Asia-Pacific Archive

One aspect of the Obama administration’s foreign policy that has provoked condemnation across the political spectrum is its approach to human rights around the world. Critics have pointed to a visible tendency to relegate human rights to the background in dealing with offending nations, as Washington keeps its focus on what it deems more important objectives. With the volume of criticism rising, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a detailed presentation of her — and presumably the administration’s — approach to human rights. Her speech at Georgetown University last Sunday offered a fascinating view inside the administration’s evolving philosophy. In […]

America’s decline and China’s rise are perhaps the two most-cited trends in global power dynamics these days. Speaking at the Carnegie Council in New York on Monday, council Vice Chairman Dr. Charles Kegley used the historical context of previous hegemons and the trajectories they followed to argue that the two trends will indeed continue, representing a transfer of power from one hegemon to its successor. How that transfer of power is handled by both will determine global security in the near future. The Fading Power. Based on America’s historically pendulum-like swings between internationalism and isolationism, Kegley says we are now […]

The conventional way to look at the Afghanistan war is as a multilateral coalition forming a security scaffolding around and upon which a stable Afghan nation can form. But if you consider the strategic network that is emerging from the war, it might be more accurate to say that Afghanistan is the strategic scaffolding around and upon which a stable regional arrangement is forming. The thought was triggered by Saurav Jha’s WPR briefing on India-Iran relations (which, if you missed it, is really worth taking the time to read). It took shape around Nikolas Gvosdev’s recent WPR columns, in which […]

After more than a year of fighting, the resumption of peace negotiations between the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was a welcome development in Mindanao, an island mired in endemic violence. But although talks have resumed in earnest, persistent structural obstacles mean that hopes for a lasting peace remain slim. The most positive development that has emerged from the latest effort is an internationalization of the process, which has now clearly moved beyond the informal and largely ineffectual mediation of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. On Sept. 15, Manila and the MILF agreed […]

KUALA LUMPUR — As Thai leaders come to terms with an ailing monarch and grapple with the headline-grabbing antics of antagonists in Cambodia, insurgents in the deep south of the country have been raising the stakes in their bid for autonomy. Casualties blamed on shootings, bombings and military raids have become an almost daily occurrence in recent months, leading Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Malaysian counterpart, Najib Razak, to tour the troubled southern province of Narathiwat on Dec. 9. Together they urged locals to condemn the violence, while promising further talks and some degree of autonomy to the […]

Two years after an unexpected surge in Dutch support for the Afghan war, the Netherlands has taken the first steps towards officially withdrawing from the NATO coalition in Afghanistan beginning in late 2010. A non-binding parliamentary decision in October rejecting an extension of the Dutch mission represents a striking break from the overall trend within NATO of deepening the alliance’s commitment to the eight-year-old war. The U.S. military is adding 30,000 troops to its current 70,000-strong force in Afghanistan, while the U.K., Italy and Poland — as well as non-NATO-members South Korea and Georgia — have also signaled their willingness […]

WSJ Hong Kong Bureau Chief Peter Stein interviews Mongolian PrimeMinister Batbold Sukhbaatar about the country’s relations with Chinaand the U.S. Sukhbaatar says he welcomes investment from China as wellas other partners that have “balanced interests.”

Afghan and American security forces work together daily in Afghanistan,however this relationship is not always easy. With a difficult languagebarrier, differing leadership styles and a lack of resources, the taskof building up a self sufficient Afghan Army proves difficult. WPR’sDavid Axe reports for Voice of America.

When, upon being elected, Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama spoke of building fraternal seas and constructing a European Union-styled East Asian Community, critics denounced him as a naive peacenik. But Hatoyama’s low-profile Nov. 23 decision to commission a new DDH-22 helicopter destroyer — Japan’s largest military vessel since World War II — suggests he is actually striking a shrewd balance between promoting regionalism and protecting Japan’s regional and global interests through robust naval capabilities. The DDH-22 is officially designated as a “helicopter-carrying destroyer” by Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces (MSDF). But with its flush flight deck and large, starboard-side island […]

It’s not often that a U.S. official defends Iran at an international forum. But U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman did just that at the sixth annual Manama Dialogue, a regional security conference organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies held in Bahrain on Dec. 11-13. Feltman deflected charges by the Yemeni and Saudi governments that Iran was providing military assistance to Houthi rebels operating along the Yemeni-Saudi border. Meanwhile, at the same conference, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki provided the most detailed counteroffer to date from Tehran regarding proposals that Iran exchange its […]

Writing at East Asia Forum, Yusuke Ishihara argues that if the Bush-era U.S.-Japanese posture toward China consisted of “hedging without reassurance” due to Sino-Japanese tensions, the current posture is closer to “reassurance without hedging” due to emerging tensions in the U.S.-Japanese alliance. All that in the context of the military cooperation agreements signed last month between China and Japan, including maritime rescue exercises and other mil-to-mil communication and cooperation exercises. Clearly, we’re in a moment of uncertainty in terms of both the U.S. regional posture in Asia, and its future as a superpower. Given the new party in power in […]

Last week, I noted that the GOP’s defense hawks have taken to accusing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats of exploiting America’s health care crisis to further their long-term “plot” to curtail defense spending — and, by extension, our nation’s capacity for military interventions abroad. The implied beneficiary of this “unilateral surrender”? Why, the Chinese, of course, who’d thereby be left free to conquer the developing world in their unending quest to secure raw materials. But a funny thing happened on the way to China’s presumed domination of the world’s natural resources: It ran into the same core problem that […]

The Asia Society hosted a panel of Afghanistan experts on Tuesday in light of President Barack Obama’s recently announced new Afghanistan strategy. The panel — comprised of Peter Galbraith, former deputy special representative of the secretary-general of the United Nations to Afghanistan; Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University; and 2009 Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani — was quick to identify the difficult position Obama finds himself in, not just on the ground, but over the airwaves. As Ghani pointed out, in a globalized world, there is no such thing as giving two different speeches […]

While Afghanistan has often been touted as the crucible for the regeneration of the Western alliance, it also offers another opportunity for the United States: a means to promote a stabilizing modus vivendi between India and China. In his recent WPR Briefing on China’s stake in containing Pakistani militants, Michael Kugelman observed, “Pakistan’s instability threatens the security of China’s citizens, its government and its energy imports,” particularly when it comes to the “combustible province of Baluchistan.” He notes, “Whenever China has demanded something of Islamabad, the latter has often complied.” And in surveying the Indian strategic view of Afghanistan, Dan […]

Bangladeshis are bearing the burden of a climate change problem thatthey’ve done little to create. As leading nations converge at theