alliance with Pakistan with a single New Year’s Day message. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years,” Trump , “and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools … No more!” Since then, Pakistan has shifted decisively into Beijing’s orbit, while India now plays Moscow and Washington off against each other to its economic advantage.

Just as Trump’s posture toward Europe could swing a wrecking ball through the NATO alliance in a second term, so his mix of economic nationalism and strategic myopia could destabilize the array of alliances along the Pacific littoral, toppling that second of Brzezinski’s three pillars for American global power.

That “assertive single entity” in Central Asia

And when it comes to that third pillar of US global power — preventing any “assertive single entity” from controlling the “middle space” of Eurasia — Trump failed woefully (as, in fact, had his predecessors). After announcing China’s trillion-dollar Belt & Road in 2013, President Xi has spent billions building a steel grid of roads, rails, and pipelines that crisscross the middle space of that vast Eurasian landmass, an enormous new infrastructure that has led to a chain of alliances stretching across central Asia.

The power of China’s position was manifested in 2021 when Beijing helped push the US military out of in a deft geopolitical squeeze-play. More recently, Beijing also brokered a breathtaking diplomatic entente between Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, stunning Washington and many Western diplomats.

Trump’s Middle East policy during his first term in office was focused solely on backing right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a nuclear agreement with Iran, his marginalization of the Palestinians, and Arab recognition of Israel. Since the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 and Netanyahu’s devastating assault on Gaza’s civilian population, President Biden’s was skewed in an almost Trumpian fashion toward Israel, with a consequent loss of influence in the wider region. And count on one thing: An incoming Trump administration would only compound the damage.

In short, Beijing is already toppling the third pillar of American global power in that critical “middle space” of Eurasia. In a second Trump term, an unchecked Chinese diplomatic and economic juggernaut could arguably grind that pillar into rubble.

Africa in the “World Island”

In fact, however, no matter what Brzezinski might have thought, there are other pillars of world power beyond Eurasia — above all, Africa. Indeed, British geostrategist Halford Mackinder, the author of the global geopolitical analysis that deeply influenced the former national security adviser, over a century ago that the locus of global power lay in a tri-continental combination of Europe, Asia, and Africa that he dubbed “the world island.”

In the age of high imperialism, Europe found Africa a fertile field for colonial exploitation and, during the Cold War, Washington added to that continent’s suffering by making it a superpower surrogate battleground. But Beijing grasped the human potential of Africa and, in the 1970s, began building lasting economic alliances with its emerging nations. By 2015, its trade with Africa had climbed to , three times the United States’. Its investments there were then projected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025.

Recognizing the strategic threat, President Barack Obama a 2014 summit with 51 African leaders at the White House. Trump, however, dismissed the entire continent, during a 2018 Oval Office meeting, as so many “.” The Trump administration tried to repair the damage by First Lady Melania off on a solo trip to Africa, but her bizarre colonial outfits and ill-timed administration cuts in foreign aid to the continent only added to the damage.

In addition to a storehouse of natural resources, Africa’s chief asset is its growing pool of human talent. Africa’s median age is (compared to 38 for both China and the US), meaning that, by 2050, that continent will be home to a full one-third of the world’s young. Given his fraught record with the region, Trump’s second term would likely do little more than hand the whole continent to China on a gold-plated platter.

South of the border

Even in Latin America, the situation has been changing in a complex fashion. As a region informally incorporated into the American imperium for more than a century and suffering all the slights of an asymmetric alliance, its increasingly nationalist leaders welcomed China’s interest in this century. By 2017, in fact, Chinese trade with Latin America had hit a substantial , making it — yes! — the region’s largest trading partner. Simultaneously, Beijing’s loans to Caribbean countries had reached a hefty by the end of the Trump administration.

Except for drug interdiction and economic against leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, the Trump White House generally ignored Latin America, doing nothing to slow China’s commercial juggernaut. Although the Biden administration made some diplomatic gestures toward the region, rose relentlessly to $450 billion by 2022.

Reflecting a bipartisan indifference in this century, a reelected Trump would likely do little to check China’s growing commercial hegemony over Latin America. And the region would undoubtedly welcome such indifference, since the alternative — along with draconian at the US–Mexican border — might involve to fire missiles at or send troops to knock out drug labs in Mexico. The backlash to such unilateral intervention amid panic over immigration could cripple US relations with the region for decades to come.

In the world that a second Trump term might face in 2025, American global power will probably be far less imposing than it was when he came into office in 2016. The problem won’t be that this time around he’s already appointing advisers determined to let Trump be Trump or, as the The New York Times recently, who are “forging plans for an even more extreme agenda than his first term.” By every significant metric — economic, diplomatic, and even military — US power has been on a downward slide for at least a decade. In the more unipolar world of 2016, Trump’s impulsive, individualized version of diplomacy was often deeply damaging, but on at least a small number of occasions modestly successful. In the more multipolar world he would have to manage nearly a decade later, his version of a unilateral approach could prove deeply disastrous.

After taking his second oath of office in January of 2025, Trump’s “thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal,” might indeed fulfill the I made some 15 years ago: “The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

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A day after Christmas, prosecutors the LDP’s former policy chief, Koichi Hagiuda. They have questioned four other top officials, who have all resigned. They are all loyalists of Shinzo Abe, the late Japanese prime minister who was in power from 2006 to 2007 and then again from 2012 to 2020. Abe was �����貹��’s longest-serving prime minister and was extremely powerful.

A very Japanese-style scandal

It turns out that the LDP made hay when Abe’s sun shone bright. The Abe faction, still the largest in the LDP, “systematically underreported about ¥500 million in ticket sales for fundraising events” over five years. This amounts to $3.51 million, which is mere piffle by Nigerian or Pakistani standards. However, Japan is a country that prizes probity, and this financial scandal is turning out to be a big deal.

The Abe faction allegedly gave the excess amount to lawmakers who sold more than their allotted quota of tickets. Kickbacks from fundraising events are not illegal, but failing to report these payments violates the law. That is why so many bigshots are in hot water.

Many in Japan are calling for reform. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised “to do everything necessary to regain trust” for the LDP. He will set up a new party body. This will discuss reforms to the political funds law, cashless payments for fundraising party ticket sales and auditing of such fundraising events.

Despite his promises, Kishida is in trouble. Public anger is running high and his approval ratings have fallen to 17%. Analysts are this scandal a “once in a generation” political crisis. Yet it is important to remember that the LDP has been through many scandals before. The party has been in power almost all the time since 1955.

As a well-oiled political machine, the LDP needs off-the-books slush funds. Its leaders used these kickbacks to take care of their buddies in their political fiefdoms. This elaborate patronage machine is how the Japanese system works. In some ways, it is no different to the US or India. In both democracies, politicians have to watch out for the interests of their donors and reward loyalists who work on their campaigns. Yet money in politics evokes a whiff of disgust and, in the case of Japan, has led to outrage.

Prosecutors are probing not only the Abe faction but also the Nikai one. They are also investigating the prime minister’s faction, too. Kishida has been in power since October 2021, but scandals have dogged him since. This includes the LDP’s links to the controversial Unification Church and Kishida’s son’s use of the prime ministerial residence for a house party.

As pointed out earlier, these scandals are minuscule in comparison to most other countries. However, they have already caused heads to roll because they have come at a time of rising discontent.

Times are tough and people are hurting

Like many other first-world countries, Japan is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis. In January, Japan’s inflation rate to a fresh 41-year high. Rent, food, fuel and almost everything cost more. Salaries have not risen accordingly. Increased military spending to counter China portends tax increases. A new invoice system is likely to lead to higher taxes for freelancers and self-employed people. Tellingly, the Japanese “tax” as the kanji character of the year. The last time they did so was in 2014 when the consumption (sales) tax rose from 5% to 8%.

Japan has long been known for being frightfully expensive. In part, this explains the low birth rate. In addition to many other reasons, young couples find high education costs daunting. Coming during a cost-of-living crisis, the LDP scandal has angered many Japanese who find politicians increasingly removed from their day-to-day realities.

In the past, scandals have prime ministers.�� In 1974, Kakuei Tanaka resigned as prime minister and was arrested two years later for taking bribes from Lockheed. In 1989, Noboru Takeshita lost his premiership after allegations of insider trading and a succession of prime ministers followed. Thanks to this instability, “the LDP its Diet [parliament] majority to a coalition of opposition parties, ending its 38-year rule.” In 2010, the Democratic Party of Japan was in power, and it turned out that its officials had underreported fundraising proceeds. As a result, Yukio Hatoyama had to resign from the prime ministership.

This time, things might be different. For now, Kishida has little to fear. The LDP leadership contest is only due in September 2024. Taro Kono and Shigeru Ishiba are popular with the public but lack support within the party. Kishida has reshuffled his cabinet twice, and the scandal weakens the Abe faction, strengthening the prime minister’s hand.

Kishida is also secure in the knowledge that national elections are only due in October 2025. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan still stands discredited. It was in power from 2009 to 2012, a time when the economy tanked and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown.

Given the lack of alternatives and entrenched interest groups, the status quo will continue. Kishida might introduce more stringent reporting measures on party fundraising, but he does not command enough support within the LDP to push through any fundamental reform.

No wonder young voters increasingly politics. Only 34% of 18- and 19-year-olds voted in 2022. This low turnout is not healthy for Japanese democracy, and the current scandal might increase political apathy further.

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To comply with these laws, experienced fishermen have learned how to distinguish males from females through visual inspection. While it is relatively straightforward to distinguish them by looking at the underside of the crabs, doing so by looking at their shell side is much more challenging. Unfortunately, when captured crabs settle on board a ship, they almost always do so with their shell side pointing up, and picking them up and flipping them individually to determine their sex is time-consuming.

Could this be yet another task artificial intelligence (AI) may excel at?

How AI can sort crabs by sex

In a recent study, a research team from Japan, including Professor Shin-ichi Satake from Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, sought to answer this question using deep learning. Their latest , published in Scientific Reports, is co-authored by Associate Professor Yoshitaka Ueki and Professor Ken Takeuchi from TUS and Assistant Professor Kenji Toyota and Professor Tsuyoshi Ohira from Kanagawa University.

The researchers implemented three deep convolutional neural networks based on three well-established image classification algorithms: AlexNet, VGG-16 and ResNet-50. To train and test these models, they used 120 images of horsehair crabs captured in Hokkaido. Half of them were males, and the other half were females.

A notable advantage of these models is that they are “explainable AI.” Simply put, this means that the model does not operate as a black box. Given an image of a crab, one can see which specific regions of the image were relevant for the algorithm in making its classification decision. This can reveal subtle differences between the males and females that could be useful for manual classification.

The test results were quite promising in terms of accuracy and performance metrics, as Prof. Satake highlights: “Even though gender classification was virtually impossible by human visual inspection on the shell side, the proposed deep learning models enabled male and female classification with high precision, achieving an F-1 measure of approximately 95% and similarly high accuracy values.” This means that the AI approach vastly outperformed humans and provided consistent, reliable classification. 

The model reveals how human crabbers identify males and females

Interestingly, when observing the heatmaps, which represented the regions the models focused on for classification, the team found significant differences between the sexes. For one, the heatmap was enhanced near the genitalia shape on the abdomen side. When classifying males, the algorithms focused on the lower part of the carapace. In contrast, when classifying females, the algorithms focused on the upper portion of the carapace. This could provide useful information not only for the development of future AI sex classification models for crabs but also shed light on how experienced fishermen can tell males from females even when looking at their shell side.

Considering that being captured can be a great source of stress for crabs, being able to quickly tell females apart without flipping them before release could help prevent health or reproductive problems for these crabs. Thus, deep learning could potentially be an important tool for enhancing conservation and farming efforts. “The fact that deep learning can discriminate male and female crabs is an important finding not only for the conservation of these important marine resources but also for the development of efficient aquaculture techniques,” remarks Prof. Satake.

Notably, implementing AI classification techniques directly on ships could reduce the amount of manual work and make crab fishing more cost-effective. Moreover, the proposed models could be retrained and repurposed for the gender classification of other species of crabs, such as the blue crab or the Dungeness crab. 

Overall, this study showcases how AI can be leveraged in creative ways to not only make people’s work more efficient but also have a direct positive effect on conservation, responsible fishing, and sustainability of crab aquaculture.

For more information, you can read the original paper .

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The drill was part of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s 2023. It was carried out by helicopter destroyer JS Izumo (DDH-183) and destroyer JS Samidare (DD-106), along with the Royal Australian Navy frigate HMAS Anzac (FFH150) and a Royal Australian Air Force P-8A Poseidon Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) in the South China Sea. It emphasized tactical operations such as anti-surface and anti-air warfare.

The war games, which took place in strategically disputed waterways, focused on tactical operations such as anti-surface and anti-air warfare. Following a port call to Vietnam as part of an Indo-Pacific Deployment, the two warships from the JMSDF participated in the bilateral training maneuvers.

The relationship between the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) has never been stronger or more important, and the JMSDF will work with the RAN on interoperability and mutual understanding in order to improve the security environment in the Indo-Pacific region.

Tokyo and Canberra’s bold Indo-Pacific strategies

The exercise is critical for continued strategic collaboration between Japan and Australia in the region and offers substantial strategic potential for promoting Indo-Pacific multilateralism. Australia and Japan regard each other as in the Indo-Pacific area. The two democratic nations share not only core principles but also strategic interests in a region increasingly threatened by China, which claims large portions of the South China Sea as its own territorial waters.

Japan and Australia to oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force in the East and South China seas, a veiled allusion to Beijing’s maritime aggression there. Japan and Australia vehemently oppose China’s claims and activities that violate international law and norms, notably the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Against such a backdrop, the joint military drill will improve the partners’ combined ability to maintain maritime security and readiness, as well as respond to any regional contingency. 

Fumio Kishida and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison signed a bilateral in January 2022 to facilitate mutual troop deployment to each respective country for joint drills and relief operations. The RAA is Japan’s second official defense treaty with another country, confirming Australia’s position as the country’s second most significant security partner behind the United States, Japan’s only treaty ally. 

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida the new “Future of the Indo-Pacific” strategy during last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. In a word, the new strategy represents Japan’s concept of global responsibility. According to Kishida, Japan wishes to offer “a guiding perspective” for a world on the edge of “division and confrontation.” Japan’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy, as it has expressed through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad), has grown in significance since 2016.

Japan has announced a in defense spending, which it aims to use to strengthen offensive capability platforms and counterstrike capabilities. Japan will spend over the next five years to bring itself up to par with NATO expenditure standards. Japan has already upped its defense budget to in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, a 26% jump from the previous year. Japan wants to purchase long-range missiles like , among other things, to improve its strike capability.

Australia too has outlined a more assertive defense posture in which the country will prioritize new technologies, such as maritime and capabilities. In a declassified version of its new defense strategic review—the most significant in —Australia determined that it must “re-posture,” since it is no longer as shielded by geography and other nations’ limited ability to project power. The country is set to spend an eye-watering ($240 billion in US dollars) on nuclear submarines over the coming years. 

Australia’s priority is to strengthen its involvement and collaboration with Southeast Asian and Pacific allies in reaction to China’s rising assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea and the danger that poses to the global rules-based order.

Japan and Australia part of a broader defense network

Military preparedness in the region has been ramping up. Japan and Australia are not expanding their military spending and cooperation in a vacuum. Both are close allies of the US, which has also increased its involvement in the region by the General Security of Military Information Agreement with Japan and India as well as the AUKUS treaty with the UK and Australia. AUKUS aims to significantly strengthen Australia’s maritime capabilities with nuclear-powered submarines. The allies revealed the terms of in March 2023, which included a second pillar on advanced technical exchange and force integration, as well as a substantial new role for AI-enabled platforms.

China, too, has deepened its involvement, for example by ramping up into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone.

China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim areas of the disputed South China Sea. Beijing has constructed artificial islands and military outposts in the waters and has experienced similar conflict with Japan in the East China Sea.

The South China Sea has become a theater of strategic rivalries, especially following the Russia-Ukraine War and the crisis over Taiwan. The Indo-Pacific partners are jointly conducting military deals to counter the Chinese maritime ambitions called the “.”

Professional engagement and collaboration with friends and partners are the bedrock of regional stability, which promotes peace and prosperity for all nations. The , an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, joined the JMSDF and the RAN in the South China Sea for multinational training that was completed on March 15. The coastguards of the United States, Japan and the Philippines, too, are cooperating in maritime exercises in the South China Sea, marking the first such maneuvers between the three nations.

Hence, Japan-Australia’s joint military exercise is part of a broader movement of cooperation between China’s neighbors, which are feeling the pressure of Chinese expansion. They aim to defend freedom of navigation in favor of a free and open Indo-Pacific. The Trident exercise and others like it, however, will also deepen regional tensions as China will be incensed by what it perceives as aggression in its backyard. Whatever happens, we can expect to watch increasing militarization in the region for the foreseeable future.

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Nowhere is this more visible than in the Indo-Pacific. Most prominent is the revived Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a strategic security forum between the United States, India, Japan and Australia. The 2021 foundation of the AUKUS (Australia, UK and US) technology-sharing alliance has also manifested the phenomenon of minilateralism. In both cases, increasing cooperation has been spurred on by an increasingly threatening China.

It remains to be seen whether these organizations will be able to contribute to stability in the region by improving cooperation and governance or destabilize relations by building up opposed blocs.

The need for nuanced international cooperation 

Minilaterals are emerging as a consequence of the shifts in underlying power in the region. China, certainly, has become more belligerent in the last 30 years, but other nations such as South Korea, India and Singapore have been growing and are also asserting their influence in a region no longer dominated by Western powers. For its own part, the West, especially the United States, France and the United Kingdom, has been making efforts to maintain its foothold in the region. These shifts in the underlying power structure have created the need for an intricate cooperation structure that can balance so many overlapping interests.

On the economic front, diplomatic prospects with the signing of the Indo- Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) by 13 countries with interests in Southeast Asia, including the QUAD allies headed by the US, last year. The signatories hope to advance sustainable economic development and strategic inclusiveness for the overall peace and stability of the region.

“The future of the 21st century is largely written in the Indo-Pacific,” US President Joe Biden. The IPEF reflects the spirit of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a part

of the US’s so-called “Pivot to Asia.” policy as manifest in the revamped entity of the QUAD. The US has also been US-Japan-South Korea and US-Japan-Philippines trilateral dialogue. Meanwhile, Australia is strengthening with India and Indonesia.

Pou Sothirak, an expert on International affairs at the Asian Institute of Policy Studies, cites a in the ability of multilaterals to operate effectively and represent member nations’ interests as a major driver of the proliferation of minilaterals.

The inertia and stagnation of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations compromise the effectiveness of these more formal political structures. Meanwhile, the changing nature of contemporary threats, coupled with the rapid development of information technology, has undeniably paved the way for more informal means of dialogue and negotiation, something which the minilaterals promise to incorporate.

More concretely, the Indo-Pacific’s democratic nations find themselves facing a Chinese threat that . This requires them to seek outside help and adopt a more aggressive collective stance than was previously necessary.

Challenges and criticisms

However, the picture is not as rosy as it may seem. Despite the strategic viability of these minilaterals, critics allege that they have diminished the sanctity of multilateral frameworks such as the United Nations, as well as their own credibility.

This aspect has three facets. Firstly, the increased preference for minilateralism has disrupted international interdependence and globalization, leading to the fragmentation of global governance mechanisms. The Quad’s relatively informal and ambiguous strategic interests in curtailing Chinese belligerence provide an example of this.

Secondly, disparity of threat perceptions between minilaterals has the potential to duplicate the competition and power-building inherent in unilateralism. The increased role of China in the SCO and BRICS, as opposed to regional forums of the ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) and the G20, illustrate how this can disrupt the process of consensus-building.

Lastly, incompatibility of interests, coupled with centralizing nature of such institutions, have fostered accountability and compliance issues, arising from non-binding targets and commitments in mutually institutionalized, exclusive power blocs, as opposed to legally sanctioned ones, accentuating the existing differences in the Ind0-Pacific.

It could be said that minilateralism as a process cannot remain isolated and has to complement the existing multilateral institutions. Moreover, successful outcomes can only be materialized should member nations endeavor to bring about the very atmosphere of discourse that exists within minilaterals into the larger regional and multilateral framework as well. A lot still needs to be worked upon, given the tremendous hegemonic shift in present-day international affairs.

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The new defense alliance reflected the logic of the region, which included the majority of the world’s industrially developed nations, all in close proximity to the Atlantic Ocean and north of the Tropic of Cancer. Collins dictionary defines the term “North Atlantic” as: “the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean, esp the waters separating North America and Europe.”

By focusing on “defense” and its character as an “alliance,” NATO sought to create the perception that it existed as pure potency, rather than as an active force that would intervene militarily in geopolitics. At NATO’s core reigned the idea that peace and non-aggression were the norm. Security was the watchword. It was about potentially defending or protecting the peace within Europe. Because the contest turned into a race—the nuclear arms race—rather than a war, a peaceful consumer society could prosper and grow on both sides of the North Atlantic.

NATO became a logical necessity once the Cold War was officially announced, opposing capitalism and communism. Both sides had nuclear bombs. In Robert Oppenheimer’s borrowed words, both had “become death, a destroyer of worlds.” The entire drama was confined to the northern hemisphere, with the Soviet and American empires engaged in a permanent showdown, with Europe in the middle.  

Since those early days, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the very idea of NATO has undergone radical changes. Technically, there was no further reason for NATO to exist. The communist military menace had ended up in the dustbin of history. But not only did it continue to exist, it began expanding, much like La Fontaine’s frog that wished to be as big as an ox.

At this month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, the media noted that Japan and NATO appeared to agree on a new partnership program. To make it more concrete, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg proposed creating a NATO liaison office in Tokyo. Alas, France’s President Emmanuel Macron –  profiting from the rule that NATO decisions must be decided unanimously –  prevented that resolution from being passed.

Stoltenberg had the Tokyo liaison office proposal in an interview with CNN in May. On that occasion, he insisted that “Japan is a very close and important partner for NATO.” On NATO’s own, we can read today the assertion: “No partner is closer than Japan.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Close:

1. Near, in geographical terms
2. Emotionally connected
3. Ideologically formatted thanks to an asymmetric relationship in which a dominant power can dictate to subservient powers the policy orientation that undergirds its own value system and ensure the subordinates will serve its interests.

Contextual note

NATO’s Orwellian “Newspeak” retains only the third definition. After all, the distance between Tokyo and Brussels is exactly 9,442 km. The distance between Tokyo and Washington is 10,900 km, which is almost exactly halfway around the world at that latitude. So, the first definition has no meaning.

The second definition is about personal feelings. It could have meaning, but only if it were legitimate to draw conclusions about entire populations on the basis of what military and political strategists feel on both sides. Members of the political warrior class quite naturally sense some kind of universal bond when assuming there is a common enemy. But clearly neither Europeans, Japanese nor even the American people feel emotionally connected to Japan. 99.99% of the global population outside of Japan, even among those who admire Japanese culture, literally feels no emotional connection with the Japanese. The fact that the Japanese themselves have notoriously cultivated a “Gaijin complex” (distrust of foreigners) attests to this reality. 

Even while asserting a concordance of “values” between Tokyo and Brussels, Stoltenberg personally shows no evident capacity to identify with �����貹��’s hyper-collectivist culture, the contrary of Western individualism. In the NATO context, the dictionary’s second meaning of “close” makes no more sense than the first. In the annals of lexicography, our Devil’s Dictionary, therefore, stands as unique in providing an accurate description of Stoltenberg’s use of language. Close describes what is distant.

NATO expansion, the central fact that provoked the war in Ukraine, is one thing. But this kind of linguistic expansion— or rather inflation—is outdoing even La Fontaine’s frog. Should the world accept with a shrug that the North Atlantic now encompasses the South Pacific? We might rather be tempted to ask ourselves this question: Which nations in the world have direct access to both oceans? There are two: Canada and the US. In terms of power politics, Canada is a featherweight. But fragmented Europe, so distant from the Pacific, isn’t even part of the discussion. It should be clear by now that NATO is quite simply a tool of US foreign policy.

NATO’s obsession with the Pacific clearly means that the treaty organization is no longer about maintaining peace in Europe at all. Instead, it is about Washington’s plans for war with China. Beltway politicians, diplomats and media increasingly evoke this as the inevitable next step in geopolitical action. Macron alone seems to have that the motivating factor is not peace, but global conquest. Sensitive to the meaning of words, the French president argued: “Whatever people say, geography is stubborn.” He then added this truism: “The Indo-Pacific is not the North Atlantic, so we must not give the impression that NATO is somehow building legitimacy and a geographically established presence in other areas.”

Undaunted, Stoltenberg on July 12: “Security is not regional, it is global—so we are determined to continue deepening our cooperation.”

Put more bluntly, NATO has evolved from a tool designed to provide a soft landing after World War II into a willing initiator of World War III. Speaking with reporters at Vilnius, Stoltenberg called China a NATO “adversary,” and said, “China is increasingly challenging the rules-based international order, refusing to condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine, threatening Taiwan and carrying out a substantial military build-up.”

What Stolteberg failed to mention is that the Global South in its entirety is also challenging the rules-based international order, refusing to condemn Russia and demonstrating a studied indifference to the question of who owns and controls Taiwan. Moreover, most of the Global South recognizes that China has a long way to go to match the military build-up of NATO (i.e. the US military-industrial complex and its client states). Does that also make the Global South NATO’s enemy? Stoltenberg didn’t say.

Historical note

At this point in history, we can have some idea – however equivocal – of where NATO has been and what it still represents. After all, as an expanding alliance, at its base it still groups together in its core all the nations that, over the past 500 years, have practiced the most outrageous forms of colonialism on every continent. Their current wealth reflects that history. But things are rapidly changing. What gave some the impression of being a stabilizing factor in the past may prove to be the opposite in an evolving context.

After 1991, Cold War architect was not alone in observing that NATO had outlived its usefulness as defined by its initial mission. Created to respond to an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia focused on a rival economic system that could legitimately be suspected of seeking to spread its ideology across Europe and elsewhere in the world, the paranoia should have faded away. The rational leaders of the victorious capitalist West needed simply to redirect their attention towards constructing a new world order in conformity with Francis Fukyama’s blueprint for the “end of history.”

They chose a different path. In an article on The Tricontinental, Vijay Prashad traces the complex evolution of NATO since its beginnings. He highlights its permanent, though never publicly avowed ambition to stretch its influence well beyond the North Atlantic. He concludes by speculating that NATO’s ambition now has less and less to do with military prowess and security concerns than with the ambition of establishing its moral bullying power and incarnating its own rules-based order. “Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the U.N., suggesting that it—and not the actual international community—is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security and values.’”

Amazingly, there are commentators among the former colonial powers who are still wondering why the nations of the Global South have not simply fallen into line. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Macron Wants to Break Up Stoltenberg’s New Love Affair appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The G7 did indeed dedicate a to Afghanistan, and the parties agreed in condemning the Taliban’s suppression of fundamental rights. However, it could not be more of an understatement to say that the G7’s response to the Afghan crisis could have been more assertive. Alongside their critique of the Taliban’s conduct, the G7 also underscored a need to maintain continuous and direct dialogue with them, balancing its condemnation with engagement. This was an attempt to reflect the complexity of the international response required in this volatile situation, but it raises questions about the commitment of the international community to the well-being of the Afghan people.

Condemnations without action

The G7’s first perspective reflects the G7’s commitment to uphold the international order based on the rule of law. This commitment is paramount in resisting unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force, as exemplified by Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons. It should also be crucial in countering other forms of lawlessness that can destabilize the international order, such as those currently unfolding in Afghanistan.

Through addressing the issue of Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the G7 had a prime opportunity to manifest its resolute determination to repudiate such actions and uphold the rule of law. Afghanistan must transition from a Taliban regime imposed at the point of a sword to a representative, lawfully installed government, encompassing all echelons of Afghan society. Regrettably, the dialogue on strategic measures to aid this transition was bleak.

Does the Future Belong to the Taliban?

Since the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, the country has been plunged into a state of lawlessness that directly violates the principles upon which the international order stands. Reports of women being denied basic rights, minority groups facing persecution, and a lack of inclusivity in government structures are not only troubling but represent a blatant disregard for the rule of law. It was the responsibility of the G7 to stand united and address this crisis. Failure to act would not only compromise the credibility of the international order but also perpetuate the suffering of millions.

One of the most distressing consequences of the Taliban’s rule is the blatant violation of. For nearly two years, women and girls in Afghanistan have been denied access to education and basic freedoms. The implementation of a gender apartheid which confines women to their homes is a gross violation of human rights and a setback for gender equality worldwide. The Taliban’s actions demonstrate a clear and present danger to the international order, because lawlessness within a member of the international community can indeed become a new normal if left unchallenged.

The issued by the G7’s foreign ministers did voice a robust opposition against such repressive practices. However, it is insufficient for a multitude of reasons. While their vocal opposition to oppressive practices marks a positive first step, it is crucial that these words be underpinned by tangible actions and strategic policy initiatives that can catalyze substantial, meaningful change.

Furthermore, the G7’s primary focus on diplomatic endeavors and economic sanctions falls short of addressing the multifaceted challenges that Afghan women routinely face. In order to formulate a genuinely impactful response, it is imperative to incorporate an element of inclusivity, ensuring that the unique voices and perspectives of Afghan women are taken into account.

One Of The Taliban’s Monumental Ruins: Gender-Apartheid Policies

Only with a sustained, long-term commitment, bolstered by active collaboration with international organizations and a comprehensive strategy emphasizing the primacy of women’s rights and gender equality, can the G7 make significant strides in effectuating the deeply needed change in Afghanistan. This necessitates expanding the scope of their efforts beyond conventional diplomacy and sanctions, thereby unlocking the potential for transformative progress in this critical area.

The absence of an inclusive government in Afghanistan poses a significant challenge to stability and progress. A sustainable peace and future for the country can only be achieved through a government that represents the interests and aspirations of all Afghan citizens. The G7, as a collective voice of influential nations, could have exerted pressure on the Taliban to foster inclusivity and ensure that minority rights are respected and protected. Unfortunately, the issued statement from the G7 does not live up to this vital mandate. The international community would do well to take a more assertive stance in advocating for a truly inclusive governance structure in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan issues placed on the sidelines

The second perspective emphasized the G7’s mission to strengthen outreach to the Global South. The group sought to demonstrate its contributions to the issues that concern these nations.

Afghanistan, as part of the Global South, is a test case for this commitment. The G7 had a moral responsibility to ensure that the plight of Afghans, especially the most vulnerable, is not ignored. However, the shift of attention towards the “Global South” was mainly aimed at the influence of Russian and China. Thus, only a limited number of nations within the Global South were invited, and unfortunately, this meant that the issue of Afghanistan received scant attention.

Addressing Afghanistan’s issues would not have been just about resolving a single country’s crisis, but about reaffirming the values that the G7 represents and that the world needs. It should have been about demonstrating that the international order, based on the rule of law, isn’t just a concept but a practice that can, and should, be upheld even in the most challenging situations.

As the host of the G7, Japan held a unique position to drive the agenda and focus attention on pressing global issues like the Afghanistan crisis, which impacts global security, precipitates a humanitarian crisis, and affects regional stability. Given its strategic location in Asia, Japan’s security interests could be influenced by instability in Afghanistan. Additionally, Japan’s historic role in fostering international cooperation could have been leveraged to unite G7 nations in advocating for an inclusive government in Afghanistan, ensuring the rights of all citizens are respected. Unfortunately, the latest G7 meeting overlooked this opportunity.

The G7, therefore, should have taken a more robust stance on the situation in Afghanistan. It was incumbent on the G7 to leverage its combined influence to push for the restoration of women’s rights, the establishment of a legitimate government, and the protection of minority rights. The G7’s statement seemed strong towards ensuring that girls and women are once again allowed to attend schools and colleges, but a statement alone is not much unless it is followed by action.

In summary, as we navigate these tumultuous times and upon the conclusion of the summit, it is imperative for the G7 to prove that the international order it upholds extends beyond the boundaries of its member states. It must demonstrate that its commitment to the rule of law and its outreach to the Global South are not just theoretical constructs, but actual policies that have meaningful, practical impacts. In doing so the powers will affirm their role as a beacon of hope and a pillar of stability in a world that desperately needs both.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The saga began with Binance’s CEO, Chanpeng Zhao, contributing to panic surrounding FTX’s financial position through a announcing Binance’s plan to liquidate its position in FTX’s FTT crypto token. This announcement fueled concerns and contributed to the depositor selloff that ultimately worsened FTX’s collapse. Binance then expressed interest in acquiring FTX to bail out the struggling exchange but abruptly reversed its decision, citing mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations.

“As a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations, we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX.com,” the company said in a . “In the beginning, our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help.”

Binance’s entanglement in FTX’s collapse has drawn significant attention from government regulators. Allegations have even surfaced suggesting that Binance deliberately attempted to cause a depositor selloff to eliminate its competitor. Moreover, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been conducting a into Binance since 2018, examining potential money laundering and criminal sanctions violations.

A long history of secrecy

The origins of Binance itself raise concerns. Chanpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, founded the company in China in 2017. In the early days, the company operated without the necessary licenses in China and Japan. CZ enforced a culture of secrecy among employees, prohibiting them from mentioning the company or divulging its location. Even when prompted for an address by a cybersecurity company, CZ employees to provide an address in the Cayman Islands, where a holding company had been set up.

This secretiveness ought to raise red flags, especially considering that the company continues to avoid producing paper trails with an established policy to keep internal communications on encrypted channels such as the self-erasing message app Keybase. The veil of secrecy further extends to Binance’s financial operations. Astonishingly, even the company’s former CFO did not have full access to the company’s financial accounts, leaving one to ponder what CZ is so desperate to hide from other company executives. As a private company, Binance does not disclose important figures such as revenue, profit, cash reserves, or the extent of its holdings of its own crypto token, BNB, on its balance sheet. Almost hilariously, the company’s base of operations still remains undisclosed.

The Truth About Crypto: It Is Scarily Untrustworthy

Given the lack of transparency, it is no surprise that concerns have emerged regarding the safety of customer assets. A proof of reserves report, commissioned by Binance to assure customers of the safety of their funds, was briefly posted to, and then subsequently deleted from, the accounting firm’s website. The firm stated about public understanding and explained that the report merely provided limited findings based on agreed-upon procedures. Consequently, doubts persist about the actual security of customer funds, especially since the report only covered Binance’s Bitcoin holdings and not other cryptocurrencies.

Transparency in Binance’s accounting practices would be desperately needed for investors to be able to trust the company’s statements. An from Jonathan Reiter, co-founder of blockchain analytics firm ChainArgos, showed that the stablecoin Binance created was not fully backed during large parts of 2020 and 2021. A collateralized stablecoin is a cryptocurrency asset meant to be kept interchangeable with the US dollar by being backed by assets of equivalent value held in reserve at all times. Investors looking to Binance’s stablecoin product as a safe haven are essentially trusting nothing more than the company’s word.

Regulators and banks on the alert

The extensive secrecy appears to be a highly motivated attempt to avoid regulatory oversight. The ongoing DOJ investigation and recent criminal charges against Bitzlato, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange, are clear indicators of the regulatory pressure faced by Binance. The DOJ the relatively unknown exchange with passing more than $700 million in tainted cryptocurrency. Compromisingly, blockchain data significant transactional ties between Bitzlato and Binance, which acted as a major counterparty for its crypto transactions. Binance was the only major crypto exchange that acted as a counterparty to Bitzlato. This raises uncomfortable questions about Binance’s involvement with potentially illicit activities.

On June 5th of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed against Binance and its CEO for securities law violations. The bombshell SEC lawsuit alleges, among other things, that Binance commingled customer assets, illegally operated in the US as an unregistered exchange, and artificially inflated trading volume on its platforms. Alarmingly, collected by the SEC show text messages sent by Binance’s former chief compliance officer to a college where he wrote “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro [sic].” In the same text conversation, the former chief compliance officer also wrote “there is no fking way we are clean.”

The regulatory crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry has gotten many crypto companies into trouble with their banking partners. US banks are reevaluating their engagement with crypto due to concerns about legal repercussions. Cases like that of crypto-friendly Custodia Bank, which has had its application to join the Federal Reserve system , have not escaped their notice. The Federal Reserve also issued a making clear that banks need to ask for permission before engaging in any crypto activity. Consequently, Binance and other exchanges are losing their US banking partners, making it difficult to process transactions involving US dollars. The turmoil has forced Binance’s international company to suspend US dollar deposits and withdrawals.

The erosion of banking partnerships poses a significant risk, as it eliminates the crucial onboarding and offboarding channels for users to convert cryptocurrency into cash. US regulators and banks simply no longer trust the cryptocurrency space. This development has created uncertainty and may deter users from participating in the cryptocurrency market.

In light of these developments, placing trust in Binance seems increasingly difficult. With all of the secrecy, questionable accounting practices, and regulatory attention that surround Binance, investors no longer trust Binance, and neither should the public at large.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Binance in Hot Water as Transparency Concerns Surge appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But it was not to be. Instead, the Global South leaders were forced to sit and listen as their hosts announced their latest plans to tighten sanctions against Russia and further escalate the war by sending US-built F-16 warplanes to Ukraine. 

The G7 summit stands in stark contrast to efforts of leaders from around the world who are trying to end the conflict. In the past, the leaders of Turkey, Israel and Italy have stepped up to try to mediate. Their efforts were bearing fruit back in April 2022, but were by the West, particularly the US and UK, which did not want Ukraine to make an independent peace agreement with Russia. 

Now that the war has dragged on for over a year with no end in sight, other leaders have stepped forward to try to push both sides to the negotiating table. In an intriguing new development, Denmark, a NATO country, has stepped forward to offer to host peace talks. On May 22, just days after the G-7 meeting, Danish Foreign Minister Lokke Rasmussen that his country would be ready to host a peace summit in July if Russia and Ukraine agreed to talk. 

Many Peace Initiatives

“We need to put some effort into creating a global commitment to organize such a meeting,” said Rasmussen, mentioning that this would require getting support from China, Brazil, India and other nations that have expressed interest in mediating peace talks. Having an EU and NATO member promoting negotiations may well reflect a shift in how Europeans view the path forward in Ukraine.

Also reflecting this shift is a by Seymour Hersh, citing US intelligence sources, that the leaders of Poland, Czechia, Hungary and the three Baltic states, all NATO members, are talking to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the need to end the war and start rebuilding Ukraine so that the five million refugees now living in their countries can start to return home. On May 23, right-wing Hungarian President Viktor Orban , “Looking at the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it’s obvious that there is no victory for poor Ukrainians on the battlefield,” and that the only way to end the conflict was for Washington to negotiate with Russia. 

Meanwhile, China’s peace initiative has been progressing, despite US trepidation. China’s special representative for Eurasian affairs and former ambassador to Russia, has Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelenskyy, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and other European leaders to move the dialogue forward. Given its position as both Russia’s and Ukraine’s top trading partner, China is in a good position to engage with both sides.

Another initiative has come from Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is creating a “” of countries from around the world to work together to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. He appointed renowned diplomat Celso Amorim as his peace envoy. Amorim was Brazil’s foreign minister from 2003 to 2010, and was named the “world’s best foreign minister” in Foreign Affairs magazine. He also served as Brazil’s defense minister from 2011 to 2014, and is now President Lula’s chief foreign policy advisor. Amorim has already had with Putin in Moscow and Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and was well received by both parties.

On May 16, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other African leaders stepped into the fray, reflecting just how seriously this war is affecting the global economy through rising prices for energy and food. Ramaphosa a high-level mission by six African presidents, led by President Macky Sall of Senegal. He served, until recently, as Chairman of the African Union and, in that capacity, spoke out forcefully for peace in Ukraine at the UN General Assembly in September 2022. 

The other members of the mission are Presidents Nguesso of Congo, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Musevini of Uganda and Hichilema of Zambia. The African leaders are calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine, to be followed by serious negotiations to arrive at “a framework for lasting peace.” UN Secretary-General Guterres has been on their plans and has “welcomed the initiative.”

Pope Francis and the Vatican are also to mediate the conflict. “Let us not get used to conflict and violence. Let us not get used to war,” the Pope . The Vatican has already helped facilitate successful prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, and Ukraine has asked for the Pope’s help in reuniting families that have been separated by the conflict. A sign of the Pope’s commitment is his appointment of veteran negotiator Cardinal Matteo Zuppi as his peace envoy. Zuppi was instrumental in mediating talks that ended civil wars in Guatemala and Mozambique. 

Will any of these initiatives bear fruit? The possibility of getting Russia and Ukraine to talk depends on many factors, including their perceptions of potential gains from continued combat, their ability to maintain adequate supplies of weapons, and the growth of internal opposition. But it also depends on international pressure, and that is why these outside efforts are so critical and why US and NATO countries’ opposition to talks must somehow be reversed.

The US rejection or dismissal of peace initiatives illustrates the disconnect between two diametrically opposed approaches to resolving international disputes: diplomacy vs. war. It also illustrates the disconnect between against the war and the determination of US policymakers to prolong it, including most Democrats and Republicans. 

Give Peace a Chance

A growing grassroots movement in the US is working to change that: 

• In May, foreign policy experts and grassroots activists put out paid advertisements in The and to urge the US government to be a force for peace. The Hill ad was endorsed by 100 organizations around the country, and community leaders organized in of congressional districts to deliver the ad to their representatives. 
• Faith-based leaders, over 1,000 of whom a letter to President Biden in December calling for a Christmas Truce, are showing their support for the Vatican’s peace initiative.
• The US Conference of Mayors, an organization that represents about 1,400 cities throughout the country, unanimously a resolution calling on the President and Congress to “maximize diplomatic efforts to end the war as soon as possible by working with Ukraine and Russia to reach an immediate ceasefire and negotiate with mutual concessions in conformity with the United Nations Charter, knowing that the risks of wider war grow the longer the war continues.”

• Key US environmental leaders have recognized how disastrous this war is for the environment, including the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear war or an explosion in a nuclear power plant, and have sent a to President Biden and Congress urging a negotiated settlement. ​​
• On June 10-11, US activists will join peacemakers from all over the world in Vienna, Austria, for an . 
• Some of the contenders running for president, on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, including and . 

The initial decision of the United States and NATO member countries to try to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion had broad . However, promising peace negotiations and deliberately choosing to prolong the war as a chance to and Russia changed the nature of the war and the US role in it, making Western leaders active parties to a war in which they will not even put their own forces on the line.

Must our leaders wait until a murderous war of attrition has killed an entire generation of Ukrainians, and left Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position than it was in April 2022, before they respond to the international call for a return to the negotiating table? 

Or must our leaders take us to the brink of World War III, with all our lives on the line in an all-out , before they will permit a ceasefire and a negotiated peace? 

Rather than sleepwalking into World War III or silently watching this senseless loss of lives, we are building a global grassroots movement to support initiatives by leaders from around the world that will help to quickly end this war and usher in a stable and lasting peace. .

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The World Presses to End the War in Ukraine: Can the US Agree? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This historical movement repeats a phenomenon that took place over 2,000 years ago across the Himalayas, both east and west. While the story of yoga and going to China, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast is popular history as part of the spread of Buddhism, only specialist scholars  have traced its to Samarkand and Bukhara and further to the.

The migration of yoga to Central Asia continued for a thousand years, and something similar may be repeating today. If contemporary interest in yoga focuses on personal well-being through āsanas, at its deepest level yoga is about the nature of , which is now the frontier of science.

To the lay yoga practitioner the connection between āsanas and consciousness may appear surprising. But if one thinks of it, we are body and mind. While āsanas are good for the body, prepares us to recognize the realm of mind and awareness, and finally to control it.

Consciousness intrigues the physicist and the neuroscientist for the promise of explaining the emergence and the location of or the self., sociologists and politicians would like to know whether the future will bring conscious machines. It is clear that if such machines can be built, they will change technology and society in profound ways.

The question of the self is at the heart of consciousness, and it has been central to Indian civilization from the earliest times. In Hinduism, the self is called the , or Shiva. In Kashmir in north India, which was a great center for science and scholarship associated with Shiva, it was conceived as “” (�ʰ���������� in Sanskrit). Yoga practices are methods to be one with the light within.

If Shiva is light and viewed as the male principle, the body itself through which one strives to see the light is the domain of the goddess, Shakti, and the female principle. yoga is the coming together of Shiva and Shakti, that is light and the knowledge engendered in the mind.

Yoga and the Many Faces of Shiva

A characteristic of the sculptural or artistic representation of Shiva is multiple faces, although in the aniconic form there is no face at all. The idea behind multiple faces is that Shiva as consciousness (��ٳ���) is present in all directions. In general, representation of Shiva with 1, 3, 4 and 5 faces is quite common with the two-faced representation as half Shiva and half Goddess.

The symbolism with the four faces is described in the : the eastern face represents sovereignty, the northern face represents perfection, the western face represents prosperity, and the southern face represents the control of evil.

Yoga went out across the Himalayas as the worship of Shiva, who was co-opted by . In contrast to Hinduism—where ��ٳ���’s transcendence is clearly stated—Buddhism emphasizes the mind and looks at reality through this prism. Since these differences can be explained away as being semantic, Buddhism has had no problem co-opting Vedic gods.

The medieval-era Indonesian equates Buddha with Shiva and Janārdana (Vishnu).  In modern Bali in Indonesia, Buddha is considered the of Shiva, which is quite accurate if we map the two to intelligence and intuition, respectively. Shiva and Vishnu are praised in the popular Nīlakaṇṭha chant that Buddhists sing in their temples to this day.

Our consciousness provides us with the sense of time, and Shiva is viewed as Time (Mahākāla) in Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism. one of the Seven Lucky Gods in Japan, is a form of Shiva. The god enjoys an exalted position as a household deity in Japan.

The influence of yoga has been so pervasive that , one of the most influential figures of modern China, a founder of the May Fourth Movement and president of Peking University, proclaimed in an essay titled Indianization of China that “India conquered and dominated China culturally for twenty centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”

Zoroastrianism has a binary view of the world as a struggle between good and evil. Over time, it also reconciled its system with that of Hinduism. Shiva Maheshvara was incorporated into the Central Asian Zoroastrian . The god Zūrvan was portrayed as Brahmā, Ahura Mazda (Adbag) was depicted as Indra, and Veshparkar (Vayu in Sogdian) was represented as Shiva.

Svetovid, Svantovit and the Next Wave

Many Slavic people worshiped gods with multiple heads who were shown in tall wooden statues in their temples. In addition to the three-headed god, the Slavs had , or Svantovid, both of which names have Sanskrit etymology: Svetovid as the “knower of the light”, and Svantovid as the “knower of heart”.

Svetovid, their principal divinity, was depicted as a four-headed god whose main temple stood at Cape Arkona off current day northwest Germany. This temple collected tributes from all Baltic people until it was destroyed by Germanic raiders in the eleventh century.

The four faces of are Svarog (north), Perun (west), Lada (south), and Mokosh (east). One can see the Sanskrit cognates of these names in Svarga, Parjanya, Ladah, and Moksha. The derivation from Europe’s own languages for these names is forced and unconvincing.

When we go deeper in the correspondences, we see that they fit in with the four faces of Shiva described in the Mahabharata and also with the geography of Kashmir from where the worship of Shiva is likely to have gone to the Slavic lands.

The of the gods was perceived in Kashmir to be just north of the valley in the Harmukh peak, which literally means the “face of Shiva”, and this is Svarga (heavens). The west of the valley is from where the rains come (scholars accept the identity of Perun with Parjanya, that is Indra who brings rains). The south of the valley is the pleasant land of India (Ladah means pleasant in Sanskrit), and the east is where the sun rises (merging with the sun is understood as moksha).

The contemporary coming together of yoga and science has within it the potential of mitigating the inevitable disruptions in society arising from pervasive job losses due to AI, and from the shrinking of populations. The imprimatur of science is behind yoga now. Yoga provides both psychological and physical health benefits, including relief from chronic pain, arthritis, stress, and even a healthier heart.

The celebration of the International Day of yoga by the UN, and the knowledge of the of yoga practice on health and well-being is facilitating its in traditional societies. Even a society as religious as Saudi Arabia has decided to include yoga in its school and college . In the next wave, one would expect the spread of the more esoteric aspects of yoga.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post How Yoga Spread and Transformed World Religions appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Both India and Vietnam face a security dilemma because of China’s regional power ambitions. They fear Asian domination by a single power. Being China’s neighbors, India and Vietnam are rightly insecure about their borders. China has invaded both countries in the past: India in 1962 and Vietnam in . 

Han and Hindu Nationalism Come Face to Face

To raise the cost of another Chinese military aggression, India and Vietnam are joining hands to counter Beijing. New Delhi and Hanoi completed 50 years of diplomatic engagement last year. It is the last five years that have been the most consequential in their diplomatic history though. During this period, the countries have been intensifying cooperation and are in a position to act in concert on many fronts.

The Dragon Spits Fire

Assertive Chinese behavior in the last few years has rattled India and Vietnam. Be it in the Himalayas or expansive territorial claims in the South East China Sea, Beijing has upped the ante. 

Countries on China’s periphery have borne the brunt of the dragon’s fire. For example, China claims portions of Indian territory in the western and eastern sectors of its border with India. Beijing also frequently crosses into the Indian side of the disputed border. 

Similarly, Beijing continues to claim all of the South China Sea, disregarding the sovereign rights and of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei. China has also repeatedly targeted Vietnamese fishing boats and carried out maritime activities in disputed areas in the chain. Vietnam claims these islands as its territory. So does Taiwan. However, Beijing exercises de facto over the island chain. China also controls the Spratly Islands and Woody Island. Beijing is turning these disputed territories into military installations in the South China Sea. 

The roots of China’s assertive behavior lie in its self-perception. Beijing views itself as a natural Asian hegemon with great power status. Now, China is seeking to become a and challenge the US for the top of the global totem pole.

New Delhi and Hanoi, like Tokyo and Canberra, do not accept China’s self-proclaimed hegemony. These countries do not see themselves as subordinate to Beijing. Naturally, they are critical of any attempts by China to dominate the post-World War II regional order. 

This is also true of the other players in the region. They might not admit it openly, but Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea are uncomfortable with Beijing’s unilateral attempts to dominate the region. However, the fear of a backlash from Beijing, a sizable number of citizens of Chinese origin in their own territories and economic dependence on China prevent these countries from voicing their worries. 

Even in 1978, Lee Kuan Yew, the then prime minister of Singapore, caught the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping by surprise, that he was more concerned about Beijing than about Hanoi. Deng had gone to Singapore to mobilize Lee Kuan Yew’s support against an ambitious Vietnam. The canny Singaporean statesman perceptively understood that the long-term challenge emanated from Beijing. Since then, it is clear that Beijing has aroused feelings of insecurity amongst its neighbors in Southeast and East Asia.

The fear of outright dominance by a single power compels Asian nations like India, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam to seek multipolarity. These nations believe that multipolarity will maintain a stable regional order. Therefore, their geopolitical and diplomatic strategy aims to counter China. These Asian nations are only following what eminent theorists like Henry Kissinger and John Mearsheimer have long posited about achieving a balance of power in international relations. 

Coalescing around shared interests such as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and freedom of navigation of the seas helps regional powers build a coalition against China. Like other Asian countries, both and have concerns about China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Both want a multipolar, rules-based regional order that  constricts the space for unilateral adventures by Beijing. Therefore, the recent “” announced by Hanoi and New Delhi seeks to make structural and institutional changes that make multipolarity a reality. 

From the mid-1970s, New Delhi and Hanoi were on the same side of the geopolitical and ideological fault lines in Asia. Vietnam was communist and India was socialist. Both were of the Soviet Union and harbored a deep distrust of the United States. 

Communist Vietnam soon found that ideological similarities could not avoid geopolitical rivalries. Deng was deeply about the deepening Soviet-Vietnamese relations. Deng sought to teach the Vietnamese a lesson for “” Beijing and siding with Moscow. Deng believed that Hanoi sought regional dominance in Southeast Asia and he wanted China to have that privilege.

Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the Pol Pot regime further poisoned its relations with Beijing. China was Pol Pot’s benefactor. Beijing saw Pol Pot’s regime as a bulwark against Soviet influence in Southeast Asia. Once Vietnam got rid of Pol Pot in Cambodia, Deng attacked Vietnam in 1979. stood by Vietnam. Moraji Desai, the then Indian prime minister, issued a statement calling for an immediate withdrawal of Chinese troops from Vietnam as the first step towards ensuring peace in Southeast Asia. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s then foreign minister, shortened his visit to China in protest against this invasion. 

Polygamous Foreign Policy

Over the years, New Delhi and Hanoi have followed a multidirectional foreign policy. Neither wanted to anger their giant northern neighbor. Both regularly championed the idea of “strategic autonomy” that focuses on avoiding sclerotic alliances and security commitments. Given the structural changes in due to China’s rise, both India and Vietnam are moving closer.

Yet there are limits to Vietnam’s relationship with India. Retired Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan believes that given their relatively small sizes and strategic location, major Southeast Asian countries have no choice but to pursue a foreign policy. As a result, these countries seek friendship with all and confrontation with none. Vietnam is no exception.

By simultaneously juggling many relationships and contradictions, Vietnam aims to diversify its partners. Fundamentally, Vietnam uses these partnerships to pursue its national interests. India is following the same . India buys oil from Russia, conducts military exercises with the US and welcomes investment from Japan. It is friends with Israel and, at the same time, maintains relationships with Iran. Like India, Vietnam also has meaningful in place with all five members of the UN Security Council. Both India and Vietnam have defied conventional Cold-War era wisdom of making binary choices. 

Indo-Vietnamese Push for Multipolarity

Over the last few years, Vietnam has become a focal part of India’s “.” As a result, defense and security have improved. This includes joint exercises and training programs, cooperation and trade in defense equipment. New Delhi has also given $600 million of defense lines of credit to Hanoi. 

Increasing trade and have brought both countries together. Bilateral trade has ballooned from $200 million in 2000 to $14.114 billion in 2021-2022. Several Indian are investing in Vietnam. They are in diverse sectors such as IT, education, real estate, textiles and garments, healthcare, solar technology, consumer goods, and agricultural products. India is Vietnam with infrastructure and connectivity projects, development and capacity-building assistance, and . Despite Chinese apprehensions, India also has oil exploration projects with PetroVietnam in the South China Sea. Cooperation in has also grown at a healthy pace. 

Slowly and surely, a silent change is unfolding in Asian waters. China’s increasing aggression is no longer going unanswered. The Indo-Pacific will not become a Chinese lake. Regional powers are responding. Not only the US and Japan but also India and Vietnam are working more closely together to preserve a multipolar Asia. 

[Contributing Editor and CFO Ti Ngo edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Xi Jinping is now emperor. He has centralized all power. Xi followed a disastrous zero-COVID policy that decimated the economy. Protests forced him to make a U-turn. A little after the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi abandoned his zero-COVID policy suddenly and dramatically.

China did not reopen in a phased manner. It went from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in less than five seconds. Chinese health authorities have admitted that 80% of the population has caught COVID since early December. This means 1.2 billion of China’s 1.41 billion people have caught COVID.

Official figures record a mere 72,000 deaths. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there are Chinese statistics. This figure is patently and absurdly untrue. On January 22, the Chinese rang in the lunar new year. Family gatherings and temple visits shot up. So did COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Just as in other parts of the world before, reports are coming in from around China about hospitals running out of beds, oxygen and drugs. It is clear that the Xi-led CCP failed to prepare for this COVID surge. They neither have the right vaccines nor the right drugs. China’s vaccine development and deployment is in deep doubt.

Many Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese analysts observe that Xi’s and the CCP’s competence is now in question. Even two years earlier, few Chinese students criticized Xi. Now, almost all of them are critical of the emperor. Xi’s legitimacy and the CCP’s hegemony are now in question.

In 2022, China admitted that the country lost 850,000 people. This might mark the start of China’s relative decline. The days of fast economic growth based on cheap labor are over. This will make China a more dangerous actor on the global stage. External aggression has often been a diversionary tactic to overcome internal tension. Xi might find patriotism and Wolf Warrior diplomacy a useful tool to rally public support.

Over the last few years, China has been acting increasingly aggressively against its neighbors in general and Japan in particular. In 2021, a joint Chinese and Russian fleet circumnavigated Honshu, �����貹��’s largest island. No foreign fleet had ever done this. Last year, Chinese warships and Russian bombers operated near Japan.

In December, Japan released two important documents: National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy. Both of them outline how Japan plans a more robust foreign and defense policy to counter China. Japan is also doubling its defense budget from 1% to 2% of the GDP over five years. This will make it the third biggest defense spender after the US and China.

Japan does not want any unilateral changes to the status quo and will work with allies to counter any unilateral moves. Japan also aims to deter any invasion. It is clear that zeitenwende—an epochal tectonic shift—has come to Japan instead of Germany. While the latter is still dilly dallying as the speakers discussed earlier, Japan has acted decisively.

The increase in Japanese defense achievement will see innovation in technology. Japan has the memory of making good stuff. The land of Toyota might create new unmanned vehicles that operate both in the air and in water. Japan might also give a fillip to the use of robots in war.

Carle takes a very upbeat view of Tokyo’s recent moves. Until now, Japan has been a subordinate ally of the US. Now, Japan is acting in Africa to counter the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is no longer acting under the umbrella of the US but a strategic defense partner. It is no longer Pax Americana in Asia but it is an alliance that is fundamentally different from the past.

Japan is also investing big time in India. Osamu Suzuki invested in India, revolutionized India’s automobile industry and achieved historic success. More Japanese investment has followed in multiple industries. Japan is building the bullet train from Ahmedabad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home city, to Mumbai, India’s business capital. 

The Japanese are engaging with their allies from South Korea and Taiwan to Vietnam and India. The Quad—a group of Japan, India, Australia and the US—was the late Shinzo Abe’s idea when he was prime minister. In some ways, Xi’s actions have upset nearly all of China’s neighbors and gives Tokyo a historic opportunity to finally counter Beijing. Finally, Tokyo is reverting to the pre-1945 days when Japan was powerful and influential in Asia. At a time of historic shifts, the balance of power is changing profoundly.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Dragon in the Room

Why is love in the air for Australia and Japan? 

The answer is simple: China. 

The Middle Kingdom has taken an increasingly in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing has made “historical claims” on the Senkaku islands claimed by Tokyo. It has increased its military maneuvers in the South and East China Seas, building artificial islands and bases. Closer to Canberra, China has intensified maritime activities in the South Pacific islands. It has even signed a with the strategically located Solomon islands. Such actions have fuelled insecurity in Tokyo and Canberra.

On the economic front, new realities have emerged. After the economic liberalization in the Deng Xiaoping era, China grew rapidly. Given the gigantic Chinese market, most Asian countries wanted to prosper from the China story. Trade increased exponentially.

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China-Japan trade grew dramatically as well. In 2021, China was �����貹��’s biggest trade partner and the trade volume crossed . China-Australia trade grew too and reached $245 billion in 2020. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the country began to weaponize trade and bully its trading partners into submission. When Australia called for an independent probe into the origins of the COVID-19 virus, Beijing responded with a range of strict against Australian imports. Naturally, this made policymakers in Tokyo and Canberra . They are attempting to change their trading patterns and rely less on China.

Strange Bedfellows

A century ago, Australia feared “economic infiltration” and by the Japanese. In 1901, Australia implemented its White Australia Policy to exclude non-white immigrants and keep Australia a European nation. In World War II, both Japan and Australia were locked in a bitter in Papua New Guinea. Mutual suspicion ran high and bilateral relations reached the nadir. In those years, Australia increasingly looked towards the US and Western Europe for identity, inspiration and security. It did not want much to do with its near abroad full of ragtag Asians. Much of Asia, especially Japan, saw Australia as a genocidal white outpost in their neighborhood.

In the 1950s and 1960s, mutual suspicion decreased. Both Japan and Australia were worried about a rising Indonesia. They shared about Indonesian strongman Sukarno who was one of the founding fathers of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). As American allies, Japan and Australia were naturally concerned about Sukarno’s nationalist assertions and NAM.

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As a result, Intelligence cooperation between Japan and Australia slowly grew. This was accompanied by a commerce treaty signed in 1957 between Tokyo and Canberra. Gradually, closer economic ties decreased historic suspicions. Japan became Australia’s largest trading partner from the late 1960s onwards to 2007 when China replaced it. Additionally, Japan and Australia were also part of the American security architecture in the region. The US-led hub and spoke system contained the communists in the region during the Cold War. 

Unpacking the Updated JSDC 

As pointed out earlier, the new JSDC signed by Tokyo and Canberra comes at a time of rising Chinese ambition. Xi’s China seeks to extend its sphere of influence in Asia. Beijing’s rising influence comes at the cost of regional powers who do not subscribe to the Chinese worldview. They are anxious and want to oppose China. As a result, Asia is profoundly. 

In this new geopolitical scenario, the JSDC makes sense. It builds local capacity to counter China. Japan and Australia do not entirely have to rely on the US to maintain peace and stability in the region. Both countries are deepening their military partnership. They are increasing interoperability, intelligence sharing, military exercises and defense activities on each other’s territories,

The two powers further seek to build on the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) signed in January 2022. Besides Australia, the US is the only country with which Japan has signed the RAA. Japan also has an Acquisition and Cross-servicing Agreement with Australia. This agreement allows reciprocal provision of supplies and services between their defense forces. They are also collaborating in space, cyber and regional capacity building.

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The JDSC marks a shift in traditional Japanese to act proactively on military matters. In the last few decades, Japan punched under its weight in military issues. This was primarily due to its war-renouncing constitution. The updated JSDC reflects the internal in Japan over the role of its military and the country’s role in the world. Various Japanese strategists have called for revising �����貹��’s National Security Strategy. They are pushing for Japan to take an active regional role. Moreover, policymakers in Canberra are also stepping on the gas. Australia is on a shopping spree for from nuclear-powered submarines to unmanned aircraft and hypersonic missiles.

The JSDC’s focus on intelligence is significant because both Japan and Australia have formidable geospatial capabilities in electronic eavesdropping and high-tech satellites. Experts believe that such intelligence cooperation will also provide a template for Japan to deepen intelligence cooperation with like-minded partners.

Secure Economics and Regional Dynamics

Japan and Australia now recognize that economics is closely tied to security. In this new deglobalizing world, words like friendshoring and secure supply chains have come into play. OPEC+ has cut oil production despite repeated US requests and sided with Russia. The US and the UK first supplied vaccines to their own populations before giving them to Europe or Asia. China used personal protective equipment for its people during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, Tokyo and Canberra want to set up a secure economic relationship in what the Pentagon calls a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

The Russia-Ukraine War has hit Japan hard. The country imports most of its energy. from Russia’s Sakhalin-2 project have stopped and Japan faces an energy shortage. Rising energy prices have increased its expenses and increased input costs for its products. Therefore, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made energy resilience a priority. In this context, Australia is a reliable and valuable energy supplier to Japan. Already, Canberra is Tokyo’s biggest supplier of LNG and coal. Both countries seek to deepen this relationship.

Both countries have further announced an Australia-Japan critical minerals partnership. These minerals include rare earths that are crucial in clean energy technologies like solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries. These could well be the oil of the future. Japan as a leader in many of these technologies and Australia as an exporter of minerals might have a win-win long term relationship on the cards.

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The US also figures prominently in the updated JDSC. Japan and Australia have asked Washington to fill in the gaps for sustainable infrastructure needs. This is part of the role the Quad — the US, Japan, India, and Australia — seeks to play in countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 

To counter China, Japan and Australia also support ASEAN’s centrality in the Indo-Pacific. They have also reiterated their desire to implement the 2050 Strategy for Continent through the Pacific Islands Forum. This initiative seeks to develop cooperation with Pacific Island countries in critical infrastructure, disaster recovery, and maritime security. This is a multilateral play to counter the Big Brother model that China follows and provide assistance for smaller countries from medium-sized powers they trust. Japan and Australia share concerns about and North Korea as well.

In the new world order that is emerging, regional powers are assuming more importance. The US is tired after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cannot write a blank check for Indo-Pacific security and single-handedly take on China. Therefore, the US is leaning on allies to step up. This makes the updated JSDC important. In the words of Professor Haruko Satoh of Osaka University, “Strengthening the Japan-Australia partnership is crucial for the US-led hub and spokes security system in Asia.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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A full 10 years later, after dealing with the aftermath in a reasonably efficient manner, Japan has one major task left. It must find a way of disposing of more than a million tons of contaminated water from the powerplant’s three decommissioned reactors. To the chagrin not only of neighboring countries including China and South Korea but also environmental groups and even �����貹��’s own fishing industry, the Japanese government has made the controversial decision to close the book on Fukushima by dumping the water into the ocean.

According to , the Japanese government claims to have taken this decision on the basis of its newfound concern with the “international best practices and standards” the Royal Society referred to in its report. The government released this statement on April 13: “On the premise of strict compliance with regulatory standards that have been established, we select oceanic release.”

�մǻ岹��’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Oceanic release:

An act stirred by the temptation to believe that whatever you can discreetly dump into the ocean will be so diluted by the mass of moving water that within weeks or months, even if it is public knowledge, no one will actually remember that the deed was done or blame those who did it

Contextual Note

In his explanation of the government’s decision, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga appealed to the fabled capacity of the Japanese to accept the inevitable. “Releasing the … treated water,” he said, “is an unavoidable task to decommission the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant and reconstruct the Fukushima area.” As a politician, not only does he feel it is his humble duty to put the errors of the past behind him, but he knows it is always effective to focus on potential positive outcomes — in this case, the reconstruction of the non-nuclear reconstruction of the affected area. Averted readers should know that when a politician from any nation calls something “unavoidable,” the most sensible reaction is to suppose that what they really mean by “unavoidable” is what we judge to be the most convenient and economic way for us to dismiss such an annoying issue.

Polls in Japan show little support for the government. Le Monde that a poll conducted by NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, found that 51% of those polled opposed the plan, with only 18% supporting it. The Chinese called the plan “extremely irresponsible.” South Korea seconded the Chinese, deeming it “totally unacceptable.” Protesters in Seoul accused Japan of engaging in “nuclear terrorism,” echoing the Iranian government’s complaint this week following Israel’s brazen sabotage of the nuclear facility at Natanz in Iran. Even Taiwan — more fearful of China than of contaminated waters — expressed its concern, though much more timidly. 

These reactions contrast with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s in which he thanks “Japan for its transparent efforts in its decision to dispose of the treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi site.” Transparent? China that the Japanese made their decision “without fully consulting with neighboring countries and the international community.” Is that what Blinken sees as a “transparent” effort? Or does he mean that because the operation will only be carried out in two years’ time, announcing it today is an example of transparency? After all, the US tends to act first and explain later and rarely worries about transparency.

Then there is another consideration the Japanese government would be wise to ponder. Dumping the still polluted water into the Pacific means that sooner rather than later the West Coast of the US will be affected. At some point in the future, could this have dire consequences for Japanese Americans who risk being assaulted for spreading “Fukushima cancer” just as Chinese Americans have been attacked for releasing the “Wuhan flu”?

Historical Note

The Japanese language has a common expression: Shouganai. One specialist of Japanese offers this explanation of the : “The best way I can translate ‘Shouganai’ is ‘It can’t be helped,’” comparing it with the well-known French expression, “C’est la vie.” The author confesses to using the Japanese “phrase almost daily.” Italian Americans from New York might prefer to compare it with their favorite all-purpose for dismissing any subject they don’t want to discuss: “Forget about it.” Every culture has its own way of accepting what is written off as a fatality that cannot be constructively addressed.

Pushing the explanation of the Japanese phrase further, the author insists that despite always being used in reference to negative events, Shouganai is “actually a pretty positive way to look at the world.” It signifies a basic feeling at the core of Japanese culture, that it’s “better to not get hung up on things outside of your control.” In contrast, US culture encourages making every effort — including at times extreme violence — to demonstrate one is in control.

Since the end of the Second World War, the Japanese government has developed the art of not getting hung up on disagreeable past events from the past, such as the fate of the Chinese and Korean sex slaves they euphemized with the name “comfort women” at a time in their history when they believed they could dominate all of Asia. After their six-week-long massacre known as the Rape of Nanking, sensing the risk of bad PR the knowledge of the brutal campaign of massacre and violent rape might produce, the emperor decided to step in. The answer was less murder and more rape, but better organized and subject to the kind of discipline and social rituals with which Japanese culture feels comfortable. The treatment of the comfort women was unspeakably cruel and inhuman, but the Japanese military had the good sense to manage it as a stable institution rather than allowing rape to play out according to the random whims of marauding soldiers.

The website History the pattern of denial associated with this episode: “For decades, the history of the ‘comfort women’ went undocumented and unnoticed. When the issue was discussed in Japan, it was denied by officials who insisted that ‘comfort stations’ had never existed.” Whether those same officials were saying Shouganai in private while they systematically refused to admit anything in public will never be known. Even today, the Japanese government continues to deny some of the most obvious facts about the “comfort women.”

The Fukushima catastrophe lacks the deeply human moral dimension associated with the crimes perpetrated by Japanese imperialism in the early 20^th century. The scandal relating to the fact that the nuclear catastrophe was preventable had more to do with professional negligence and government incompetence than moral failings, cruel personal behavior and abusive policies, though the frontier between conscious and neglectful abuses will always be difficult to define. The tendency to deny and then forget is common to both.

On the purely moral plane, were either of these human disasters in any way comparable with US President Harry Truman’s decision to drop — without warning — not one but two atomic bombs on urban civilian targets at the end of World War II? The immediate difference between the attitudes of the two nations is that the Japanese showed some sense of shame, however hypocritical, following the Rape of Nanking. Their consistent denial of the true history of comfort women also indicates a degree of implicit shame. It’s as much a question of not losing face as it is of aggressive denial.

In contrast, the American government never attempted to disguise its fulsome pride in an achievement that — following its cultural logic summed up in the expression, “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” — put an end to a world war. Could it have been done differently? Of course. But for most Americans, the positive result canceled all the useless scruples one might have concerning the gravity of the damage done.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Containment advocates argue that North Korea has never truly been squeezed hard enough to force capitulation. Engagement advocates counter that serious tit-for-tat negotiations have never tested North Korea’s willingness to freeze or shut down its nuclear program in exchange for good-faith incentives. Both camps maintain that some additional variable — failure of leadership, bureaucratic inertia, the perfidy of North Korea, the resistance of the US Congress, the ambivalence of China — has undermined the integrity of the containment or the engagement approach. Politics and/or geopolitics, in other words, continually interfere with the workings of a perfectly good plan.

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There is a third category of options: try something new and different. Into this category falls a regional proposal like a nuclear-weapon-free zone for Northeast Asia. Unfortunately, it remains as marginal to the debate today as it was when it was first proposed. Even though the rationale for such a zone has arguably grown stronger, the political will in the principal capitals — Washington, Pyongyang, Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul — is lacking. Not surprisingly, the greatest interest in this proposal has come from Mongolia, a country that has not been central to the nuclear politics of the region.

But significant changes are on the horizon. The coronavirus pandemic poses a new, collective threat to the region. China is emerging from this crisis in a stronger, and more aggressively nationalist, position. The United States may well have new leadership in 2021, and its strategic thinking about the region is evolving regardless of who occupies the White House. The surprising resignation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in September has shaken up Japanese politics, while the engagement-friendly Moon Jae-in administration has a more powerful parliamentary majority in South Korea after the 2020 elections.

Ordinarily, such changes would merely shift the needle slightly toward one of the status quo positions, probably a renewal of tit-for-tat negotiations — between the US and North Korea on the one hand and North Korea and South Korea on the other — within a narrow spectrum of options. However, frustration over several decades of failed engagement and containment strategies could push pundits and policymakers to explore the third category of options, including a nuclear-weapon-free zone.

The State of Play in Washington

The election of US President Donald Trump in 2016 introduced a new dynamic into nuclear politics in Northeast Asia in three ways. Trump was interested in demonstrating his reputed negotiating skills in resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis, a stand-off that frustrated his predecessor, Barack Obama. The new president showed little interest in shoring up traditional alliances, such as the military pacts with Japan and South Korea. And he demonstrated a marked indifference to non-proliferation norms, suggesting at one point that the US should remove the nuclear umbrella from Japan and South Korea and allow the two countries to develop nuclear weapons of their own.

Despite three direct encounters between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as well as repeated US attempts to extract more money in host-nation support from Tokyo and Seoul, the US president has not substantially changed the status quo in the region. North Korea has  to its nuclear deterrent. Japan and South Korea have bristled at Trump’s extreme burden-sharing demands. Relations between the United States and China have significantly worsened. But the US nuclear umbrella remains in place, as does the US alliance system. As a recent Stimson Center  notes, the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula persists and will likely to continue despite the coronavirus.

Over the last six to nine months, US pundits have churned out variations of their past positions, updated to reflect Trump’s erratic policies, Kim’s hardening stance and the outbreak of the coronavirus. Trump’s own vacillations between a “fire-and-fury” threat of military response and his seeming willingness to negotiate a comprehensive deal personally with Kim have provided hope and concern to both sides of the debate.

Containment advocates have argued, for instance, that the US and its allies haven’t really tried to squeeze North Korea. Some presidents have crafted what they have called campaigns of maximum pressure. But Bradley Bowman and David Maxell of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies have argued that what is needed is “” in which all tools of national power, including diplomacy, military, cyber, sanctions and information and influence activities, are brought to bear on Pyongyang.

Other conservative think tanks have offered variants of this. “There is no diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis—or to be a little more precise, no solution acceptable to Pyongyang that also involves security for the United States and her allies,”  Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. “Thus the only viable Western option for dealing with the North Korean nuclear menace is ‘threat reduction’—a concerted and unremitting project to diminish the regime’s killing force materially by unilateral outside action, without Kim Jong Un’s assent.” Focusing on the more immediate, COVID-19 era,  of the Heritage Foundation has put it simply: no relaxation of sanctions in exchange for a “partial, flawed agreement.”

Engagement advocates, meanwhile, argue that the US and its allies haven’t really tried to negotiate properly. While those favoring containment propose different combinations of sticks, those favoring engagement offer different combinations of carrots. Most recommendations boil down to stepping away from an all-or-nothing approach and offering some partial sanctions relief for a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, as both the Carnegie Endowment’s  and  of the Brookings Institution argues.

Often, as with  of the Center for American Progress, there’s a plea to repairing U.S. alliances or, as with  of the Center for a New American Security, an additional realpolitik rationale, in their case a bid to deny China influence over North Korea. Sanctions relief for a freeze is possibly feasible, Sue Mi Terry of the Center for Strategic and International Studies , but Trump took this option off the table through his ham-fisted negotiating style.

Few in the Washington advocacy community think it is useful to step away from this tug-of-war to propose something new.  of the Quincy Institute hews to the engagement line but puts a few more carrots into the mix, not only partial sanctions relief but also declaring an end to the Korean War and establishing a liaison office in Pyongyang in return for North Korea dismantling some of its nuclear facilities over the course of one year.

Perhaps the most radical suggestion comes from the Cato Institute, where Doug Bandow  that normalizing relations with Pyongyang should precede further negotiations and thus transform the entire diplomatic framework. I have made a , referencing the US-China deal of the Richard Nixon era.

What has been noticeably absent from discussions has been a regional approach that involves all parties. For a while in the mid-2000s, the “six-party talks” arrangement gained traction, even in the US where the Bush administration was eager to avoid one-on-one negotiations with North Korea. A nuclear-weapon-free zone could have flowed out of such a process. But it has largely faded from the diplomatic agenda.

What would it take to get such an idea back on the agenda?

Zoning Out

A nuclear-weapon-free zone for Northeast Asia has been on the drawing board since 1972, at least in US arms control circles. Hiro Umebayashi, the Japanese arms control expert, has delineated perhaps the most detailed  of the proposal.

In his  to inject a nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) proposal into the moribund six-party talks, Morton Halperin argued that the prospect of either or both Japan and South Korea going nuclear in response to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions made it imperative to conclude a comprehensive approach to regional security. Such a zone was only one of six elements of this comprehensive arrangement, which also included ending the state of war, turning the six-party talks into a permanent regional security council, a mutual declaration of no hostile intent, provision of nuclear and other energy sources to North Korea and the removal of sanctions.

The zone, according to most versions, would cover North Korea, South Korea and Japan. The United States, China and Russia would pledge not to store nuclear weapons in the zone. The US would maintain its nuclear umbrella over both its military allies but with some modification.

In 2016, South Korean security expert Moon Chung-in  in light of North Korea’s expansion of its nuclear program. He recommended that a “first step toward establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone would be for the six parties to request that the UN secretary-general and the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs convene an expert meeting to examine the concept behind the zone. Parallel efforts could be conducted by civil society organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.”

Most recently, Mongolia has taken the lead in pushing the idea at the United Nations as well as the civil society level. Jargalsaikhan Enkhsaikhan of the NGO Blue Banner acknowledges the difficulties of pushing forward a nuclear-weapon-free zone at a time when North Korea is unlikely to negotiate away its nuclear program simply as part of a region-wide non-proliferation strategy. Rather, he  as a first step a declaration of “non-nuclear deterrence” from all the parties which “would contribute to greater predictability and stability and hence would avert a possible uncontrollable chain reaction leading to the regional nuclear arms race. This would also lead to ‘denuclearizing’ regional war planning and military exercises.”

Toby Dalton of the Carnegie Endowment’s Nuclear Policy Program, one of the few policy analysts in Washington to incorporate a nuclear-weapon-free zone into his analysis, suggests that the NWFZ can serve a useful function in negotiations as a commonly agreed-upon endpoint. To reach this endpoint using Halperin’s model, Dalton , requires the substitute of “cooperative security” for the current nuclear deterrence model.

Such a transformation would, in some sense, provide a new language for the negotiations so that the two sides would have a better chance of not talking past one another. A nuclear-weapon-free zone then becomes like a more advanced text that can only be read and understood by the participants once they’ve gone through the earlier language training in “cooperative security.” Importantly, Dalton sees this process as Korean-led rather than primarily a negotiated calibration of US-North Korean relations, which is also a departure from most Washington analyses.

Assessing the Likelihood

The six-party framework no longer exists. Mongolia has been a valuable diplomatic partner in many regional initiatives in Northeast Asia, but it doesn’t have the kind of convening power necessary to overcome the deep ideological divides and profound imbalances of power in the region. “Cooperative security” is indeed a powerful language to substitute for deterrence, and a Korea-led process is indispensable. But deterrence remains a deeply rooted status quo, and the two Koreas are too far apart to lead on anything at the moment.

On top of all this, the US Senate has never been very enthusiastic about nuclear-weapon-free zones. It ratified the Latin American zone during the Ronald Reagan years but didn’t  on the protocols connected to the African, Central Asian and South Pacific zones that the Obama administration submitted. The United States has not signed the protocol recognizing the Southeast Asian zone.

It would seem, on the face of it, that there is no foundation upon which to place a Northeast Asia nuclear-weapons-free zone. Still, here are some hopeful signs.

First, on the US side, the election in November could put Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the White House, where he would likely advance the (albeit conflicted) disarmament agenda of Barack Obama. Moreover, a shift of the Senate to a Democratic majority could provide a historic opportunity to move forward on a number of stalled arms control and disarmament initiatives.

An intensifying conflict with China, which has  among US policymakers and pundits, mitigates any optimism about the United States participating in regional threat reduction. On the other hand, an evolution in US strategic posture in the region away from what the Pentagon describes as a “targetable footprint” — most recently evidenced by the removal of  from Guam — anticipates the kind of US pullback that could support a future nuclear-weapon-free zone.

Second, neither Japan nor South Korea has pushed ahead with a program to acquire nuclear weapons, despite North Korea’s advanced nuclear status. The current leadership in Japan precludes any serious commitment to regional threat reduction much less a shift to cooperative security. However, the current government of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga enjoyed an initial post-inauguration surge of support, but an election between now and October 2021 could nudge the country in a very different direction.

Thanks to the Moon Jae-in government in Seoul, South Korea is already the most amenable to regional threat reduction, but it has been cursed by a lack of partners. That may change with elections in Washington and Tokyo, which could represent the “disruption and realignment” that Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations  is necessary for any change of status on the Korean peninsula.

In the 2000s, China supported turning the six-party talks into an institutional framework for addressing regional security. Since then, President Xi Jinping has presided over a more assertive and strident expansion of Chinese influence in practically all directions. Closer to home, Beijing has mended fences with Seoul, its relationship with North Korea remains vexed and it continues to eye Japan with suspicion.

As Cho Kyung-Hwan , however, a multilateral framework in Northeast Asia still makes sense for Beijing, for it “believes that the framework could reduce regional suspicion of China’s hegemony, deter �����貹��’s military buildup, and lessen US military deployment and the chances of US intervention in the region.”

North Korea remains the real question mark. Now that he has a credible nuclear deterrent, Kim Jong Un has focused on improving the country’s economic performance. A reduction of sanctions and a diminution of military threat are certainly on the North Korean leader’s agenda and, as in the past, could motivate a series of protracted, step-by-step negotiations on sanctions relief for steps toward nuclear disarmament. But Pyongyang will not likely waste time on regional negotiations — predicated on cooperative security and with a nuclear-weapon-free zone as an agreed-upon endpoint — without some concrete, immediate benefits.

Given North Korea’s pragmatism in this regard, a reframing is necessary, and COVID-19 points in the right direction. The current pandemic is a potent reminder that trans-border problems require collective, cooperative action. Regional environmental problems, and the effects of climate change more generally, represent an even larger challenge.

In the spirit of Dalton’s reframing, it is critical to view challenges such as the pandemic and climate change not simply as narrow environmental or health challenges but as security problems under the heading of “human security.” Establishing a Northeast Asia multilateral framework for addressing these issues under such a rubric would bring countries to the table to discuss actionable problems in a technical fashion. It would also, necessarily, involve non-political experts and NGO advocacy groups. And it could provide the immediate benefits — such as scientific cooperation and resource-sharing — that North Korea looks for in international initiatives. Reducing the risk of pandemic infections in North Korea and maintaining the country’s low rate of carbon emissions would also represent significant benefits for the region as a whole.

Once mechanisms and institutions of concrete cooperation have been established and once a measure of trust has been created, such a “human security” reframing could ultimately incorporate parallel discussions of more traditional security questions, including nuclear weapons, at which point Dalton’s recommendations would kick in. In this way, the mutually-agreed-upon endpoint of a nuclear-weapon-free zone can be approached not directly but in a sideways manner.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It will be a busy few years for Japan, which hosts the G20 summit on June 28-29 followed by the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The international attention sparks questions concerning how durable its economic success will be.

Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, in office since 2012, has been able to put his stamp on the country’s economic development, above all with his heterodox economic package known as “Abenomics.” This three-pronged approach has entailed loose monetary policy, fiscal stimulus (read: more debt) and modest structural reforms. �����貹��’s macroeconomic approach has been the exact opposite of that of another major world economy: the eurozone.

While the news concerning the Japanese economy is often gloomy, the truth is that the country has reasonable growth given its demographics, and it has succeeded in providing a high standard of living for its citizens. �����貹��’s per capita growth has been in line with that of the United States or the European Union. But, despite its success stories, which include an enviable unemployment rate of just 2.5%, all is not rosy.

The highlights some cracks in its solid credentials. “Disposable incomes have risen little in recent years, and real consumption per capita has been flat. In a country that was once hailed as the epitome of equitable growth, a new precariat has emerged,” the report says, adding that structural reforms are essential to secure the nation’s stability.

Indeed, there are worrying signs that the Japanese model of inclusive growth is beginning to come apart. Japan has seen low but steadily rising income inequality since the 1980s. In the past, the limited disparity in earnings was primarily achieved via a kind of social consensus on wages rather than, as in many other countries, through redistribution. However, a deepening divide between protected and “non-regular” jobs means that more and more people, in particular the young, are in precarious employment. Now, some 40% of workers have such “non-regular” jobs, often women working part-time. Furthermore, low pensions mean that poverty has been spreading among the elderly, now reaching the level of southern Europe. These days the is more or less at the level seen in the UK.

Piles of debt

There are also questions concerning the sustainability of �����貹��’s deficit-spending, which continues unabated. �����貹��’s government debt comes up to over 250% of gross domestic product (GDP), an incredible figure. So far, this has not affected the stability of the Japanese economy or, for the most part, the confidence of creditors. Perhaps this is because around 90% of this debt is held by Japanese individuals and institutions, preventing the kind of financial runs that have plagued other economies, whether in southern Europe, Latin America or Southeast Asia.

In the long term, we can provocatively ask whether Japan will have its place in the G20 at all, unless things change. Put simply: the Japanese are disappearing. According to demographic forecasts, �����貹��’s population of 126 million could to a mere 85 million by 2100.

The Japanese government has taken measures to address this, notably by improving childcare provision, extending parental leave and opening up childcare for 2-year-olds. However, so far the results have been modest. Another option would be to increase highly-skilled immigration. By the end of 2018, there were 2.7 million foreign in Japan and the country has opened up temporary residence for skilled foreign nurses. However, Japanese society remains largely hostile to mass migration.

Japanese fertility has recovered somewhat since the low point of 1.26 per women in 2005, reaching 1.43 in 2017. Yet it is still a far cry from the government’s goal of 1.8, let alone the population replacement level of 2.1. Progress seems clearly possible here. In northern Europe, in particular, comparable economic performance has been tied with generous provisions for parents and ambitious measures to increase work-life balance, particularly for working mothers. Comparable measures in Japan could conceivably both increase the currently low workforce participation of women and increase the birth rate.

Losing its frontrunner role in tech

Japan is rightly famous for its accomplishments in the fields of science and technology. The country has a world-class education system and invests some 3.3% of GDP in research and development, one of the highest levels in the world. However, the SGI report notes that “�����貹��’s strong position among the world’s top technology nations is slowly declining, based on various indicators, including the often-used .” The government has sought to increase �����貹��’s top-tier human capital with a “green card for highly skilled professionals.”

Signaling how Japan may need step up its bid to future-proof its economy, the country had a weak track record on how effective its economic policy has been in providing a reliable economic framework and fostering international competitiveness. On this key question, Japan scored just four out of a possible 10 points, leaving it third from last in the SGI sample of 41 industrialized nations.

Japan will, of course, remain a major economic and scientific pole for the foreseeable future. The country has made special efforts to cultivate strong economic ties with other countries. Shinzō Abe has sought to maintain good relations with the US, has implemented a free trade agreement with the EU, and has signed the Comprehensive Progress Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPATPP) with Canada, Japan, Singapore and other Pacific economies. Abe has even suggested that the UK — should it ever — would be welcome to join the Pacific deal.

With the right policies, Japan is well-equipped to maintain position as a factor for stability, prosperity and scientific innovation in our sometimes turbulent world order.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Our world is becoming increasingly interconnected in a multitude of ways, and advances in information and communication technologies have made the gathering and dissemination of information at a global level rapid, simple and highly cost-effective. One might have anticipated that such developments would have boosted our access to world news, as it now has increasing relevance and is easier to obtain. Sadly, this has not been the case. (in the US media at least) has in fact decreased with the end of the Cold War and has not really recovered since.

And there is a host of other issues, beyond the overall quantity, that need to be considered when looking at how well the news media is performing in its provision of information about the world. Geographic distribution is one such issue. There are typically large gaps in media coverage of different regions in the world. The factors that decide which regions and/or countries become the haves and which become the have-nots of media coverage include: geographic proximity, national, racial, ethnic, linguistic and historical ties and perceptions of strategic/economic importance. But there seems to be one constant in much of the world’s news flow—the global South is heavily marginalized.

A View From Japan

How does the Japanese media perform in this regard? Japan has a relatively high consumption of news media. The Yomiuri Shimbun, for example, is thought to have the in the world. The national broadcaster (NHK) is one of the in the world. Furthermore, as a country with the third largest economy in the world, the (potential) ability of Japan to influence the world, through corporate or government activity, is exceptionally high. For these reasons, it is worth examining how the Japanese media sees the world.

A newly established research organization (of which the author is a part) based at Osaka University, , is conducting research into the world news coverage by Japan’s three leading newspapers: Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun. Looking at the quantity of coverage by these newspapers for the year 2015 reveals some rather concerning trends. Firstly, the levels of coverage of the world (compared to domestic news) are low, averaging less than 10% of the whole. This amounts to the amount of coverage devoted to (primarily domestic) sports.

Furthermore, the of this limited coverage is massively skewed. Looking at the total coverage for the three newspapers, roughly half of the world news (48%) was focused on Asia (including the Middle East), with an additional 24% of coverage of Europe and 14% of North America (primarily the USA). In stark contrast, the African continent (including North Africa) was the object of little more than 3%, and Latin America (including Mexico), 2%.

The ten most-covered countries included the USA (the most-covered country), five European countries (France, Russia, Greece, Germany and the UK) and four Asian countries (China as the second-most-covered country, as well as South Korea, Syria and Myanmar). If we combine all coverage of the entire African continent and of Latin America (87 countries), it amounts to roughly the same (5.5%) as that of just one (the third-most covered) country—France (5.2 %).

This represents a staggering level of disproportion, leaving much of the global South virtually invisible in Japan. Coverage of France did, of course, have much to do with the high-profile terrorist attacks in that country. Terrorist attacks with death tolls greater than those in France that occurred in Kenya and Nigeria, not to mention Syria, were largely ignored by the Japanese press, as they were in much of the rest of the world.

Cultural Distance

The various forms of “distance”—geographic, racial, trade, historical and cultural—from Japan might help to explain the marginalization of Africa and Latin America in the press. But they do not help explain the relative marginalization of countries that are large—in terms of population and GDP—geographically and historically close, and linked by relatively large proportions of trade with Japan, perhaps most notably Indonesia and India. Neither of these countries was able garner more than one percent of the .

Gaps are also evident in the content of coverage of issues, such as conflict. The quantity of coverage of conflict in Europe—primarily the Ukraine conflict and the attacks in Paris—amounted to more than five times the quantity of coverage of conflict in Africa. But although the quantity of conflict coverage in Africa was relatively small when compared to other regions of the world, it dominated what little there was, making up 42% of the whole. This indicates that other events and phenomena in Africa were marginalized, leaving readers with a conflict-laden image of the continent.

These massive gaps between the haves and have-nots of foreign affairs and the marginalization of the global South help neither Japan nor the world. Japan relies on, impacts upon and is influenced by the outside world in a multitude of sectors, including trade, security, health and the environment. A greater knowledge and awareness of the world outside would help Japan to survive and thrive in��it.

Furthermore, its economic power gives it the potential to provide considerable amounts of official development assistance (ODA) to least developed and developing countries. Yet less than one-third of the amount of ODA set in the long-accepted target of 0.7% of gross national income (GNI). It also accepts a negligible—sometimes in the single digits annually—numbers of .

Realizing change in the how the Japanese media covers the world is going to be challenging, to say the least. Not only is there the problem of a financially shrinking news media sector—gathering and presenting international news is rarely financially rewarding—but there also seems to be little awareness (among the public and in the media sector itself) that there exists a problem in the levels and content of international news in Japan. Making improvements in international news will mean working to change perceptions at a very fundamental level.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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A combination of recent events, underpinned by long-running historical strains reaching back more than 60 years, has turned the western Pacific into one of the most hazardous spots on the globe. The tension between China and the United States “is one of the most striking and dangerous themes in international politics,” says��the Financial Times’��longtime commentator and China hand,��.

In just the past five months, warships from both countries—including Washington’s closest ally in the region, Japan—have done everything but ram one another. And, as Beijing continues to build bases on scattered islands in the South China Sea, the US is deploying long-range nuclear capable strategic bombers in�������Ի���.

At times, the rhetoric from both sides is chilling. When Washington sent two aircraft carrier battle groups into the area, Chinese Defense Ministry Spokesman Yang Yujun cautioned the Americans to��“.”��While one US admiral suggested drawing��“”��at the Spratly Islands close to the Philippines, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s�� warned that US actions “raised the risk of physical confrontation with China.” The newspaper went on to warn that “if the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a U.S.-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea.”

Earlier this month, Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan said Beijing should prepare for a “.”

Add to this the appointment of an extreme right-wing nationalist as �����貹��’s defense minister and the decision to deploy anti-ballistic missile interceptors in South Korea and the term “volatile region” is a major understatement.

A History of Conflict

Some of these tensions go back to the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended World War II in Asia. That document, according to Canadian researcher��, was drawn up to be deliberately ambiguous about the ownership of a scatter of islands and reefs in the East and South China Seas. That ambiguity set up tensions in the region that Washington could then exploit to keep potential rivals off balance.

The current standoff between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands—the Japanese use the former name, the Chinese the latter—is a direct outcome of the treaty. Although Washington has no official position on which country owns the tiny uninhabited archipelago, it is committed to defend Japan in case of any military conflict with China. On August 2, the Japanese Defense Ministry accused China of engaging in “.”

�����貹��’s new defense minister,��, is a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine that honors �����貹��’s war criminals, and she is a critic of the post-war Tokyo war crimes trials. She has also called for reexamining the 1937 Nanjing massacre that saw Japanese troops murder as many as 300,000 Chinese. Her appointment by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seems almost calculated to anger Beijing.

Abe is also pushing hard to overturn a part of the Japanese constitution that bars Tokyo from using its military forces for anything but defending itself. Japan has one of the largest and most sophisticated navies in the world.

Over the past several weeks, Chinese Coast Guard vessels and fishing boats have challenged �����貹��’s territorial claims on the islands, and Chinese and Japanese warplanes have been playing chicken. In one particularly worrisome incident, a Japanese fighter locked its combat radar on a Chinese fighter-bomber.

Behind the bellicose behavior on the China and US sides is underlying insecurity, a dangerous condition when two nuclear-armed powers are at loggerheads.

Containment Updated

From Beijing’s perspective, Washington is trying to “contain” China by ringing it with American��allies, much as the United States did to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Given recent moves in the region, it is hard to argue with Beijing’s conclusion.

After a 20-year absence, the US military is back in the Philippines. Washington is deploying anti-missile systems in South Korea and Japan and deepening its military relations with Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia and India. The Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” has attempted to shift the bulk of US armed forces from the Atlantic and the Middle East to Asia. Washington’s Air Sea Battle strategy—just renamed “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons”—envisions neutralizing China’s ability to defend its home waters.

China is in the process of modernizing much of its military, in large part because Beijing was ��by two American operations. First, the Chinese were stunned by how quickly the US military annihilated the Iraqi army in the First Gulf War, with virtually no casualties on the American side. Then there was having to back down in 1996, when the Clinton administration deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Taiwan Straits during a period of sharp tension between Beijing and Taipei.

President Barack Obama is said to be considering adopting a “no-first-use” pledge, but he has come up against stiff opposition from his military and the Republicans.

In spite of all its upgrades, however, China’s military is a long way from challenging the US. The Chinese navy has one small aircraft carrier, while the US has 10 enormous ones, plus a nuclear arsenal vastly bigger than Beijing’s modest force. China’s last war was its disastrous 1979 invasion of Vietnam, and the general US view of the Chinese military is that it is a paper dragon.

That thinking is paralleled in Japan, which is worrisome. �����貹��’s aggressive nationalist government is more likely to initiate something with China than is the United States. For instance, Japan started the crisis over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. First, Tokyo violated an agreement with Beijing by arresting some Chinese fishermen and then unilaterally annexed the islands. The Japanese military has always had an over-inflated opinion of itself and traditionally underestimated Chinese capabilities.

In short, the US and Japan are not intimidated by China’s New Model Army, nor do they see it as a serious threat. That is dangerous thinking if it leads to the conclusion that China will always back down when a confrontation turns ugly. Belligerence and illusion are perilous companions in the current tense atmosphere.

Rising Risk of Nuclear War

The scheduled deployment of the US Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile systems has convinced Beijing that the United States is attempting to neutralize China’s nuclear missile force—not an irrational conclusion. Although anti-missile systems are billed as “defensive,” they can just as easily be considered part of the basic US “counterforce” strategy. The latter calls for a first strike on an opponent’s missiles, backstopped by an anti-ballistic missile system that would destroy any enemy missiles the first strike missed.

China is pledged not to use nuclear weapons first. But given the growing ring of US bases and deployment of anti-missile systems, this may change. It is considering moving to a “launch-on-warning” strategy, which would greatly increase the possibility of an accidental nuclear war.

The Air-Sea Battle strategy calls for conventional missile strikes aimed at knocking out command centers and radar facilities deep in Chinese territory. But given the US “counterforce” strategy, Chinese commanders might assume that those conventional missiles are nuclear-tipped and aimed at decapitating China’s nuclear deterrent.

According to Amitai Etzioni of Washington University, a former senior advisor to President Jimmy Carter, “China is likely to respond to what is effectively a major attack on its mainland with all the military means at its disposal—including its stockpile of nuclear arms.”

A report by the����concluded that if China moves to “launch on warning,” such a change “would dramatically increase the risk of a nuclear exchange by accident—a dangerous shift that the U.S. could help to avert.”

President Barack Obama is said to be considering adopting a “no-first-use” pledge, but he has come up against stiff opposition from his military and the Republicans. “I would be concerned about such a policy,” says US Air Force Secretary��Deborah Lee James. “Having a certain degree of ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.”

But given the possibility of accidents—or panic by military commanders—”ambiguity” increases the risk that someone could misinterpret an action. Once a nuclear exchange begins it may be impossible to stop, particularly since the US “counterforce” strategy targets an opponent’s missiles. “Use them, or lose them” is an old saying among nuclear warriors.

In any case, the standard response to an anti-missile system is to build more launchers and warheads, something the world does not need more of.

China Alienates the Region

Although China has legitimate security concerns, the way it has pursued them has won it few friends in the region. Beijing has bullied Vietnam in the Paracel islands, pushed the Philippines around in the Spratly islands, and pretty much alienated everyone in the region except its����in North Korea, Laos and Cambodia. China’s claims—its so-called “nine dash line”—covers most of the South China Sea, an area through which some����in trade passes each year. It is also an area rich in minerals and fishing resources.

China’s ham-fisted approach has given the United States an opportunity to inject itself into the dispute as a “defender” of small countries with their own claims on reefs, islands and shoals. The US has stepped up air and sea patrols in the region, which at times has seen Chinese, American and Japanese����bow to bow and their����wing tip to wing tip.

The recent decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague that China has no exclusive claim on the South China Sea has temporarily increased tensions, although it has the potential to resolve some of the ongoing disputes without continuing the current saber rattling.

China is a signatory to the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, as are other countries bordering the South China Sea (the US Senate refuses to ratify the treaty). China has never tried to interfere with the huge volume of commerce that traverses the region—trade that, in any case,����the Chinese. Beijing’s major concern is defending its long coastline.

If the countries in the region would rely on the Law of the Sea to resolve disputes, it would probably work out well for everyone concerned. The Chinese would have to back off from their “nine-dash-line” claims in the South China Sea, but they would likely end up in control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.

But to cool the current tensions, Washington would also have to ratchet down its military buildup in Asia. That will be difficult for the Americans to accept. Since the end of World War II, the US has been the big dog on the block in the western Pacific, but that is coming to an end. According to the International Monetary Fund, China surpassed the US economy in 2014 to become the world’s largest. Of the four largest economies on the globe, three are in Asia: China, Japan and India.

Simple demographics are shifting the balance of economic and political power from Europe and the US to Asia. By 2015, more than 66% of the world’s population will reside in Asia. In contrast, the United States makes up 5% and the European Union 7%. By 2050, the world’s “pin code” will be 1125: 1 billion people in Europe, one billion in the Americas, two billion in Africa and five billion in Asia. Even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) predicts: “The era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945—is fast winding down.”

The US can resist that inevitability, but only by relying on its overwhelming military power and constructing an alliance system reminiscent of the Cold War. That should give pause to all concerned. The world was fortunate to emerge from that dark period without a nuclear war, but relying on luck is a dangerous strategy.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Few could have imagined in the 16^th century that we would have satellites in space, open-heart surgeries and infinite information in the palms of our hands. Yet every now and then, nature breaks the illusion that we have tamed it. This week, earthquakes hit Ecuador and Japan, unleashing death and devastation on a large scale.

Both earthquakes have lessons for our times. In Ecuador, the earthquake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale. It has already killed hundreds of people and injured many more. For thousands, food and other essentials are in short supply. Buildings, roads and bridges have been damaged. There are reports of looting and public disorder. Other countries have offered help. Venezuela and Mexico, neither of whom shares a border with Ecuador, were the first to offer substantial assistance.

In Japan, the earthquake hit Kyushu, its southwestern island, and measured 7.3 on the Richter scale. It succeeded another quake that measured 6.4. Roads, bridges and tunnels have suffered massive damage. At least 41 are dead and hundreds are wounded. Around 180,000 people are in temporary shelters and about 300,000 homes have no water. Electricity has been disrupted with more than 62,000 homes cut off from any power supply.

Big landslides have cut off remote villages. Heavy rains are compounding an already grim situation. About 25,000 Japanese troops are engaged in the rescue effort and the US military is offering assistance. Meanwhile, Toyota has suspended production because the quakes have disrupted the supply of parts. The car company’s fabled just-in-time production that relies on low inventory has been disrupted by the two earthquakes.

In both countries, earthquakes are not new phenomena. They form part of the , a string of volcanoes and sites of seismic activity around the edges of the Pacific Ocean. Yet there are major differences. Ecuador is a former Spanish colony where conquistadores and Catholic priests did much to destroy local cultures. Until recently, the country has suffered from political volatility. Some of this volatility occurred because of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which interfered to install pliant military dictators all across Latin America.

Most of these dictators were descendants of conquistadores, owning much of the property of the region. They became champions of the free market in Latin America. During this era, the US held property rights to be inviolable. This meant that white elites of countries like South Africa or Ecuador had inviolable rights to the land that their forefathers had stolen from the natives. These mestizos were supposed to work hard, live frugally and work their way up the ladder of opportunity. To use an American expression, they were supposed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That they did not have boots leave aside bootstraps was irrelevant.

Today, Ecuador continues to suffer from high poverty and glaring inequality. The indigenous and mestizo population is still caught in a grinding struggle for survival. President Rafael Correa has been in power since 2007 and belongs to the democratic socialist tradition of Latin America. He has launched schemes to reduce poverty and curb the power of multinationals. Correa also likes to stand up to the US and has given asylum to Julian Assange who .

Perhaps most importantly, Correa’s economics is anathema to the United States. He defaulted on debt payments of $3.2 billion in 2008 and 2009. Correa’s argument was that the securities that Ecuador had to repay were illegitimate. Ecuador is a . For the last six years, Correa has run budget deficits and falling oil prices are pushing Ecuador’s economy over the edge. The earthquake could not have come at a worse time.

Japan is a much richer and more homogenous country than Ecuador. It has a long history of dealing with earthquakes and some of the most state of the art technologies to minimize damage in the case of seismic activity. The earthquake is causing much hardship in Japan, but there are no reports of looting. Unlike Ecuador, the social fabric of Japan is not fraying at a time of crisis. Even though the Japanese economy has long been in the doldrums, the country will absorb the losses inflicted by the earthquakes just as they have .

The tragedies in Ecuador and Japan have three important lessons for us.

First, societies have to prepare better for natural disasters. Tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires have become only too commonplace in recent years. In 2015, . In particular, life in Chennai came to a complete standstill. Swirling waters full of debris, sewage and industrial effluents caused colossal damage and threatened to unleash epidemics in their aftermath.

In South America, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina suffered the worst flooding in 50 years. Apparently, the weather phenomenon was to blame. In addition to floods, fires caused tremendous damage in 2015. and suffer spectacular fires almost every year. It turns out that . Last year, that ended up generating more emissions per day than the US.

So far, societies have assumed that natural disasters are rare and have dealt with them on an ad hoc basis. Of course, there are exceptions like Japan. This island nation has designed some of the most impressive infrastructure on the planet despite the ever present risk of devastating seismic activity. �����貹��’s rescue and relief measures are world class as well. Other societies could learn from the Japanese.

For instance, both India and Brazil have slums and favelas that are not only vulnerable to floods or fires, but also to diseases and epidemics. To prepare better for disasters, human beings could do well to make changes in the way they live. Arguably, the biggest change has to come from those who are affluent. They are often wanton in their consumption of natural resources whether it is in the form of or . Even the poor will have to live differently. Houses in low lying catchment areas do not make sense. Similarly, remote homes in arid areas full of dry brush might be an invitation to disaster.

Second, disseminating knowledge and creating relief systems would help societies prepare better for natural disasters. Here, much of the world could learn a lot from Japan. If more buildings in Ecuador met standards that are common in Japan, fewer people would be crushed to death. The logistical exercise that Japan is currently engaging in is breathtaking and institutions in other countries could learn a lot from the Japanese response to natural crises.

Third, mitigating extreme inequality might help societies cope with natural disasters. In societies of masters and serfs, the former tend to wallow in luxury, while the latter start suffering from dejection and dependency. Unequal societies far too often lack social solidarity and find it difficult to cope with natural disasters. They are also unable to build institutions that deal with common interests and coping with floods, landslides or earthquakes becomes even more onerous as a result.

More than 7 billion human beings live on a planet with old perils such as volcanoes and earthquakes and new perils such as drying rivers and record floods. Perhaps the time has come to live a little differently, learn a bit more and create less unequal societies.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

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How a Child is Made into a Suicide Bomber

From suicide bombers in the Middle East to drone operators in the United States, youth-on-youth violence has become epidemic.

In 1954, a single book destroyed the popular notion that children are innocent souls. In that book, a plane of such innocent souls crashes on a deserted island. There, in a paradise of coral and coconuts and wild pigs, the survivors soon revert to a state of nature. But such a state, author William Golding warned us, is not an idyll of flower-sniffing and poetry-writing. In��The Lord of the Flies, the children turn savage, inspired not by beauty or the common good but, rather, the will to power.

The Lord of the Flies��takes place during a time of war. On a tropical island far from civilization, Ralph, Piggy and Jack reproduce the dynamics of the heartless society from which they’d been torn. The children become savages because savagery is an integral part of the modern world, with…

There Are Limits to Defining Indian Nationalism

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Those who claim to speak for the state—as well as those who question the state and claim to speak for the rest—remain highly exclusive.

Terms such as “home” and “nation” have different meanings for different people. The transnational links of the Nagas and Mizos in northeastern India or those of people living in western Rajasthan and Kutch, when held to restrictive definitions of “nationalism,” provide challenges to mainland categories.

The last few months have witnessed public discourse in India deteriorate to abysmal levels. Personalities and vested interests have come to limit the possibilities of truth, the idea of which continues to remain elusive. All we know is whether to trust the pursuer of truth, and whether s/he stands to gain to stand from a particular definition of truth. The rest is surrounded by a mist of multiple interpretations.

However, while thinking through the events, something nagged at me from a not-so-distant past.�� People I met while…

Can Markets Be Timed Accurately?

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Market timing has long been the holy grail for investors, and evidence suggests that it works but might be a tricky game to play.

Homo sapiens��like predictability and look for patterns. Sometimes these patterns hold, but at other times they fail. This apparent randomness of markets has long puzzled economists, mathematicians, physicians and, most importantly, investors. Clustering illusion, or what Kahneman and Tversky call representative heuristics, highlight the��tendency of investors to look for patterns and fall prey to market bias.

Almost all investors predict and time the market before putting their money in. Their decisions are based both on biases and on trends that they can observe and predict. The key question in the age of��big data��is whether the availability of large computational capability and statistical techniques allow us to observe and predict trends better. Simply put, can markets be timed? Well, the answer would partially depend on whether one believes that the markets…

What the Panama Papers Have To Do With America

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Panama is not alone in the world of financial secrecy. The problem of secret financial transactions affects lives in communities throughout America.

The massive release of the��Panama Papers��has rocked the financial and political world. The leaked documents from Panama’s Mossack Fonseca law firms contain more than 11 million files involving 214,000 companies set up over the last four decades. A dozen current or former heads of states are implicated and one, the prime minister of Iceland, has already resigned.

Despite the enormous scope of the leak—more than 1,500 times larger than Edward Snowden’s WikiLeaks files—it represents just the tip of the iceberg of worldwide activity to conceal the identity of those participating in financial transactions.

Anonymous offshore companies can be used for a host of reasons, some perfectly legal, but many not, including tax evasion, theft of public funds, arms trading, human trafficking, consumer fraud, illegal campaign contributions and international drug trading.��Though Mossack…

Tesla Speeds Ahead in the Electric Vehicle Market

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Tesla’s impressive bookings for its next electric car suggest that it may be close to tapping the mainstream market.

“The Week that Electric Vehicles Went Mainstream,” is how Tesla Motors headlined its��blog��post in early April, citing more than 325,000 pre-bookings for the Model 3 electric car it launched on March 31. “[That] corresponds to about $14��billion in implied future sales, making this the single biggest one-week launch of any product ever,” the company boasted. Deliveries are set to begin in 2017.

Tesla may well be on the way to mainstreaming the electric vehicle market for itself and its competitors. In addition to the wide appeal the Model 3 seems to command, several other aspects point to a potential journey away from a niche market for Tesla. The car’s $35,000 price tag is half the price of the Model S ($75,000) and the Model X ($80,000). Bookings for the Model 3 have surprised even Tesla’s founder…

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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A fervent disciple of the capitalist system, where social admiration revolves around material gain, modern South Korea has become a victim of its own success. In a country where it has become commonplace for every child to aspire to work for prestigious conglomerates like Samsung or Hyundai, the rat race for jobs is what really concerns Korean citizens. Despite all the media attention, historical atrocities and “landmark” arrangements—such as the comfort woman deal with Japan of��—remain secondary concerns.

With poor economic returns expected, both Presidents Park Guen-hye and Lee Myung-bak (Park’s predecessor) have responded to South Korea’s meager performance by��calling for the country’s employment culture to undergo “”—in essence��trying to reign in of .

Statistics, though rarely reliable just by themselves, are noticeable in this regard, as the financial toll for South Koreans who have chosen to pursue higher education has proved to produce more detriments than benefits. Tuition fees and other related costs have accounted for over a 10^th of national household debt in South Korea. Figures from South Korea’s own Student Aid Foundation have also����in the first half of 2015, linking it with other concerns afflicting the country’s demographics, such as the rising age of marriage and decreasing birth rates.

Strangely, despite South Korea’s overwhelming preoccupation with employment, the picture shown by certain commentaries these days would have us believe that a historical sentimental boogieman is just waiting to pounce.����have argued that the “domestic backlash” from such an abrupt deal with Japan could backfire, as oppositional forces get ready for the coming elections.

While such insights certainly deserve their place in the sun, increased bandwidth to such narratives may wind up creating blind spots for the rest of the world, whereby the real concerns of South Korean locals are glossed over. The deal may give the impression of a “,” but resentments such as these would seem to be only peripheral when compared to the sheer frustration pent up by South Korea’s unemployed.

With an����having difficulty finding jobs, the economy, not social justice, is what truly reoccupies South Korean politics.

In the end, in spite of South Korea and �����貹��’s “milestone achievement” from 2015, observers might do well to take a step back to see if anything of consequence has actually occurred.

Of course, advocates and detractors alike would be quick to point out that such a deal was more about foreign policy progress than domestic political achievement. Alarmists stating that the loss of momentum for this issue, which has been watered down as a “concession” on Park’s part, would appear to refute the notion that historical pressure points actually made a huge dent in foreign affairs. Though undoubtedly a sensitive nerve in the immediate term, South Korean policies in relation to its security (vis-à-vis the United States) and overall economy (vis-à-vis China), not to mention its frail ties with Japan, all remain nevertheless.

The South Korea-US alliance continues to be the bedrock for security on the Korean Peninsula, while Chinese economic interests—now being South Korea’s top trading partner—continuously force the country to play a careful diplomatic balancing act. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate then had such alarmists described “tensions” with Japan as inertia rather than a backward slippage into the abyss.

Adding to all this is the fact that the North Korean problem remains intact and a possible strike is still a prospect for which no one can rule out. Granted that no headway has been made, or will likely be made with South Korea’s new rapprochement, East Asia’s Kim dilemma will linger on for years, if not generations to come.

The options that remain are a toss between this trio: military action, which will always be a last resort; some form of diplomatic compromise; or strategic patience. The last option pertains to South Korea waiting to see if North Korea will eventually take after China to subscribe to a socialist model with Chinese characteristics and eventually open up its markets.

Of Old Wounds, and Bread and Butter Anxieties

In the end, in spite of South Korea and �����貹��’s “milestone achievement” from 2015, observers might do well to take a step back to see if anything of consequence has actually occurred. While genuine transformation may certainly be in the works for Japan-South Korea relations, one must consider if such transformation occurs due to the emotional healing of old wounds, or everyday bread and butter anxieties.

To be clear, the argument here is not that the comfort women deal does not matter, nor is it that a domestic price will not be paid for President Park’s actions. The point is rather that the burying of historical hatchets does not inevitably take center-stage when one examines it more deeply. At best, historical scars left by Japan created sparks to set things in motion and, at its worst, are distractions that keep us from noticing what everyday South Koreans truly worry about: domestic economic woes and high youth unemployment rates.

One must recall that despite all the yearnings for a fair deal, it was not until the 1990s that the unforgivable crimes against these women started to gain media traction—leaving one to wonder what exactly caused most South Koreans after independence in 1945 to remain silent till then. Was it a social taboo of some form that kept people away from assisting these women, or could it be just that South Koreans, like most people tragically, tend to be moved by their wallets and pragmatic calculations more so than their hearts?

After all, even after the horrors of Japanese occupation, South Korean officials themselves have been��, save for this time, to satisfy the needs of US soldiers stationed to protect South Korea.

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The news cycle around ’s actions has become all too predictable. Its rocket launches and bomb tests tend to lead to a round of condemnation but little action from the usual voices. As of last week, the cycle repeated itself once more.

On January 6, the it had detonated a hydrogen bomb, the fourth test since 2006. Although experts are skeptical that it was in fact a hydrogen bomb, a chorus of criticism from the United States, Japan, South Korea and China sounded out. The key players in the region each have reason for choosing words over action.

US President Barack Obama cannot divert from his policy of “strategic patience” without a real act of provocation. If the Kim dynasty was to be removed by force, it would not go down without South Korea suffering devastating retaliation. Seoul, the South Korean capital, is just 50 kilometers from the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas. While Obama is in charge, the US will continue to play the waiting game.

South Korea, for its part, has resumed propaganda in the shape of through loudspeakers that can be heard 20 kilometers into North Korea. Yet while South Korea is committed in principle to reunification, many within the country fear the outcome of such a victory, other than the potential damage expressed above. Even if the Kim dynasty were to collapse from within, a huge refugee crisis and a bill for reunification that could cost over $500 billion would result.

, the most crucial player, has stressed its commitment to a de-nuclearized Korean Peninsula. Most of North Korea’s food and money comes from China, and its ability to trade nuclear weaponry and secrets over the border could not be possible without a green light from the Chinese. While China is believed to have the most power over the rogue state, Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons demonstrates how little influence Beijing really has.

Yet this is not to say that there will no implications for the region. While the tests are damaging for stability and peace in East Asia, they are also bringing enemies together in response.

Keep Your Friends Close, But Your Enemies Closer

South Korea and Japan will “.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters: “We agreed that the provocative act by North Korea is unacceptable … We will deal with this situation in a firm manner through the cooperation with the United Nations Security Council.”

This is a remarkable statement given that South Korea and Japan have been reluctant allies since the end of World War II. It marked a further warming of relations between the East Asian nations, coming just over a week since the over the “comfort women” issue that had previously caused a huge strain in relations between the two countries.

Pyongyang can no longer rely on resentment between the key players in the region. The tests, whether real or not, show a North Korea running out of friends and options.

Although it might not mean much for Sino-Japanese relations, the nuclear crisis at least draws attention away from tensions over disputed islands in the South China Sea, which China calls the Diaoyu and Japan the Senaku. While Tokyo fears a rising Beijing, a nuclear-armed North Korea poses a more immediate threat. As a consequence of the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan is the oldest enemy of the nationalist Kim dynasty.

There have even been calls for the US to cooperate closer with China over the North Korea issue. While it remains to be seen how China will respond, US Secretary of State John Kerry called for China to “” with the rogue state.

Further afield, while Iran and North Korea are still partners, the nuclear deal struck between the P5+1 and Tehran in 2015 no doubt left North Korea feeling further isolated. Iranian officials were present during North Korea’s three previous nuclear tests—, but not 2016. Furthermore, while Pyongyang’s desire for nuclear weapons is for survival, it also holds tests to , as it has done for years. Now that Iran has given up its nuclear ambitions, North Korea has lost a loyal customer.

Indeed, perhaps it is this isolation from its partners in Iran and China that has led to North Korea continuing its quest to become a nuclear power as a means for survival as a state.

It would be near impossible for America to repeat the success of the Iran nuclear framework. Neither North Korea nor the US can be easily brought to the negotiating table. While Iran had sometimes been diplomatic in the past—for example, offering to help the US fight terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11—North Korea’s diplomacy has never been as sophisticated.

Pyongyang can no longer rely on resentment between the key players in the region. The tests, whether real or not, show a North Korea running out of friends and options.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Nanjing Massacre. “Comfort women.” Did the Chinese communist forces beat imperial Japan or the nationalists? And who really owns the islands known in Japan as Senkaku and in China as Diaoyu?

Yet if there is one thing that , and can agree on, it’s that history is a powerful tool that can be used to manipulate their own respective populations.

History is a sensitive subject in East Asia. It is little wonder, then, that Seoul erupted into protest on November 14 over the decision by the government of President Park Guen-hye to make drastic revisions to how history is taught in South Korea’s schools. Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of downtown Seoul after the announcement that South Korea’s history textbooks would be replaced with a that all high schools will use��from 2017.

It is not the first time South Korea has imposed a single state-approved textbook in schools. President Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, issued history manuals in 1974, and these remained in place until 30 years later, when private publishers were finally allowed to print their own history books, ending the state’s monopoly on the teaching of history. Currently, schools can choose from eight different state-approved textbooks.

Of these eight textbooks, conservatives in the government only endorse one as appropriate for teaching purposes. Yet it was criticized for overlooking many episodes of state-sponsored violence in South Korea’s recent history, and for championing the controversial 1961 coup that brought President Park Chung-hee to power. Published in 2013, this book was rejected by schools. Unsatisfied by this shunning, conservatives have decided to ditch the eight-book system and impose a single state-sanctioned textbook.

The aim of this new policy is to correct a “pro-North Korea bias,” with proponents such as Education Minister Hwang Woo-Yea claiming,��“.”��Critics of the decision are calling it a��, as it will continue to overlook the atrocities of authoritarian governments of pre-democratic South Korea. In the 2013 book, there is no mention of, for example, the Geochang Massacre of 1951 in which 719 unarmed civilians perished. Photos of the first North-South Korea summit have also been removed, which speaks volumes about the current government’s attitude toward reconciliation with North Korea.

The Park government is also attempting to stifle debate on the legacy of the president’s father, who while modernizing South Korea also presided over serious human rights abuses. Awkwardly, while Korean nationalism is based on opposition to Japan, the elder Park was a Korean collaborator with imperial Japan, serving as an officer in the Japanese colonial government of Manchukuo (now present-day Northeast China).

Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China, 1937

By reverting back to issuing a single textbook, it makes South Korea the latest East Asian country to meddle with its own history for political purposes.

The History That Bends…

Japan has long been guilty of ensuring a national amnesia of its history. It is a common complaint outside Japan that the Japanese education system simply does not cover enough of World War II and �����貹��’s attempts at establishing its dominance in Asia during that time. Mariko Oi, a BBC journalist,��recalls how the —an atrocity in which between 40,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured and murdered—was reduced to a footnote in her school history book.

Outside the classroom, an atmosphere of intimidation in Japan is mostly to blame for the muting of open discussion over the country’s dark past. To criticize the Sino-Japanese War could prove to be career-threatening and even life-threatening in Japan. In 1990, a gunman almost fatally shot Motoshima Hitoshi, mayor of Nagasaki, for saying that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II.

Perhaps most damaging is the manipulation of history at the top of Japanese society. In August, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s����was more sympathetic to the soldiers of imperial Japan, casting them as only following orders from their emperor. “Comfort women” were not mentioned in name, but only referenced in a single sentence as “women … whose honor and dignity were severely injured.” There was no mention of the Nanjing Massacre. Little wonder, then, that both China and South Korea regarded this apology as��“” and “not living up to expectations.”

At its worse, in his statement, Abe appeared to attempt mitigating or even seeking legitimacy for �����貹��’s past acts of aggression and war crimes. Claiming that “the peace we enjoy today exists only upon such precious sacrifices,” he suggested that the atrocities imposed on East and Southeast Asia by imperial Japan somehow led to peace in the region. It fits in with the Japanese far-right’s version of history in flowery rhetoric: Japan as the liberator rather than colonizer, as the victim and not the aggressor.

The issue of �����貹��’s past has always been fresh in the minds of Chinese and Korean leaders since Abe’s visit to the controversial Yusukuni Shrine in 2013. Abe visited the site to pay respects despite a chorus of Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese protests that the shrine honors Japanese war criminals as well as Chinese and Korean nationals who were conscripted into the imperial Japanese army against their will.

For Japan and South Korea, preferring to overlook or downplay difficult episodes of their respective histories is a result of their vibrant democracies. South Korean and Japanese leaders often have to pander to far-right views to stay in government and bolster their own authority. In contrast, authoritarian China is effective in stifling debate over its history.

History with Chinese Characteristics

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also exploits history for its own legitimacy. Like Korea, the Chinese brand of nationalism is based on opposition to Japanese intentions. While there is no right-wing party in Chinese politics, the CCP uses the struggle against Japan to bolster its own party’s legitimacy and exploit the nationalism of the Chinese population. “In school, we were taught that the nationalists did not prioritize defending our country,” says Fang Jinqing a student of China’s prestigious Fudan University.

The outcome of the bending of history is increasingly strained relations between the three biggest powers in East Asia. Today, the biggest point of tension has been over island disputes, despite shabby historical claims.

This historical revisionism was on show during the Victory Day parade held in Beijing last September. China is wholly justified in reminding the world of the forgotten sacrifices it made during World War II. However, the Victory Day celebrations exaggerated the role of the CCP in the war against Japanese aggression and ignored the role of the nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek.��As Rana Mitter of Oxford University points out, it was the of the Japanese invasion. Historian Jung Chang goes further, saying that during the war, the Communist Party did not completely cease hostilities toward the nationalists and often sabotaged Chiang’s efforts against the invading Japanese armies.

Beijing loves to cast Japan as an aggressive villain of East Asia. China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, recently��.��While it is true that Japan has not apologized for its war crimes as fully as Germany has done, Japan today is not the aggressive power that is painted in the CCP’s narrative. Unlike China, Japan has not fired a shot, let alone engaged in any conflict since 1945. By being dishonest about Japan, China uses this narrative to claim more clout in the region today. Comments over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands) are often laced with references to �����貹��’s imperial past.

The CCP’s worst offence is the forced national amnesia of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, in which hundreds or thousands died (the death toll is unknown). Meanwhile, just across the border in Hong Kong, an enormous candlelight vigil is held every year—the subject remains completely taboo in public, in the media and online 26 years on. On each anniversary,�� and remove any online posts that reference the massacre. The result is that those born after 1989 or who were too young at the time to remember have no reference to the protests. “Many young people have no idea about the June 6^th incident,” says Zhang Bowei, a father of two who works in Beijing.

This is not to say that all history is often used to ill use. China rightly teaches in great detail about the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese war crimes, which are often forgotten in the West. On any given day of the year, dozens of different schools across China visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. Before Iris Chang’s��The Rape of Nanking��was published in 1997, very little was known about the massacre outside of China. Neither Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China, nor Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China sought wartime reparations from Japan after the war as both leaders were competing for Japanese trade and political recognition. Against the threat of communism, the United States, too, sought close relations with Japan and did not press the issue.

Great Leaders Make History, Bad Leaders Write It

The outcome of the bending of history is increasingly strained relations between the three biggest powers in East Asia. Today, the biggest point of tension has been over island disputes, despite shabby historical claims. Both China and Japan lay claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Yet China never����China’s claim to Taiwan is also difficult to defend, given that the island was never part of the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, the mainland has not administered Taiwan since 1895. Meanwhile, relations are strained between South Korea and Japan over the Liancourt Rocks, though no conclusive evidence has surfaced as yet on ownership.

The war in East Asia has long been over. But dishonesty over it is threatening peace in the region.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.��

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Let’s say the car stops and we get our teeth around the tire. Let’s say we bite down hard enough to let out all the air from the US empire. Now what?

Those of us who have campaigned for a radical reduction of the US military footprint overseas, for a major scaling back of US interventionist capabilities, and for a shift of Pentagon funding toward necessary improvements on the home front have spent so much time detailing our objections to the status quo that we don’t have much time left over to consider what would happen if we succeed.

Sure, it’s easy enough to talk about the distribution of the surplus here in the United States. We all have our favorite human needs to fund (infrastructure, education, green energy projects). And certainly some funds would be left over to address global problems as well. All of that falls into the category of “doing good.”

The much more challenging issue is dealing with the other part of foreign policy: “countering bad.”

If the US were to close all of its military bases tomorrow, withdraw its troops and Special Forces from����where they’ve been operating and even stop arms exports, bad things would still happen around the world. Wars would still take place. Governments would still repress their citizens. And countries would still violate each other’s sovereignty.

Those of a more isolationist bent will argue: It’s none of our business, and the US usually ends up aggravating the problems we swoop in to solve. The usual progressive response is: Strengthen international institutions and empower civil society organizations. These answers contain some necessary insights, but they’re not sufficient.

And because these alternatives are not sufficient, other options have gained an unacceptable credibility. Which brings me to Barney Frank.

Sharing the Burden

When he was in Congress, Barney Frank was a strong advocate of reducing the military budget, upholding human rights, boosting foreign aid and supporting internationalism in general. I met him during our efforts to shrink the US military footprint in Okinawa, an initiative he supported at the time, and was impressed with his candor and commitment.

Of course, because Frank was a politician, pragmatism shaped his principles.

Barack Obama © Shutterstock

Although the Sustainable Defense Taskforce that he chaired back in 2011��, Frank himself voted for Congress to contract with General Electric (GE) and Rolls Royce����for the already over-priced F-35. Even a sophisticated jet fighter only needs one engine, and another manufacturer had already won the bid to build it. But the GE plant meant jobs in Frank’s district, and no politician can ignore employment-generation schemes—even if they produce an entirely useless product.

Frank is no longer in Congress. He does, however, write a column for��Politico��that offers a similar blend of principle and pragmatism. In his��, he quite sensibly takes Republicans to task for demanding substantial increases in U military spending:

“I simply don’t understand why Republicans accept the view that the entire burden of providing the world’s military force should be borne by American taxpayers, even leaving aside my belief that advocates of these huge increases in American military spending greatly exaggerate both the threat that disorder overseas presents to us, and even more, to what extent America could effectively resolve these problems by military intervention.”

But then, in posing his alternative, he dusts off an old argument that has been present in US policymaking circles for decades: burden sharing. Conservatives have traditionally argued that the Pentagon can get more bang for the buck by leaning on allies to pick up more of the tab for US military bases, spend more overall on their militaries and take the lead on various military campaigns. Liberals, like Barney Frank, trot out burden sharing as a way of gaining bipartisan support for Pentagon budget reductions. As our allies spend more, we can spend less.

The concept of burden sharing is so mainstream, however, that I wonder why Frank feels the need to devote an entire column to it.

The US government is always trying to pressure allies like Japan, South Korea and Germany to pay more as part of their host nation support. Through NATO, the United States has ��Europe and Canada to meet their informal obligation of spending 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on the military. Yet the burden sharing argument can be found equally in the�������Ի�����of US military actions overseas.

In part, Frank’s column was a sideways contribution to the ongoing debate over the budget in Washington. The Obama administration vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act last week—which would have given the Pentagon $612 billion—largely because it objected to spending caps applied to non-defense expenditures. But a deal this week, just as John Boehner heads out the door as House speaker, will��, up the non-defense spending caps and raise the national debt ceiling in order to keep the lights on in government until at least spring 2017.

If the US were to close all of its military bases tomorrow, withdraw its troops and Special Forces from��the 130-plus countries��where they’ve been operating and even stop arms exports, bad things would still happen around the world.��

Frank has been trying to persuade his former colleagues in Washington that the Pentagon can safely and sustainably cut $100 billion a year. His colleagues aren’t listening to him. They like the idea of burden sharing. They also like the idea of maintaining the same level of US military spending, which in their minds translates into more jobs in their districts.

But the other reason for talking about burden sharing now is Frank’s argument that Russia and China pose a destabilizing threat to the world order. Frank doesn’t want the US to face down these threats in a��High Noon��standoff. Rather, he wants to deputize other countries to hem in the regional hegemons. For that reason, Frank recommends “that it’s time to rearm Germany and Japan.”

A Dodgy Proposition

The strangest part of Frank’s argument is that Germany and Japan are already rearming themselves.

Yes, as Frank points out, the United States spends 3.5% of GDP on defense, while Germany spends closer to 1% (1.2% to be precise). But somehow he must have missed the German government’s announcement earlier this year that it would����as part of a comprehensive modernization.

Japan has traditionally tried to keep its military spending to under 1% of GDP. But conservative leader Shinzo Abe is pushing the boundaries. Tokyo has increased its military spending for the last four years and recently��. The Abe government has also����that will allow the now-misnamed Self Defense Forces to engage in military operations overseas.

Shinzo Abe and Angela Merkel © Shutterstock

OK, so they’re already rearming, in part in response to the same threat perceptions that Frank identifies. Are they still freeloaders, as Frank suggests?

Japan by no means gets a free ride from the Pentagon. It’s generally covered around����for maintaining US bases in the country (compared to percentages around half that by Germany and South Korea). The debate is in the news (in Japan at least) because Washington is currently trying to get Tokyo to increase its share even as the Abe government is��. This comes after Washington has already pressured Tokyo to cover the costs of a����that the vast majority of the residents there oppose.

As David Vine writes in his invaluable new book��:

“Today, Japanese sympathy payments subsidize the U.S. presence at an annual level of around $150,000 per service member. For 2011 alone, Japanese taxpayers provided $7.1 billion, or around three quarters of total basing costs. In addition to agreeing to pay $6.09 billion to help close Futenma and move marines off Okinawa, the Japanese government agreed to contribute around $15.9 billion toward a larger set of transformations involving bases in Okinawa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Iwakuni, Japan.”

As for Germany, with the end of the Cold War and the drawdown of the conflict in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has been closing bases there for the last quarter century. Several major garrisons in recent years have been closed. Paying for US bases in Germany has now morphed into����connected to these closures. Vine also details several cases of extravagant and entirely unnecessary upgrades at US military bases in Germany, some of them just prior to their closure. Prudent Germans would be right not to want to cover such costs.

So, our allies are already upping their commitments. Congress is not reducing the Pentagon’s budget. And militarism continues apace.

But it gets worse.

Unintended Consequences

The United States has historically put itself forward as an honest broker that can deter and mediate conflicts because of its lack of interest in acquiring territory. Territorial expansion, of course, is only one factor that can compromise the neutrality of a mediator or justify the presence of military bases. But still, this argument has persuaded many countries to support a distant superpower in order to balance the regional power closer to home.

Both Germany and Japan have managed, to some degree, to overcome regional suspicions that date back to their World War II conduct (and earlier). Fearful of a resurgent Russia, Poland has moved closer to Germany. Similar fears of China have prompted the Philippines to ��from its “peace constitution.”

And yet the specter of resurgent militarism in Germany and Japan still makes many Europeans and Asians uneasy. South Korea, for instance, has yet to settle its territorial and historical concerns with Japan. And many EU members are uncomfortable with Germany’s disproportionate economic influence over European affairs. Turning Germany into a military giant will not improve intra-European Union relations.

Angel Merkel and Francois Hollande © Shutterstock

Then there’s the issue of adding yet another driver to the global arms race. It’s bad enough that the US spends so much and peddles so much. Pushing our “junior partners” to take on more “mature” commitments will only keep global military spending����at a time when those resources are so urgently needed elsewhere. Its overall military spending on the decline for some time, Europe has been the one bright spot in global trends. Asia, meanwhile, is on a military spending binge. Adding a resurgent Japan to this mix only makes it more volatile.

Although both Europe and Northeast Asia are comparatively wealthy, they too face economic challenges. �����貹��’s economy has been in the doldrums for decades, compounded by the Fukushima disaster of 2011. Europe, facing a plethora of challenges from refugees to highly indebted states, is hard-pressed to meet its NATO obligations.

The notion that countries like Germany and Japan would advance as the American empire retreats comforts some liberals by preserving US power projection beneath a veneer of multilateralism. But it’s the mechanism of militarism that is ultimately the problem—not who’s controlling the levers.

Alternatives to Empire

Barney Frank’s burden sharing option is already basically in play. Our key allies are spending more on their militaries. And this hasn’t led to any bipartisan agreement to cut US military spending. What alternatives are there to the United States continuing to go it alone, or embracing Frank’s option of policing the world with more assistance from a couple of hand-picked gunslinger allies?

Let’s start with isolationism versus internationalism.

The isolationists and their fellow travelers make a good point about the limits of US power. But focusing exclusively on domestic affairs is an argument more fitting for 1515 rather than 2015. Today, the globe faces any number of very difficult challenges that no one country can solve by itself: global warming, a refugee crisis, a growing divide between rich and poor. Moreover, Washington is partly responsible for the fires that are burning around the world, so we have an obligation to be part of the bucket brigade. We just need to be sending our diplomats and humanitarian specialists, not our soldiers, to help put out the fires.

Which brings us to the internationalist option. I lean in this direction, but just invoking the United Nations (UN) is, frankly, not enough. UN peacekeeping, which just received an infusion of troops and equipment at the UN meeting in September, has worked most successfully when deployed after a peace agreement (as in Sierra Leone and Cyprus). Their efforts to stop the outbreak of violence or reduce its scope—in Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia— have more often than not failed. And such missions need constant oversight, for they often suffer from the same problems as other armed forces (for example,�������Ի���).

International mechanisms such as tribunals and treaties are equally important. But they require enforcement, which is hampered by lack of resources and lack of international consensus. The best agents of implementation, of course, are civil society actors on the ground. But such actors are most effective where the rule of law is already reasonably strong. What chance do civil society organizations have against forces like the Islamic State in conflict-torn Iraq and Syria?

Clearly, to address the palpable evils of the world, international institutions are not yet up to the task. So, what can be done in this interim period as we beef up the capacity of international institutions and push to reduce the US military footprint?

Here are three modest suggestions:

1) Rather than provoke Russia and China to accelerate their own military modernizations, engage them in new rounds of arms control. Both countries have their own economic worries and could ultimately find negotiated limits on deployment attractive particularly if coupled with other guarantees (like a freeze on NATO expansion or one on new base construction in Japan).

2) Rather than push individual countries like Japan and Germany to rearm, strengthen inclusive regional security mechanisms. If Europe is to play a stronger military role in the world, the burden should fall on the European Union as a whole and not one country like Germany. Northeast Asia, meanwhile, urgently needs a regional security structure to handle its myriad territorial disputes. Regional responses to crises can suffer from the same defects as international efforts. But locating crisis-response mechanisms at the regional level can ideally avoid both the difficulty of marshaling consensus at the international level and the self-interested motives of unilateral actors.

3) Rather than add fuel to the fire, support international gun control. The global arms trade—valued to be��—has flooded conflicts with enormous firepower. The��, which entered into force at the end of last year, takes a first step by making arms sales more transparent. The next step, an incomparably more difficult challenge, is to reduce the flow.

At the moment, we’re still chasing the car. If we don’t start thinking about concrete alternatives, we’re not likely to achieve our goal. And we might just get run over trying.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Nagaoka’s son, who has asked for his name to be withheld to protect the privacy of his family, first joined in the fall of 1987 when he was still a college student studying Indian philosophy. He had always been fascinated with religion and had, by this time, read more than 2,000 books on the subject. Picking up a couple of books published by Aum, he was surprised by the cult’s progressive ideas.

It didn’t take the son long to fall under the spell of visually impaired Aum guru Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto. He started to study the teachings of the cult and take part in yoga classes. He went on to take part in a ten-day “madness” camp, during which participants were forced to undergo severe training that tested their physical strength to the limit. Desperate to become a fully fledged member, the son devoted himself completely to the cult.

Even though he was a college student, he made donations to Aum as often as he could, even skipping meals on occasion to save whatever money he could. “Mind control is sort of like magic—anyone is in danger of falling into that trap,” the son says. “Aum made it seem like you were free to make choices but, in reality, you were being guided toward those choices.”

He quickly took on a prominent role inside the cult, representing Aum in the media and opposing the actions of his father, who had founded a support group for parents whose children were being brainwashed by Asahara.

The Bond

Like other cult members, the son was taught to believe that relationships with parents were unnecessary because they only represented his present life.

“The bond between Aum members was very strong because we thought we were connecting on a spiritual level,” he says. “We believed we are connected in our past lives as well as the future through reincarnation. I didn’t have a good relationship with my father at the time. I was taught that anything he said was evil nonsense.”

The son dedicated himself to Aum activities and worked tirelessly in the cult’s 1990 bid to get Asahara and 24 other members elected into the Diet. Eating one meal a day and sleeping a couple of hours each night, he spent his days distributing fliers and putting up campaign posters of Asahara.

One morning, he woke up suffering from amnesia—he had no idea who he was or what Aum Shinrikyo did. After a few days, he recovered most of his memory prior to his association with the cult, including his father’s phone number. His days with the cult were numbered.

© Shutterstock

After conducting his own research into Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo, he realized he had been lied to and was finally able to escape. “I was the son of the chairman of an Aum victims’ support group,” the son says. “If I had stayed, I would have either been killed or been forced to become involved in the sarin attacks.”

He went on a trip to India with his parents to meet with a close aide to the Dalai Lama, who denied that the Nobel peace laureate had instructed Asahara to propagate “real ” in .

The son says he was able to escape the cult because of his parents, especially his father, Nagaoka, who refused to give up on him. Nagaoka publicly stood up to the cult not only to help his son, but also other parents whose children had been brainwashed.

Atone For Your Sins

By doing so, however, Nagaoka made himself a target and was attacked with VX nerve gas shortly before the sarin subway attack. He was almost killed in the attack.

“I feel terribly guilty for what I put my father through and always will,” the son says. “If I hadn’t joined Aum, he wouldn’t have been targeted in the VX attack. It was because of my father and mother that I was able to leave Aum. Not everyone is as lucky as I am because some people don’t have a family to go back to.”

The son has succeeded in helping more than 30 people leave Aum Shinrikyo. To this day, however, he regrets failing to convince convicted Aum member Masami Tsuchiya to quit. A few years before the sarin attack, the son spent weeks visiting a facility in Ibaraki Prefecture, where Tsuchiya was being detained by his family members. He spent up to ten hours a day talking to Tsuchiya, who remained impassive and eventually returned to the cult. Tsuchiya is now on death row after being found guilty of making the toxic gas that was used in the subway attacks.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t convince Tsuchiya to quit. If I had been successful, there probably wouldn’t have been sarin attacks in Matsumoto or Tokyo,” the son says. “Tsuchiya was older and smarter than me, and [he] looked down on me as a failure. Nothing I said reached him.”

The son was in his mid-20s when the sarin attack happened. Now 46, he works as a contract employee and is also a certified Tibetan Buddhist monk.

He still tries to help some of the existing 1,650 members of Aleph and Hikari no Wa groups leave if approached by their families, but he says it’s not easy to juggle a family and a full-time job.

“There are now people in my life that I need to protect and I can’t fully commit (to helping members quit),” the son says, noting that it takes countless hours to convince a member to leave.

Meanwhile, the people he once considered to be closer than his family are now on death row.

“If you kill someone, you have to atone for your sins in this life in accordance to Japanese law,” he says. “It’s true (the 12 men on death row) might have been under Asahara’s influence, but the reality is that they killed people. I don’t think our tax money should be used to keep them alive.”

*[The full version of this article was��originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Twenty years after Japan was shaken by Aum Shinrikyo’s nerve gas attack on March 20, 1995, which killed 13 people and injured thousands, the last of the court proceedings are finally coming to an end. In April 2015, Takahashi Katsuya was sentenced to life imprisonment. Takahashi was one of those who helped the subway attackers escape; he was arrested in 2012 after 17 years on the run.

Thirteen people, including the group’s charismatic leader, Asahara Shoko, were sentenced to death—though whether they will be executed is unclear. What is certain is that 20 years after the event, the actions of Aum continue to resonate in . While the religious terrorism spotlight has recently shifted to Islamist groups like and the , Aum remains a striking example of modern religious and violence. It was the first nongovernmental organization ever to use lethal chemical weapons on the general public. As such, its activities caused great worry among security forces worldwide, for whom Aum appeared to suggest the dawn of a new era of mass terrorism using new forms of weaponry.

Solace in Religion

So, how did a legally registered religious movement rapidly descend into terrible violence?

To understand this, it is important to reiterate that Aum Shinrikyo (the name translates as “Aum teaching of truth,” although its official English title was Aum Supreme Truth) was not initially a violent movement. “Aum” is a Sanskrit term used in Hindu and Buddhist contexts as a mantra, and it contains meanings of creation, preservation and destruction—themes central to the movement’s teachings, with destruction (of evil) viewed as central to the creation of good.

Aum Shinrikyo was founded in the early 1980s by Asahara, a partially blind man from an impoverished background who had suffered discrimination because of his disability, and who had sought solace in religion. He became a talented teacher of yoga and meditation in Tokyo and attracted largely young and well-educated idealists, many of whom had professional careers but who were looking for spiritual nourishment in a society they saw as too materialistic. Repulsed by materialism, Asahara’s teachings stated that people needed to turn to a more spiritual way of life based in asceticism and meditation.

Like many other late 20^th century religious groups, Aum feared that the end of the millennium would bring disaster—like several other religious leaders in 1980s Japan, Asahara spoke about a coming apocalypse unless behaviors changed, believing he had been sent to bring this change. In Asahara’s view, the world was corrupted by materialism, which created negative karma that could lead to chaos and apocalypse by the end of the century. Yet this could be averted, he taught, via a peaceful spiritual transformation through Aum’s mission: If it could, before the end of the century, develop a large force of spiritual masters, it could eradicate the world’s negative karma and bring universal salvation.

It was a message of spiritual transformation articulated by many millennial movements, and one that was particularly resonant in 1980s Japan, where the shadow of the atomic bomb and fears of nuclear war, along with worries about ecological degradation, were recurrent features of Japanese popular culture and struck a chord with the younger generation. Asahara developed a coterie of highly motivated disciples keen to accomplish this task, setting up communes where devotees could renounce the material world and focus on spiritual practices.

However, Aum’s strict asceticism and worldly rejection were extremely demanding and proved off-putting for the wider public. The result was that Aum’s self-proclaimed mission of world salvation through peaceful spiritual actions stalled. Although Aum had as many as 10,000 adherents at one stage, only a few hundred in all renounced the world—far less than the 30,000 advanced practitioners Asahara declared were necessary to transform it.

As the end of the century approached and Aum’s ranks of spiritually advanced practitioners barely swelled, a feeling of urgency developed, tinged with the fear of failure. Religious leaders and prophets who believe they are bringing new truths and salvation to the world often prove ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of failure, and Asahara was no exception. He followed a common pattern by externalizing the blame: Rather than reflecting that his message and the demanding path of asceticism he had established might be a reason why he was not attracting large numbers of devotees, he cast the blame on those who failed to respond.

It was the fault of the world at large for turning its back on the truth. It was too steeped in materialism and negativity to be saved. In other words, it deserved to be punished for this rejection rather than saved to enjoy the spiritual civilization of the future.

This transformation in teaching was spurred also by other factors that afflicted Aum from the late 1980s. They included external opposition: Families whose offspring had severed familial ties and given up careers mobilized against Aum, lobbied to get hostile stories about Aum into the media and engaged Sakamoto Tsutsumi, a prominent activist lawyer, to assist their anti-Aum movement. Simultaneously, Aum’s communes, intended as the blueprint of its new spiritual world, faced difficulties from hostile neighbors and civic agencies that were none too keen to have what they saw as a strange religious movement buy land and set up in their areas.

Anti-Aum Shinrikyo protest / Flickr

By Killing Him, We Save Him

Such external opposition from the late 1980s fueled paranoia within the movement and strengthened its belief that the mainstream world was its opponent. In 1988-89, unexpected internal events precipitated a turn to illegality that placed the group firmly on a road to violence from which it never recovered.

The first was the accidental death of a devotee during ascetic training in late 1988. The exercises designed to purify the spirit of the disciple included cold-water austerities—a technique widely used in Japanese ascetic traditions, which in this case caused a deadly heart malfunction. If this news got out, Asahara and his closest disciples thought it would imply that, rather than saving his disciples through the spiritual path he had advised, he was leading them into danger. It would also add fuel to the growing anti-Aum campaigns and jeopardize its status as a registered religious organization.

As a result, they covered up the death and secretly cremated the body—both classified as criminal acts under Japanese law. In acting this way, they had decided their mission was above the law of the land. This left a dark secret at the heart of the movement and increased the paranoia enveloping Asahara. When a disciple involved in the cover-up, Taguchi Shuji, later said he was going to report the death to the police, he was killed on Asahara’s orders—starting a pattern of using violence to suppress dissidents, protect Aum’s mission and avoid investigation at all costs.

The accidental death and murder were interpreted and justified via the formulation of Aum’s key doctrine of poa. This concept, which Asahara initially borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, was grounded in the notion that ritual actions performed by an advanced spiritual practitioner when someone died could help them progress safely into the next realm—a notion intrinsic to normative East Asian conceptualizations of transmigration and the ritual processes that accompanied death, and a standard feature of Japanese Buddhist culture.

Asahara had performed such rituals for the spirits of dead members and relatives, but after the accidental death and subsequent murder, his concept of poa changed. It was reinterpreted to mean not just aiding the passage of spirits to the next world after death, but also intervening in life to stop people accruing what Aum termed “negative karma” in this world. Thus, the disciple who died did so because he could not achieve enlightenment in this realm and needed to purify himself through being ritually guided by his spiritual teacher Asahara into the next realm. Taguchi, the dissident, was killed because if he went to the police, thereby damaging the “truth” and thwarting Aum’s salvation mission, he would have amassed so much negative karma that he would have to spend countless eons in the Buddhist hells after death. By killing him, Aum was in fact saving him.

This doctrine of killing to save people from otherwise dire karmic fates became a central teaching embraced by Aum’s zealous core disciples, who thereby emphasized that they and their guru Asahara alone possessed absolute truth. This led directly to the idea that anyone not following this truth would inevitably accrue spiritual punishments in the afterlife, and as such Aum’s members had the “right” to kill—a right that both punished non-believers for not accepting the “truth” and simultaneously saved them from spiritual torment.

In all, the group was responsible for the murder of over 25 people, including Sakamoto Tsutsumi. Sakamoto had begun to raise questions about Aum, portraying it as a dangerous and potentially fraudulent movement intent on relieving devotees of their money and its leader as falsely claiming supernatural powers. His investigations were seen as a major threat by Aum’s leaders, and in November 1990, he disappeared with his wife and young child. Their disappearance was only solved in 1995 when Aum devotees began confessing their roles in a campaign of sustained violence against Japanese society, and that Sakamoto and his family had been murdered to stop his investigations.

In this context, there were no innocents: Everyone was either devoted to the truth or guilty of rejecting it. Nakagawa Tomomasa, a doctor who joined Aum, provides a striking example of this attitude. Having joined Aum, Nakagawa immersed himself thoroughly in its practices and rapidly attained high status. When asked to kill (the term used by Asahara here was poa) an “enemy of the truth”—the lawyer Sakamoto—Nakagawa, instead of displaying horror at being asked to go against his professional oath to protect life, said he felt elated. Being chosen to kill meant he had attained a high level of spirituality and was therefore capable of saving others.

Welcoming the End of the World

This emphasis on spiritual elitism was tinged also with increasing concerns about the opposition to Aum, by a sense that few people were listening, and by a fear that its secrets would be exposed before it could fulfill its mission. Such concerns became so strong among Aum’s leaders that anyone who criticized the movement was regarded as an agent of evil, intent on destroying the “truth.” In this mixture of paranoia and doctrinal extremism—and driven by apocalyptic visions of a final war—Aum became convinced that a world conspiracy, that included the American and Japanese governments, plus various other groups often cited by paranoid conspiracy theorists such as the Freemasons and the Jews, was trying to suppress the truth.

In the early 1990s, Aum stopped regarding its mission as one of saving the world from apocalypse, turning instead toward welcoming the end of the world as a necessity to halt this conspiracy and achieve world salvation. In this process, Asahara’s prophecies increasingly stressed the inevitability and desirability of an imminent final war between good and evil.

To prepare for this, Aum had to build its own weaponry in the form of biological and chemical weapons. It was for these reasons that, beginning in 1990, it built clandestine laboratories at its commune outside Tokyo and experimented with various toxins until settling on Sarin nerve gas as its chemical of choice. The subway attack of March 20, 1995—seen by some as the first shot fired in this final battle—was the culmination of Aum’s escalating campaign of violence against its enemies who, by 1995, included just about everyone on the planet.

Sincere Believers

The story of Aum is thus one in which religious idealism and a sense of mission play a part, alongside the grandiose visions of a leader who saw himself as a world savior but was unable to respond to setbacks or deal with rejection. Sociologists of religion have long recognized that believers can reinterpret what they see as reality in the light of changing circumstances, so that their core beliefs are not challenged. In Aum, this dissonance meant that rather than recalibrating its teachings and sense of mission to accommodate the setbacks and realities it faced, it amended them in ways that led the movement down a violent path, transformed its visions of the apocalypse and damned those who failed to support it.

Clearly those who committed the atrocities—notably Asahara as leader—have rightly been held responsible for their deeds. Yet the standard ways in which the affair has been portrayed in Japan—through the lenses of “cults” and “mind control”—has failed to adequately represent what went on within Aum.

The people who joined Aum were largely those who had ostensibly succeeded in the Japanese system, such as the aforementioned doctor Nakagawa; Hayashi Ikuo—one of the subway attackers who quit a career as a high-level heart specialist to join Aum and find spiritual meaning in his life; and Aoyama Yoshinobu, who was the youngest person ever to pass the Japanese bar exam before joining Aum. They did so because they viewed the current system as broken, and because they felt that materialism and the conveyor-belt career system failed to provide adequate meaning in their lives. They were, in short, sincere believers. It was because of those beliefs, rather than because they were tricked and “brainwashed” by a crazed, power-mad conman, that they took the path they did.

Certainly Asahara took advantage of his disciples’ devotion as he led them to violence, and he bears prime responsibility for what happened. Yet it was not a one-way process but one his disciples readily encouraged and participated in. They readily embraced the idea that Asahara had supreme spiritual powers and encouraged the development of doctrines such as poa through which they were able to elevate their spiritual status and acquire powers of punishment and life and death over others—a point evident in Nakagawa’s elated response to being asked to kill.

In this context, the notion of a cult is separated from its classic sociological meaning: that of a new religious group forming around a charismatic figure, a group which may develop into a full-fledged religious movement. This stage occurs in all religions, a good example being Jesus and his 12��Apostles. Removed from its original meaning, the word turns into something highly pejorative. As used in Japanese and worldwide media and public discourse, the word “cult” has taken on a different meaning: something deviant, fraudulent, and centered around “mind control” or “brainwashing”—notions widely questioned by scholars who have carried out research on how people become converts to religious movements.

As scholars such as Eileen Barker, in The Making of a Moonie,��have shown, it is common for groups seeking religious converts to talk to and get large numbers of people to attend their seminars and training sessions, yet few actually become ardent devotees. Many such groups—and Aum was no exception—have a very transient membership, with a large percentage leaving soon after joining. As such, scholars have asked, if these groups used “brainwashing” and their mode of operation is to “control the minds” of those who join, why are��they unable to retain members?

The link between cults and mind control appears to be a simple reason why the people who joined Aum in pursuit of peaceful meditational practices ended up as ideological murderers. However, this simple interpretation seriously misrepresents what happened in Aum and, in so doing, neglects deeper questions about why the affair happened.

In portraying Aum’s followers—many of whom were highly educated doctors, lawyers, scientists and engineers—as “brainwashed,” we fail to ask why they were attracted to Aum in the first place, and we overlook the point that they were convinced of the righteousness of their cause. Following the simplistic “cult = mind control” formula means we lose sight of more complex and ultimately more important questions: How and why do people with seemingly sincere religious beliefs turn to violence? And how can this sincere belief coexist with the murder of innocents?

The Aum case is interesting because it tells us that having sincere religious beliefs can, in certain circumstances, lead to dangerous results. Simply resorting to the rhetoric of cults and mind control does not enable us to gain a real understanding of how such affairs happen or why people who are interested in meditation and spiritual advancement may in particular contexts turn to violence. It also serves to subtly invalidate critiques of the normal state of affairs and expressions of a need for turning away from materialism and toward spiritualism.

This is something that might also be considered in Western contexts, in which a rhetoric rather similar to that of cults and mind control, in the idea of radicalization by fanatical and evil preachers, is used to explain why young people may feel the compulsion to leave their homes—just as Aum devotees did—to seek out a movement that they believe might transform the world. What is needed is a deeper, more sophisticated analysis of extreme beliefs so that the ways in which people may be persuaded to turn to violence can be more adequately dealt with.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Everyone on the Mall near the Washington Monument was looking up at the sky. I was there, too. But I wasn’t looking up — at least not that far up.

On May 8, I was playing Ultimate Frisbee during the noontime game on a stretch of level grass behind the Holocaust Museum. This time, we were joined by thousands of people eager to commemorate the 70^th��anniversary of the surrender of Nazi and the end of World War II in Europe. They’d shown up in droves to watch an air show of vintage planes.

I find it strange that so many people like to look at bombers. These machines visited enormous death and destruction during World War II, particularly on civilian populations. The firebombing of German cities ��600,000 German civilians, including 75,000 children. The fire bombings of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities killed�� of 300,000 people, predominantly civilians, and this doesn’t include the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We would find a similar display by the Germans or the Japanese of their war planes singularly distasteful. These planes also rained death down upon the British, the Chinese and others. But the Germans and the Japanese lost the war. And we won.

So, by the ancient laws of battle, we’re allowed our displays of war totems. Our display is the functional equivalent of mounting the heads of our victims on pikes. But it’s obviously not the visual equivalent, or else we wouldn’t bring our children out to gaze up at the sky and applaud these instruments of terror.

The victors were not chastened by the experience of all this destruction. During the Korean War, US warplanes had almost free rein to wipe out . US planes dropped 32,000 tons of napalm on Korea, twice what they dropped on Japan. They deliberately destroyed dams in an effort to destroy crops and precipitate large-scale starvation.

In his��new ��on the air campaign, Blaine Harden quotes Douglas MacArthur, not known for being soft-hearted, as saying: “I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was [in Korea]. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited.”

Meanwhile in Moscow

A celebration of the end of the war also took place in the Russian capital.

used the opportunity to mourn the enormous casualties suffered by the Russian army and the Russian people during World War II. By his side were Xi Jinping of and Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations. Unlike at past affairs — in 2005 with George W. Bush and 1995 with Bill Clinton — the American president was not in Moscow to attend the commemoration. Nor did the leaders of France, Germany or Britain join Putin for the military parade. Even lowly Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, stayed home to witness the test of his new submarine-launched ballistic missile.

© Shutterstock

Putin had a choice words for the absent. “During the last decade, the basic fundamental principles of international cooperation were increasingly ignored,”��he . “We saw attempts to set up a unipolar world order. We see the use of force. This kind of mentality undermines global stability.”

The was as committed to unipolarism in the 1990s and the 2000s as it is today, if not more so. Ditto the use of force. What Putin finds frustrating is the encroachment of US geopolitics on his perceived turf, which includes Ukraine.

The shadow of the current Ukrainian conflict fell over the commemoration of the end of World War II, just as the shadow of that long-ago war continues to fall over Ukraine. To understand the depth of enmity between the current combatants, you have to understand how history shapes present grievances.

Ukrainians have never really received acknowledgment — much less an apology — for the great famine (holodomor) that swept through the region in 1932-33 and left nearly 4 million dead. Or the waves of class-based and ethnic-based slaughter that took place on Ukrainian territory (of kulaks and various ethnic groups, including Ukrainians). The subsequent return of the Red Army to the territory between 1944-47, as Timothy Snyder notes in��, left another quarter of a million dead.

The Russians, meanwhile, harbor resentment toward all the Ukrainians who sided with the Nazis. They have as little love for fierce nationalists like Stepan Bandera, a hero to the Ukrainian right-wing today, who resisted Communist rule. It is common for Russians who side with Putin to tar all Ukrainians with the fascist brush, from the leadership in Kiev to the far right-wing paramilitaries fighting the separatists in the east.

The current crisis in will probably not truly end until Russians and Ukrainians come to terms with the past — and also acknowledge that Putin is not Stalin, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is not Stepan Bandera.

And in Asia

The end of World War II didn’t come until August 15, 1945, when Japan finally surrendered less than a week after the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

In many ways, Asia remains even more trapped in the vise grip of World War II than Europe. It was in 1945 that the United States and the Soviet Union drew a line across a map and divided the two Koreas, a cleavage that remains today. The “peace constitution” that the United States provided — or imposed upon — Japan is still, more or less, in place. China, divided between communists and nationalists at war’s end, remains that way, though the latter have a much smaller footprint in their current Taiwanese redoubt.

As I’ve��written here , many of the tensions in Northeast Asia revolve around “history” problems, much of it from the World War II era.

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Asia can’t point to a feel-good story like the rise and expansion of the European Union, in which nationalist rivalries become transmuted by common interest (initially anti-communism, in Europe’s case) into golden cooperation. What binds together the former combatants in Asia is a shared commitment to export-led growth. It’s largely because this growth has come in a phased sequence — first Japan, then Singapore and , followed by Korea, now China and points further south — that the countries in the region haven’t been at each other’s necks in competition for markets.

But capitalism hasn’t quite tamed the great ideological passions of the 20^th��century in Asia. The great rivals of the Cold War — China and North Korea on the one hand; Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the United States on the other — could still deliberately or inadvertently find themselves in an escalating military conflict. The conflicts are by no means confined to these ideological categories. South Korea and Japan are still arguing vehemently over what happened in the 20^th��century. And China and Vietnam are clashing over territorial claims in the South China Sea that go back even further than that.

Finally in ’45

I was recently reading the letters my father sent to my mother when he was in the army during World War II. He rarely mentions the war itself. He’d turned 18 a few months before Pearl Harbor and signed up thereafter like many young men his age. But at some point his desire to fight evaporated, and he was happy enough to remain stateside. The letters he wrote to my mother, the ones that survive at least, focus on his boredom, his desire for furloughs and his eagerness to get discharged.

Even the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki gets barely a mention, though my father was glad that it would shorten the war. But on one occasion, short of writing paper, he drafted a note to my mother using the back of another letter. This letter, from someone named Cyril and dated August 9, 1945, is typed in all caps. It reads in part:

“The past two days have been days that will be remembered for all time! The atomic bomb has suddenly changed our entire lives and will influence the future of all mankind. It has suddenly made obvious to everyone that another war is an impossibility if mankind and the world is to continue to exist.

“If we have finally been shocked into the terrible necessity of cooperation, then this terrible weapon is indeed a boon to progress in the world.”

My father would eventually change his mind about the dropping of the atomic bombs and see it as a barbarous act. Cyril, meanwhile, was wrong. We��would��get more wars, and we would not��be shocked into the “terrible necessity of cooperation,” except intermittently.

When the instruments of death fly above us, we still look up in admiration, not horror. As long as we celebrate destruction in this way, we will be doomed to repeat it.

*[This was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The post Celebrating Destruction Will Only Lead to History Repeating Itself appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Far too often, history is mythology and news is fiction. Dominant elites construct narratives in which they fight with honor and valor for truth and justice against devious and deadly foes to create a safe and just world. Like Mahabharat, the great Indian epic, reality is 100,000 shades of gray.

The World This Week has repeatedly the tragic plight of African Americans. It is now almost a cliché that one in three black men is likely to end up in jail in the . Yet the devastation of inner cities is not quite a feature of mainstream American narrative. For that matter, neither is the desolation of Native Americans in reservations accorded much attention. In popular culture, the US is a land where seductive cheerleaders have 1,000 watt smiles and brawny athletes have superhuman strength. In Robert Browning’s unforgettable words, “God’s in His heaven — All’s right with the world!”

It turns out God might be in heaven, but parts of the world have turned to hell. Baltimore is burning. Fox News is furious. CNN is concerned. How can such things happen in the US? As Jon Stewart, the man many Americans trust most for their news, out, such things happen repeatedly in the land of the free and home of the brave. African Americans are the untouchables of their society, lacking access to decent education, nutrition and jobs. Every now and then, when someone like Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man, suffers from a spinal injury and dies a week after his arrest, the simmering volcano of resentment explodes.

The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation has been burnished by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who decided to wage a war on drugs and crime. The operating assumption was that a state based on the Old Testament would foster order and instill respect for the law. More police and tougher laws such as California’s “three strikes law” would troublemakers off the streets. Packing people off to prisons is indubitably more sensible than investing in schools or sports or any other activities for disaffected young men. Furthermore, taxing the poor through punitive fines and locking them up when they fail to pay is a fine idea. It creates the right incentives for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Unlike sub-Saharan Africa, no one in the US lacks bootstraps or goes barefoot. If there is no bread, those in the US can always eat cakes.

It is now an open secret that there are fewer jobs on offer in an increasingly unequal US. A service economy has created a generation of baristas. Those who serve have to be pleasant and non-threatening. So, a pretty white girl is more likely to be hired at Starbucks than a threatening black man. Statistics tell us that black men are more likely to commit crime and tend to lack respect or discipline. It is little surprise that even in Silicon Valley, black men who turn up to interview for top firms get stopped by white cops and are told to get out of town. Discrimination is a daily phenomenon, and black men who want to work “normal” jobs have to be more proper, dress better and smile incessantly to allay the suspicion that they might be angry gorillas capable of murder, rape and worse.

As per Fox News, if only African Americans did not have multiple sexual partners, had fewer illegitimate children, became more caring parents, valued respect and inculcated responsibility, they would get ahead like Indians and Koreans who are the living proof of meritocracy and social mobility in multiracial America. No one is trying to keep African Americans down. They themselves shoot themselves in both their knees because of their culture of criminality, consumption of crack cocaine and the ravaging rage of rap.

Like all narratives, the Fox News one has an element of truth. Africans often comment on how they cannot relate to African Americans. Black ghettos are prisoners of a culture that rip apart the souls of those who live there. Bling, anger and gratuitous violence make people turn on each other. Places like Inglewood and South Central in Los Angeles have “shoot ‘em up” gas stations, murderous gangs and “drive by shootings” on a regular basis. Yet what Fox News fails to note is that African Americans are traumatized by their past, scarred by incessant discrimination and underserved by institutions that favor a dominant elite that tends to be disproportionately white. This elite is afraid of its own shadow and fears both its dark-skinned underclass and foreigners who speak in strange cadences.

Anyone who arrives from Britain to the US cannot help but notice that the immigration official is wearing a fancy uniform and packing a gun. Why is that so? Those stepping off a plane are highly unlikely to be armed. An unarmed official could question visitors and get their fingerprints. Similarly, the police in the US always carry guns and are increasingly militarized. Far too often, they shoot first and ask questions later. As many black men say, the police “ride their ass,” and they have to be super polite to avoid getting locked up. The doctrine of using disproportionate force as a deterrence destroys trust in the police. Hence, many minority communities turn to the likes of Don Corleone instead of the police. Their narratives are not part of the one peddled by CNN or Fox News.

Shinzo Abe © Shutterstock

Outside the US, narratives are equally nonsensical. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe turned up at the US Congress to express “deep repentance” for ’s actions in World War II and offer “eternal condolences” for all Americans who died during the war. Abe has not offered any apology to any Asian neighbor for enslavement, torture and rape. He fails to acknowledge the infamous Nanjing Massacre that justifiably stirs Chinese passions. Starting on December 13, 1937, the Japanese slaughtered an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 unarmed civilians and raped with a brutality that has few parallels in the 20^th century. Japanese textbooks ignore this and Abe pays his respects at Yasukuni, a shrine that honors some of those responsible for the massacre.

Abe’s apology is a simple reflection of the fact that an aging Japan with a tottering economy is terrified of a rising China with growing economic heft. Hence, Japan is asking its “so big and so strong” lover “to come a little bit closer.” De facto a satellite state since the end of World War II, Japan has lived under US protection and, in many ways, is culturally a colony. When Richard Gere with Junichiro Koizumi, he insisted on playing the man and taking the lead. A pretty faced American actor reduced a powerful Japanese prime minister to the role of a woman in a society known for its chauvinism and atavistic attitudes toward women.

If Japan were to apologize to fellow Asians on whom it inflicted enormous suffering, Asia would be a more peaceful and harmonious place. But then fellow Asians did not drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, why should the Japanese apologize? Needless to say, the US has not apologized for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the US has yet to apologize for Agent Orange, napalm and Mỹ Lai Massacre. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung is bang on the money when he says that the US “committed barbarous crimes” and slaughtered millions of innocents. Yet the United States has chosen to forget what it did in Vietnam whilst demanding apologies from others.

Like the US, is yet to apologize for rapes that its soldiers committed in at the end of World War II. Diaries like A Woman in Berlin are unknown in countries that won the war. Russian troops raped an estimated 2 million German women. About 100,000 were raped in Berlin alone. Neukolln, just one of Berlin’s 24 districts, approved 995 pleas of abortion between June 1945 and June 1946. At that time abortions were illegal in Germany, but a special provision was made in the light of mass rapes. Today, no one sees the Germans as victims. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a recent law makes denigration of Russia’s record in World War II an offence. Authorities can throw those who talk about the country’s war crimes into jail for up to five years.

The dominant narrative is that most Germans were evil Nazis who gassed innocent Jews. Winston Churchill is celebrated as a champion of freedom, despite the fact he locked up Mahatma Gandhi and aimed to perpetuate British imperial rule over those with more melanin in their skin. The aptly named “Butcher” Harris bombed Dresden in 1945 when it became clear that the war had already been won because he did not “regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” Yet he remains a war hero and, in 1992, Queen Elizabeth, the last Empress of India and mother to the current British queen, unveiled his statue outside the RAF Church of St. Clement Danes in London. It seems the Germans are the sole villains of Europe because they slaughtered white people on European soil instead of colored people overseas. And, of course, they lost.

Perhaps, the Bible did not quite get it right when it claimed that “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” To paraphrase an old saying, God lies on the side of those who have more guns and gold.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided.]

[seperator style=”style1″]Death of African American Burns Baltimore[/seperator]

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Baltimore has become the latest focus of African American anger over policing and deeper race relations.

It was only a matter of time before Baltimore erupted into racial violence. The city epitomizes urban deprivation and underdevelopment. In decline since World War II, when its population peaked at just under a million people, the city now has 600,000 residents — and two-thirds are African Americans.

Unemployment is around 9%, but it is twice that in Baltimore’s black community. The city has a history of troubled race relations going back more than 100 years to the development of segregated housing developments, which effectively “ghettoized” Baltimore’s African American communities in poorly serviced and cramped communities.

Now, Baltimore is the focus of violence with protests over the death — in police custody — of Freddie Gray, a young African American male, who died on April 19 of spinal injuries after being arrested and found in possession of a knife. Gray’s death is just the latest in a recent spate of…

[seperator style=”style1″]Iraq is a Model Example of “Unfinished Business”[/seperator]

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In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.

Aleksander Kwasniewski is a respected name in Polish politics. He served as the president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. He is known for negotiating the accession of Poland to the European Union (EU) and NATO.

Kwasniewski was a critic of the Iraq War in 2003. However, he now says the early withdrawal of US troops from the country was not the correct decision, and that Iraq is a model example of “unfinished business,” in terms of ill-prepared stabilization plans.

The veteran politician says the United States is Poland’s “strongest and the most reliable ally.” He also believes that US plans for installing a missile defense shield in Poland is a necessity, given the unstable and turbulent situation in the Middle East and Iran’s “lack of transparency” in its nuclear activities.

Kwasniewski was appointed as the European Parliament’s envoy to Ukraine to investigate criminal charges against former…

[seperator style=”style1″]If You Agree With UKIP’s Policies, Are You Racist?[/seperator]

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To dismiss UKIP as racist is to mischaracterize not just the party, but Britons as a whole.��

The titular question was asked of 51�Թ�, so 51�Թ� asked me, at which point I realized how little the public knows about the real policies offered by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), other than cheap accusations of “racism.”

Google reports that the two most common searches related to UKIP include: “Are UKIP racist?” and “Why should I not vote for UKIP?” Yet Britons use Google to search for UKIP’s policies more than any other British party’s.

Clearly, people in Britain are not being informed adequately by the traditional news media. UKIP complains about bias at the BBC and Channel 4 — the Office of Communication (OFCOM) is investigating the latter.

Meanwhile, other parties are guilty of prejudicial reductionism of UKIP to “racism,” as epitomized by a recent talk from the Labour Party’s Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, about “a virus of racism which runs through that party.”

[seperator style=”style1″]Lessons on Disaster Preparedness From the Nepal Earthquake[/seperator]

The Nepal earthquake, which left widespread damage and thousands dead, is a clarion call for other countries to become better prepared for disasters.

The recent 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal left a wide swath of devastation, and the death toll keeps rising. As the Nepalese cope with the tragedy, there are lessons for the United States and other countries to learn when it comes to disaster preparedness.

To discuss this topic, Knowledge@Wharton sat down with Howard Kunreuther, co-director of Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center and professor of operations and information management.

In the interview, Kunreuther notes that Nepal is not alone when it comes to being taken off guard by such disasters. Even developed countries such as the US have seen their fair share of events that have stressed the limits of their own preparedness, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“What happened in Nepal is something that happens everywhere in the world. If something doesn’t happen for a long…”

[seperator style=”style1″]Australia Wages War On Its Own People[/seperator]

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John Pilger argues that indigenous rights are once again being exploited in Australia.

Australia has again declared war on its indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa. Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide.”

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the “lucky” society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home — which revealed that thousands of indigenous children…

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The post The World This Week: Baltimore Burns and Japan Says Sorry appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Japan is in recession — a downward revision of gross domestic product (GDP) data on December 8 determined that — and the world’s third biggest economy is performing well below the expectations laid out when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office nearly two years ago. Moody’s Investor Service highlighted growing skepticism over Abe’s policies when it cut �����貹��’s sovereign debt rating one notch down to A1 from Aa3 on December 1. This put �����貹��’s national debt one notch below China’s.

The decision by Moody’s reflected concern over �����貹��’s ability to reduce its fiscal deficits after Abe decided to postpone an increase in the sales tax, from 8% to 10%, judging that the blow to the economy from an April 1 hike in the tax from 5% to 8% left the recovery too shaky for another increase. Abe promised to come up with a new fiscal consolidation plan by next summer, promising there will be no further delays, with a sales tax hike to 10% to come in April 2017.

Seeking a fresh public mandate for his tax decision, among other policies, Abe dissolved parliament and called an election for December 14 that polls suggest is virtually certain to give the ruling Liberal Democrats an even stronger majority, despite misgivings over the “Abenomics” economic agenda of fiscal stimulus, aggressive monetary easing — better known these days as “quantitative easing” —and structural reforms. Both economic data and public opinion suggest that so far, those policies — aimed at ending years of deflation — have done little to encourage consumers to spend more.

Instead, economists generally agree that Abe’s chief achievements so far have been a weakening of the Japanese yen, which has both positive and negative implications for the domestic economy, and higher stock prices, which have benefited wealthy Japanese and big corporations. The yen, inflated by massive injections of money into the economy through central bank asset purchases, has fallen 47% against the dollar since January 2013. The Nikkei 225 stock index has climbed 69% in the same time period.

“Quantitative easing is a very risky strategy, and fiscal stimulus hasn’t worked in the last 20 years. All it has done is it has taken Japan from [being] the least indebted major country to the most indebted major country,” says Wharton finance Professor Franklin Allen. So far, he notes, Abe has not done much to push through the “drastic” reforms needed to shore up �����貹��’s waning competitiveness. “The country is getting to the point now where it is going to need a major crisis to solve the problem. That is very unfortunate, but that is where it is headed,” Allen adds.

Most Japan watchers and economists, and even Abe himself, say that to restore sustainable growth, Japan needs sweeping deregulation and structural reforms to cope with its growing public debt and its declining and aging population. But pushing through such changes is proving daunting, despite Abe’s pledges to “drill deep into the bedrock” of �����貹��’s vested interests.

Far From Passing

“The only good thing that has happened is the mood in Japan became more positive than in the last two decades,” says Seki Obata, an associate professor at Keio University’s Graduate School of Business Administration. Obata, author of the book Reflation is Dangerous, suggests that Abenomics-style policies — which, like “Reaganomics” three decades ago, are based on the anticipated “trickle down” effects from public spending and the enrichment of the wealthy — will not bring long-term stable economic growth in Japan. He gives Abe an overall score of 33 out of 100, far from a passing mark.

Japan needs at least nominal 3-4% GDP growth in the next ten years to put its economy back on track, but Abe has accomplished little with his “third arrow” of reforms, meant to complement the first two arrows of fiscal and monetary stimulus, says Masamichi Adachi, an economist at JP Morgan Japan Securities Co., Ltd. “Is Japan on track to have stable nominal 3% growth in the next ten years? That would be extremely difficult,” he says.

Abe decided to postpone the planned 2015 sales tax increase because real GDP unexpectedly contracted 1.6% in the second quarter of the fiscal year, which ends in March 2015, after a 7.3% decline in the first quarter following April’s sales tax hike. The real GDP growth in the second quarter of this fiscal year was revised down to minus 1.9% on December 8 from minus 1.6%. Even after Abe put off the tax hike, some economists revised their forecasts downward for the year. Japan Chief Economist Junko Nishioka at RBS Securities Japan Ltd. dropped her forecast for the full fiscal year to minus 0.6% from her earlier forecast of plus 0.1%, but revised the outlook for the next fiscal year to 1.6% growth from an earlier forecast of 1.4% growth. London-based Capital Economics also lowered its GDP growth forecast for the 2014 calendar year, to 0.3% from its earlier forecast of 0.9%. Its forecast for calendar 2015 is for 0.1% growth, down from 0.5%.

Indulging his prerogative as incumbent, Abe is expected to splash out more than $25 billion, or three trillion yen, in fiscal stimulus after the election. Unlike much of the earlier stimulus, Japanese media reports say at least some of the new spending will be targeted at low-income families and others whose spending power is falling as incomes fail to keep pace with inflation. Whether it will make a significant difference remains open to question.

“As for the stimulus package, they have spent enormous amounts of money over the last 20 years and it has never helped much before,” Allen notes. “I do not think it is going to help this time. Twenty-five billion dollars is not big enough. It won’t have much effect in a $5 trillion economy [�����貹��’s GDP in 2013]. It’s a very small dollop.” Obata agrees with Allen. “I do not see the package as meaningful because it will make �����貹��’s fiscal condition worse. The government decided to postpone the sale tax increase, which is in a way the biggest possible stimulus,” Obata points out.

Japan is in recession — a downward revision of gross domestic product (GDP) data on December 8 determined that — and the world’s third biggest economy is performing well below the expectations laid out when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office…

Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda surprised markets and investors with an October 31 announcement that the central bank was increasing its annual asset purchases to around 80 trillion yen, from the 60 trillion to 70 trillion yen announced in April 2013 when he took up his post and pledged to do whatever is required to attain an inflation target of 2%. The BOJ at the same time released a revised three-year forecast for growth and prices that halved the agency’s growth estimate for the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2015, to 0.5% from the 1% it had predicted in July. It also lowered its median inflation forecast for the coming fiscal year to 1.7% from 1.9%. The BOJ forecasted 2.1% inflation in the fiscal year to end March 31, 2017, unchanged from its earlier estimation. Some economists expect Kuroda may end up increasing BOJ asset purchases further next July to help raise inflation expectations.

Post-Election Predictions

What is the likely scenario after the election? Most economists expect Abe to keep his majority in the Lower House. “I’d be very surprised if Abe didn’t win the elections. The main reason is there is no effective opposition in Japan right now. There is no alternative, and he knows that,” Allen says. While most Japanese say they have not yet felt a positive impact from Abenomics, many still view Abe and the LDP as the most realistic choice. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which lost to the LDP in December 2012, has public support ratings of only 10% at best, a third or a quarter of the LDP’s, depending on the survey.

The most recent poll by the Japanese financial newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, on December 4, found the LDP is likely to win more than 300 out of the 475 seats in the Lower House, and may even take a two-thirds majority of 317 seats. Before the election, the LDP held 295 seats and its coalition partner, the New Komei Party, had 31 seats.

“There is a less than 5% chance that the LDP and Komei Party will lose their combined two-thirds majority,” JP Morgan’s Adachi says. “But the question is whether the LDP will have less than 300 seats or not, which is tricky because it means Abe will have less support within the LDP.” Abe says he will resign if the coalition cannot keep its majority and he is not able to push forward with his Abenomics strategy.

Long-Term Prospects

Although Abe postponed the two percentage point tax increase until April 2017, in the long-run, Japan has little choice about raising the consumption tax given surging costs for social welfare as its population ages, and its growing national debt, which at nearly 250% of GDP is the biggest among wealthy industrial nations. Financial markets were counting on Abe to deliver on promises for “fiscal consolidation.” A failure to push ahead with the tax hike could have severely shaken investor confidence, though so far the markets have instead reacted favorably to the pragmatic choice not to weaken the recovery further.

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Allen says there is an issue of long-term fiscal sustainability for Japan and this is part of the risk. “At some point, there will be a significant problem in the form of capital flight from Japan. Whether postponing [the sales tax hike] two years will trigger that or not — I don’t know. There’s some chance of it, but probably it won’t make too much difference,” Allen notes. Eventually, though, Japan must tackle its debt situation. “The problem is they can’t keep on borrowing,” he points out. “It’s a question of what one thinks the short-term versus the long-term effects are. The long-term effects at some point will catch up with them — but it could take a long time. This is why it’s such a tricky issue.”

From Adachi’s point of view, the delay is not such a critical problem. “The loss of 2% of tax revenues for 18 months amounts to 8.1 trillion yen or 1.7% of GDP,” he says. “Relative to the general government current debt, which stands at 243% of GDP on the IMF estimate from 2013, the potential loss is fairly small.”

Hisakazu Kato, economics professor at Meiji University, is among many Japanese experts who say the government will have to drastically reduce pension payments, raise the age at which pensions begin from 65 years old and increase the national sales tax to at least 20%. The most recent estimate by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research is that the Japanese population will fall to 97 million by 2050 from 127.5 million in 2012, based on the 2010 birthrate of 1.39 children per couple. By 2100, the population could fall below 50 million, according to Ryuichi Kaneko, a population expert and deputy director of the institute. Those over 65 now account for about a quarter of the population. By 2050, those over age 65 will account for 38.8% of the population, rising to 41.1% by 2100, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

“�����貹��’s population is declining by 0.2% a year and the over-65s are increasing rapidly,” Adachi notes. “In order for Japan to have 3% nominal economic growth for the long-term, Japan needs a great deal of economic structural reform and social changes. I think what Abe is doing is not enough. Whatever the BOJ does, it is worse than buying time. People may realize later that it was a big mistake for the Japanese government to make people think that BOJ action is changing Japan.”

Hiroshi Shiraishi, senior economist at BNP Paribas Securities (Japan) Ltd., who is a co-author of the report “Why Abenomics Did Not Work: The Miscalculation of the Japanese Government and Bank of Japan,” says �����貹��’s fiscal stimulus and monetary easing have reached their limits, and structural reforms will take a long time to have any appreciable impact on the economy. “They are supposed to implement the ‘third arrow,’ which [includes] painful reforms, but they are giving pain killing medicine by stimulus and monetary easing,” Shiraishi says. BNP Paribas views the most likely scenario as one in which Japan will have full employment, and inflation will begin to rise in earnest, along with wages, from late 2015 and into 2016. At that point, “the BOJ will start outright financial repression.”

The BNP also cites a potential sharp depreciation of the yen as a significant risk. As domestic depositors flee negative interest rates, the yen could fall to as low as 150 yen against the dollar and beyond, the firm says. That could eventually push inflation as high as 10%. The BNP raised its assessment of this probability to 25% on November 17 from 20%. “This scenario is that Japan will not be able to control yen deprecation and inflation. This would be disastrous because there would be spiraling effects from yen deprecation and inflation,” Shiraishi says.

A Need for Structural Reform

Not all economists agree with this assessment. Nishioka at RBS doubts the weakening yen will trigger high inflation. In the past, the main cause for such a problem was a shortage of goods, she contends. “For example, Zimbabwe suffers from hyperinflation not because of a weakening currency, but because of shortages of goods. I do not think this will happen in Japan, because Japan has ample supplies of goods and services despite its population decline,” Nishioka says.

What does Japan need to be able to attain sustainable growth? Some economists, including Julian Jessop, chief global economist at Capital Economics in London, view higher inflation as the only plausible answer to �����貹��’s fiscal problem, but say that achieving the current inflation target of 2% would not suffice. Japan needs a nominal 4% GDP growth rate for at least a decade to reduce its net debt to GDP ratio to 100% from the current level of about 140%.

The public debt problem, so far, has not boiled over into a full-blown crisis, but the demographic changes could soon cause Japanese finances to get out of control. A sustainable real growth rate of only 1% would require an inflation rate of 3% or more, and further expansion of monetary easing is needed to achieve this. But that will not be enough, Jessop says. “In order to achieve a 1% real growth rate in the long-term, Japan has to implement structural reforms. The remaining 3% has to come from inflation, which is where I think that the Bank of Japan has to do a lot more work,” Jessop notes. “The Bank of Japan has to keep inflation at 3% and keep it there for at least ten years. It seems very high for Japan, but most major economies have been running inflation rates of 2% or higher in the last ten years or so.” The International Monetary Fund is projecting the net debt of Japan will climb to 148% in 2018 from an estimated 140% in 2013, below Greece’s 170% but still well above the 80% level of the US.

Given the slow pace at which Japan has been tackling reforms needed to catalyze new industries, promote innovation and increase productivity, Japan may end up facing a fiscal crisis before any drastic action is taken, says Allen. Abenomics is no panacea, he adds. “The issue with long-term fiscal sustainability is Japan is potentially heading for some massive crisis. Maybe that will solve everything for it, but it is also likely to be extremely disruptive and politically dangerous.”

*[This article was originally published by 51�Թ�’s content partner, .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Leveraging their longtime presence and hefty government backing, businesses eager to hedge their risks in and find new offshore production bases and markets are rushing into , setting up factories and taking on mentoring roles across a wide range of industries, from stock trading to rice growing. This latest economic “frontier” is all about the country’s potential — consultancy McKinsey estimates Myanmar’s current gross domestic product (GDP) at only 0.2% of Asia’s total, about the same size as those of or Johannesburg.

Myanmar’s opening to foreign investment with the end of sanctions imposed by Western governments against the former military-led regime was well-timed. Just as the new leadership in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, was looking for a way to reduce growing sway over the economy, new leadership, under Prime Minister , was seeking a foothold in a new emerging market. Countering the regional influence of China, given Tokyo’s frictions with Beijing over a territorial dispute, was an added bonus for the Abe government.

“The current investment opportunities [in Myanmar] are in pre-manufacturing, and more along the lines of infrastructure and agriculture,” says Edwin Keh, a lecturer in Wharton’s Operations and Information Management Department. A former chief operating officer of Walmart global procurement, Keh previously managed a consulting group that worked with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Myanmar.

Myanmar’s opening has brought on something akin to a “gold rush” of Japanese business people looking for opportunities. In 2013, some 66,187 Japanese visited the country, triple the figure two years earlier. But Japanese businesses, aware that good intentions are no guarantee of success, are approaching Myanmar with caution. So far, Japanese private corporate investment in Myanmar is still mainly confined to big infrastructure projects and logistics, and other services.

“Myanmar investments by Japanese are still small because of the infrastructure problems, such as shortage of electricity and a lack of proper industrial parks for company set-up,” notes Eitaro Kojima, an expert on Myanmar and acting director of the Asia and Oceania Division at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). “Moreover, the country lacks clarity of legal systems and various rules and regulations,” adds Kojima, who worked in Yangon as head of JETRO from 2007-11.

China’s $14.2 billion accumulated investments in Myanmar are mainly in oil and gas production and pipelines, dams, and related roads and port facilities.

In these early days, it is the biggest Japanese corporations — huge trading houses like Mitsubishi Corp., Marubeni Corp, Mitsui & Co Ltd and Sumitomo Corp — that have been moving aggressively ahead since the sanctions were lifted and Tokyo forgave billions in Myanmar debt, clearing the way for fresh borrowing.

A Long History

Japan has a long history in the country, dating back to its invasion during , which was followed by a period of reparations and development projects. Those projects were frozen after the crackdown in 1988, when the military fired on pro-democracy protesters. But many of the bigger Japanese companies kept a presence in Yangon while awaiting better times.

Within two weeks after Abe took office in late December 2012, Finance Minister Taro Aso was in Yangon, standing posed with his hand pointing forward during a visit to the Thilawa trade zone, which is being built by a Japanese-Myanmar joint venture. Marubeni, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo hold a joint 49% share of the company running the zone. Hiroshima-based Penta-Ocean Construction Co has the construction contract.

“On the public side, the sums are vast by standards,” says Sean Turnell, a professor at Macquarie University and an economist and expert on Myanmar. “The scale of involvement dwarfs that from the US or Australia.”

�����貹��’s desire to sell infrastructure and to expand overseas production bases dovetails with Myanmar’s top priorities of building a modern economy, and creating factory and service industry jobs to absorb an expected doubling of its urban population in the coming 15 years. China’s $14.2 billion accumulated investments in Myanmar are mainly in oil and gas production and pipelines, dams, and related roads and port facilities.

Oil and gas fields in northern Myanmar could be the biggest attraction, but any products that require a significant amount of transportation will need big investments in ports, roads and trains before they are exportable, Keh said in a 2011 Knowledge@Wharton on Western companies doing business in Myanmar.

While it vies for infrastructure projects, Japan is also gearing up for low-cost manufacturing and the consumer market. Its cooperation with Myanmar stretches from help for farmers, food aid and disaster prevention to dispatching financial experts to counsel the country on setting up a modern stock exchange and other financial institutions. Japanese companies are involved in building telecommunications networks, construction of bridges, airports and other infrastructure, in food and consumer goods retailing, logistics — just about every sector.

South Korea��was the biggest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the nine months ending December 2013, with a 29% share, followed by��Singapore, with about 28%.��Thailand��accounts for 19.2%, and the��UK�����Ի���Vietnam��about 7% each. Japan trailed with 1.7% and investment from China was at 0.8%.��

Figures compiled by the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry show 161 members as of May, up from about 51 in March 2011. More than a third of those members were involved in logistics and other services, about a quarter in construction, slightly more in manufacturing and the rest in finance and trading.

Shifting Investment

Despite the high degree to which it is “embedded” in Myanmar, Japan still lags behind other major Asian countries in terms of overall investment. In the fast-expanding hotels sector, for example, Hong Kong and other Asia-based hotel chains have snapped up opportunities to develop prime sites, including the ornate but rickety Yangon Railways headquarters, which the Peninsula Hotels chain has agreed to redevelop. Keppel Land, Accor, Daewoo Group, Shangri-La and Vietnam’s Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group, or HAGL, all have big projects already underway.

was the biggest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the nine months ending December 2013, with a 29% share, followed by , with about 28%. accounts for 19.2%, and the and about 7% each. Japan trailed with 1.7% and investment from China was at 0.8%. China’s share in accumulated FDI was more than 90% in the 2011 fiscal year, but had dropped to 31.5% as of January 2014 after the sharp cutback in investments in 2013, according to Myanmar’s Central Statistical Organization. Total FDI in Myanmar was estimated to be $4 billion for the fiscal year that ended March 31.

Investment flows are shifting away from mining and energy and into manufacturing and services, reflecting the government’s emphasis on trying to build up an industrial sector to deliver faster growth and more jobs — following the example set by China and, more recently, by Vietnam. In 2013, Myanmar attracted $1.8 billion in investment in manufacturing, accounting for 47% of the total. Other leading areas were transport and logistics and hotels and tourism, followed by energy and property development.

Although Japan has lagged other countries, such as Thailand and Singapore, in plunging into this new economic frontier, Myanmar leaders are repaying �����貹��’s forgiveness of billions of dollars in unpaid debt with a red carpet welcome. “Japan helped Myanmar when it needed help, and we will help Japan when it needs help,” U Win Aung, chairman of the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, told a recent Japanese business delegation organized by JETRO to showcase the Thilawa Special Economic Zone, a pet project of both governments. “Once this project is completed by mid-2015, this will help more Japanese companies to move into Myanmar,” JETRO’s Kojima says.

Thilawa is little more than a 400-hectare expanse of red, leveled dust — the preliminary groundwork having just been completed — but it represents Myanmar’s ambitions for a built-by-Japan manufacturing boom.

The Used Car Connection

For now, however, used autos are by far �����貹��’s biggest export to Myanmar, at more than 80% of the total, followed by construction materials and then a range of manufacturing components like textiles, electronics and steel. From Myanmar, Japanese imports mainly clothing, followed by seafood and other food-related items, timber and gems, according to data from JETRO. As two-way trade rocketed by 75% in 2012 from the year before to $1.93 billion, �����貹��’s longtime deficit with Myanmar swung to a surplus of $585.6 million.

Myanmar needs an average growth rate of about 7% and cumulative investments of about $650 billion by 2030, according to the McKinsey report. A large share of that will come from domestic savings, but about $170 billion will need to be from foreign investment.

Looking ahead to the days when Myanmar drivers will be buying new rather than used autos, Toyota and other major automakers are setting up showrooms there. For now, they mainly cater to expatriates such as diplomats, officials of NGOs and government officials who can afford to pay six figures for an SUV. But eventually they expect to serve Myanmar’s emerging market of newly affluent private local buyers.

Expanding that vision beyond Yangon, Mitsubishi Motors Corp, parent company Mitsubishi Corp and Yoma Strategic Holdings, the flagship of tycoon Serge Pun, have set up an auto after-sales service center in Yangon, saying they plan to set up facilities in the national capital, Naypyitaw, and in Mandalay.

But however optimistic Japanese officials are over the potential for Myanmar as a new consumer market and low-cost manufacturing base, the gold rush of investors into Yangon already is driving prices sharply higher, potentially narrowing profit margins.

Costs for land and rents in the city are already at levels comparable with downtown Tokyo, at more than $100 a square foot, up from a fifth of that level just two years ago, and compared with about $75 in New York City — and for much lower quality. Wage levels have more than doubled from about $50 a month for a factory worker in 2013 to more than $100 a month in 2014, factory managers say.

“Land prices have gone through the roof due to speculation, or in anticipation of more investments coming into the country,” notes Keh. “Lack of infrastructure is slowing down export manufacturing ambitions for the time being.”

McKinsey & Company, in a 2013 report, identified seven sectors it says have the potential to quadruple the country’s GDP: energy and mining, farming, manufacturing, and infrastructure are the four largest. Others such as tourism, telecommunications and financial services will grow faster, though from very low levels, the report says.

Myanmar needs an average growth rate of about 7% and cumulative investments of about $650 billion by 2030, according to the McKinsey report. A large share of that will come from domestic savings, but about $170 billion will need to be from foreign investment. That compares with the $40 billion in foreign investment Myanmar drew from 1989-2012, most of it from China.

Food and Timber

Apart from Thilawa and other export assembly zones, other niches with growth potential include food and timber processing and financial services. Trading house Mitsui & Co plans to set up joint-venture rice processing facilities in Yangon with Myanmar Agribusiness Public Corp, or MAPCO, to help raise the value-added of Myanmar’s rice exports as it ramps up production.

Before World War II, nearly half of Myanmar’s GDP came from agriculture, mainly rice exports. Farming still accounts for about 40% of all business activity in the country, and plans call for output to increase to the point where Myanmar could export 5 million tons a year. With exports forecast at 1.1 million tons in 2013-2014, and rural regions reporting shortages of farm labor, that appears a distant prospect, however. If Myanmar carries out reforms to modernize its agricultural sector, which have so far lagged other industries, �����貹��’s main farm machinery manufacturers, Yanmar and Kubota, would likely be looking to expand sales there.

In processed foods, Osaka-based noodle-maker Acecook, collaborating with trading house Marubeni, has set up an office in Yangon. It has plans to build a factory by 2017, expanding from its earlier overseas venture in Vietnam, where the company says it has sold more than 3 billion noodle meals so far.

Myanmar will need to watch carefully to avoid the pitfalls Vietnam has run into as it opened its economy to foreign trade and investment, Moody’s Ratings says in a report.��

Japanese trading companies are likewise involved in investments in Myanmar’s still barely developed timber processing industry. As the source of half of the world’s teak, Myanmar faces pressure to curb illegal exports of raw tropical hardwood, especially into China. Building a local industry to process the teak would be part of the process of bringing that illicit trade under control, and helping wean conflict-stricken border regions of their reliance on illegal trading in timber, opium and gems.

No Shangri-La

Japanese businesses remain relatively cautious for good reason: Myanmar is no Shangri-La. The latest survey by the government-affiliated Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO, ranked the country 182^nd of 189 countries in terms of ease of doing business in 2014, with deteriorations in such areas as construction permit approvals, electricity supply, financing and business registration compared with 2013. For logistics, Myanmar ranked 129^thof 155 countries surveyed. There are some signs of improvement, though, with international corruption watchdog Transparency International recording an improvement in perceptions of corruption over the past three years.

But the advantages appear to be winning over many investors. Wages, though rising quickly, are still generally the lowest in the region.

“I’m often asked if it’s the right time to invest in Myanmar. It depends on which sector you are in,” says Aung Thura, CEO and founder of Thura Swiss Ltd, a Myanmar-based consulting and research company. For energy and telecom — which are key infrastructure areas — now is the right time, he told a recent conference in Yangon. “If you’re in manufacturing where you need electricity, it might be too early because we don’t have reliable electricity yet.”

While the retail market is wide open, with few foreign or domestic competitors for most consumer products, the country’s distribution systems are archaic and complex, and banking services rudimentary to non-existent, notes Ramon Meguro, a professor of marketing at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Writing in the Nikkei Asian Review, he recommends partnering with local firms, such as brewery Asahi Group Holdings’ joint venture with local beverage maker Loi Hein.

Whether Myanmar will realize its potential as an emerging economy and fast-growing consumer market remains uncertain. It’s easy enough for hardware to “leapfrog.” The ubiquity of mobile phones across the developing world, where landlines have never been installed, attests to that. But ensuring consumers have the wherewithal to pay for air time is another issue, Aung Thura points out. “We cannot leapfrog in the development of purchasing power.”

Foreign investors have allies in Myanmar’s new entrepreneurial class of business people, many of whom are foreign-educated returnees. “What we try to tell lawmakers is to open up,” notes Tun Thura Thet, the founder of software company Myanmar Technology, who spent more than 15 years running his business under the former military regime before seeing things open up under the current government. “In China, they try to protect local businesses. We don’t want to do that. We want to move past that. We want to leapfrog.”

The key is to get foreign investors to create jobs, says Tun Thura Thet. But filling those jobs can be a challenge given the scarcity of skilled workers after so many long years of economic isolation, he adds. Those working in Yangon speak of government civil servants skimping on sleep to try to get more work done as the country prepares to host the ASEAN summit later this year. “The limits are in human resources and capacity.”

Heavy government regulation, an opaque legal system and very weak physical infrastructure are other constraints. “For financial institutions and insurance companies starting up here, the most difficult thing has to be the lack of clarity in the legal system,” says Robert Walsh, managing partner at S&S Project Management in Yangon. “As yet, many necessary laws have not been drafted, let alone the accompanying implementing instructions. So any such company setting up here is running the risk of having their basis of operations cut off should new laws be passed that proscribe their activities.”

According to a recent Knowledge@Wharton on Chinese investments in Myanmar: “This severely underdeveloped and misgoverned nation faces serious uncertainty over its true ability to transform and to leapfrog into today’s technologically advanced and fast-paced markets.” Reforms in Myanmar “will take place at the pace the Myanmar generals are comfortable with,” Vibhanshu Shekhar, a research fellow at the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi, said in Knowledge@Wharton article on the country opening its doors to foreign investments.

Myanmar will need to watch carefully to avoid the pitfalls Vietnam has run into as it opened its economy to foreign trade and investment, Moody’s Ratings says in a report. Vietnam’s Achilles heel has been its weak institutional framework and inadequately regulated banking system, which have not kept pace with the demands of a rapidly growing economy, according to the report.

The huge sway held by companies and business people with connections to the military and the massive concentration of wealth in their hands is a daunting barrier for newcomers, both local and foreign, the report notes. Investment laws requiring hiring of local workers are putting huge pressures on would-be new businesses. Under the rules, local workers must constitute three-quarters of a company’s skilled workforce by the end of its sixth year of operations.

Capital is also in short supply. Myanmar has four state-owned banks and 22 private banks, but so far none of the 35 foreign banks with representative offices in Myanmar have been allowed to begin operations, restricting the availability of financing for foreign investments.

Inevitably, the devil will lie in the details of how Myanmar manages this transformation from isolated backwater to a bustling market economy. With civil conflict still ringing its heartland, stemming from violence between Buddhists and Muslims in the east and fighting along other borders, the government’s ability to ensure stability will be key.

“Initially, it was executives flying in to this nice, unspoiled, exotic location,” says Turnell. “Now, it’s the nuts and bolts: degraded infrastructure, high rents. The initial hyper-confidence … has come off a bit. The real threat is the violence.”

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Foreign policy seldom occupies an important position in political agendas during electoral campaigns, and 2014 in India is hardly any different. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate has, however, evoked a little more interest from various sections. One reason for this abnormal curiosity is that anything Narendra Modi does attracts attention.

Another reason is the refusal by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States to grant Modi a diplomatic visa because his alleged role in the 2002 Gujarat riots makes him an even more interesting prime ministerial candidate, especially given his apparent popularity with large swathes of the Indian people. Conversely, the Gujarat chief minister has enjoyed much success in his foreign visits to China, Japan and Singapore.

Modi himself has said little about the shape his foreign policy would take but his actions as chief minister belie a strong emphasis on trade, particularly with Asia and the countries of the Indian Ocean rim. Yet commercial links alone do not dictate foreign relations and, in this era of the global village, Modi must think on several interconnected factors that will affect the security and esteem of India.

Structural Issues

The making and study of foreign policy is beset with difficulties at several levels. First, there are structural issues — despite scores of its own languages, India is predominantly an English-speaking state and moves in Anglophone circles. The dominant views in this system are set by the US and, to a lesser extent, Britain.

This is largely due to the presence of hundreds of well-staffed and well-funded think-tanks who see the world through Anglophone eyes. Issues such as non-proliferation, global warming and terrorism are defined, unchallenged, by American interests. Multilingual historians are often surprised by the diversity of debate in other languages, even when there is broad national consensus.

The Anglophone discourse is a result not of some master conspiracy, but of a failure to empathize with rationalities other than one’s own. India’s best response to the present situation would be to open its own national archives to ��and encourage its universities to produce policy experts in the plethora of fields that governments usually interfere in. A narrative informed by the history of Indian policymaking is the first step in generating superior inputs to current policymakers.

A second challenge India faces in its international relations is infrastructure: the lack of energy, transportation, public safety, health, and a sound legal system make the country����to foreign investment.

It is telling that an Egypt still recovering from the turmoil of the Arab Spring saw more tourists in 2013 than India did. Though infrastructure does not strictly fall in the realm of external affairs, it makes an enormous difference in attracting valuable partners and forming strong ties with them.

A third question Modi must ponder on is the structure of��, the stick or hard power of foreign policy. What sort of force structure is required for the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts?

With the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia, it is unlikely that India’s neighbors will engage in 20th century-style conflicts over land with India. Rather, they will rely on asymmetric warfare and/or well-trained fast and mobile units with heavy firepower, good lines of communication, and a high degree of stealth. India will need to be able to deploy force in a variety of theatres — maritime anti-piracy operations, mountainous border engagements, thrusts across the desert and others.

Remedying these fundamental deficiencies will give India a stronger hand, despite its understaffed Foreign Service, with which to project its views and defend��its interests in the international community.

Central & South Asia

A state’s immediate neighbors are always of the greatest concern. India has seen its influence slip considerably in recent years or, at least, has had its impotence exposed. With smaller states who can pose no military threat on their own like the Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, India must be generous in its development aid and facilitate closer ties via education, cultural exchanges and easier travel regulations.

However, India must be careful to avoid the tail wagging the dog — preferential treatment must be reciprocated by good faith. Modi must see to it that Indian officials do not come off as overbearing and condescending to the neighborhood as they have been����of in the past. Instead, they must walk that fine line between arrogant regional power and regional locus of power.

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan will shift some of the����of keeping the Central Asian country free from Taliban rule onto India. It is more logical for Afghans to fight the Taliban for their own country than for India to follow in the erroneous footsteps of imperial Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

India must act in concert with other regional powers with ��— Russia and Iran — to help Afghanistan repel the Taliban and rebuild its society and economy. Any less of a commitment would irredeemably jeopardize Indian economic and security interests. The challenge would be to strangle the Taliban’s flow of aid from Pakistan. Modi must keep international attention and condemnation on Pakistan’s aid to the Islamists in Afghanistan, while cobbling together a coalition to provide military and financial aid to the non-theocratic forces in Kabul.

Iran can be another important regional partner for India. Both countries have somewhat similar interests in Afghanistan, and Iran is also the last stop on the proposed International North-South Trade Corridor (INSTC) that would connect the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea and serve Turkey, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and��. Iran would be a vital partner in this project as well as in providing security to Afghanistan against the Taliban.

Although Iran does not look to India as a major��, there are, nonetheless, several projects of bilateral interest that India must push to develop quickly. Among these are the much-talked about development of Chabahar port, its attendant road, rail and pipeline infrastructure, and oil and gas pipelines between the two countries. Modi must put Iran toward the top of his foreign policy agenda not only to capture a new, post-sanctions Iranian market, but also for the ripple effect the INSTC can have for trade in the region.

Over the years, Pakistan has elevated itself from a nuisance to a threat with its support of terrorism from behind its nuclear shield. Endless summits have failed to silence the guns in Kashmir, let alone bring peace to the region. In fact, all evidence still points to support of terrorist cells by various arms of the Pakistani government, while men like Malik Ishaq and Hafiz Saeed roam free.

At this low juncture, one option left to Modi is to����and downgrade diplomatic relations to the consular level. In the past, India has shown itself as too willing to talk regardless of provocations and dishonored commitments by the other side. A concerted effort to highlight, internationally, Pakistan’s links to terrorism must be mounted. India must try to throttle foreign aid to Pakistan or affix conditions that demand aid be��sanitized from contact with terrorism via sub-contractors, finance, labor and so on.

Any talks that do take place between the two states must only be via a third party. Modi must be bold — but not reckless — and explore��other strategies to put pressure on Islamabad, be it via Afghanistan, Balochistan or along the Line of Control (LoC).

*[Read the final part . A version of this article was originally published on Jaideep Prabhu’s .]

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By Kalyan M. Kemburi

Over the last two decades, cruise missiles were predominantly deployed by a select group of advanced industrial countries, in particular the United States. Subsequently, there had been a wider use of this weapon system by militaries, partly due to globalization which accelerated technology diffusion, but also because of affordability and operational requirements (in particular the search for asymmetric capabilities). 

Asian militaries top this list. The main advantage of cruise missiles involves the ability to strike targets accurately almost under any weather condition from a long-range by evading most air defenses, and with minimal risk to friendly forces. 

Asian Militaries and Cruise Missiles

Although most countries in Asia have acquired anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM), China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan are developing or have deployed land-attack cruise missiles (LACM). Some Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam have also expressed interest. Japan has indicated interest in a system that could endow it with preemptive strike capabilities — for which cruise missiles could fit the bill.  

For countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the high-cost of deploying missile defenses and the treaty restrictions in developing ballistic missiles have made cruise missiles an attractive system to strike against potential adversaries' ballistic missiles and artillery systems. 

As with any military technology, there is always a dynamic between defense and offence. Deployment of cruise missiles have also resulted in consequent developments in defense: active countermeasures include advances in early warning systems and the deployment of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, as well as the strengthening of passive defenses such as installations holding critical assets like aircraft or command and control equipment. Moreover, new operational requirements have intensified efforts to acquire high-speed cruise missiles. 

R&D in Supersonic and Hypersonic Systems 

Five countries in Asia — China, Japan, India, South Korea and Taiwan — have either civilian and/or military programs aimed at developing supersonic and hypersonic systems. It is generally agreed that supersonic systems (powered by ramjet engine) operate in the range of Mach 2-4 and hypersonic (scramjet engine) over Mach 5; most of the deployed LACMs fly at subsonic speeds of around 800km/hr. 

China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center and the National University of Defense Technology are currently working toward scramjet propulsion, pulse-detonation engines and turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engines, with an aim to eventually develop hypersonic missiles and aircraft. Further, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics has reportedly developed an experimental scramjet. 

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is involved in developing high-speed air-breathing propulsion for a hypersonic aircraft. JAXA is also collaborating with institutions based in Australia, Germany, Italy and the US in developing scramjet-based systems for space access. In 2012, Japan reportedly tested a rocket-based combined-cycle engine model under Mach 8. 

India currently deploys the ramjet-powered supersonic LACM Brahmos flying at 2.5-2.8 Mach, and has plans to collaborate with Russia to develop a kerosene-based hypersonic Brahmos 2. Concurrently, the Defense Research and Development Organization is working on a hypersonic system that could fly at Mach 6-7 speed propelled by scramjet. Similarly, for space access, India's civilian space agency has been working on a hydrogen-fueled scramjet engine. 

Taiwan's Hsiung Feng III (HF-3) LACM is propelled by a ramjet engine flying at a maximum speed of Mach 2 with an estimated range of 150-200 km. Initially developed as an ASCM by Chung Shan International Institute of Science and Technology, it was later reported that the missile also has land attack capabilities and entered into service in 2008. 

A new entrant of the cruise missile club, South Korea, has also been developing a supersonic Haeseong-2 LACM from the existing ASCM Haeseong-1 (Sea Star, or SSM-700K). In September 2011, Korea Times reported that the missile was slated for deployment by the end of 2013 and has a range in excess of 500 kms.

Additionally, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) has on the drawing board a two-stage Mach 4 scramjet propelled surface to air interceptor. Reportedly, KARI has ground-tested various scramjet components required for this concept. 

Evolution or Revolution in Fire Power 

Supersonic cruise missiles would increasingly become an attractive option due to the following factors.

Firstly, they reduce sensor-to-shooter to-target times. A supersonic LACM flying toward a target at a distance of 1,000 kms has clear time advantage of over 60 minutes over its subsonic counterpart.

Secondly, the kinetic energy of a supersonic missile not only increases the explosive power of a warhead, but also facilitates reduction of the warhead payload, which helps in expanding the range of the missile. Moreover, they are also very useful for targeting hardened targets; this is important given the hardening of installations as part of key passive defensive measures undertaken by many countries.

Thirdly, supersonic LACM used in conjunction with subsonic and theatre ballistic missiles create processing difficulties for any advanced early warning and air defense system. 

On the other hand, hypersonic air-breathing missile is a key emerging technology. For an effective and efficient use of this technology, changes are necessary in organizational structures, decision-making processes, operational concepts, and C4ISR systems. For most Asian militaries, accustomed to organizational and procedural inertia, bringing these changes in itself is revolutionary.

Moreover, enormous technical and financial resources are necessary to deploy a hypersonic cruise missile; therefore, over the next 10-15 years, supersonic cruise missiles offer a more viable complement to the existing cruise and ballistic missiles. 

Asian militaries are still in the process of inducting subsonic LACMs — supersonics in some cases — in significant numbers, and currently are working on innovative concepts and organizational changes that aim to take advantage of these systems in affecting the outcomes on the battlefield. Therefore, induction of high-speed missiles is evolutionary. 

Nevertheless, in a decade, military commanders in Asia would be able to have a cruise missile delivered to their target 1,500 kms away in less than 30 minutes. 

*[Note: Kalyan M. Kemburi is an Associate Research Fellow with the Military Transformations Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. This article was originally published by .]

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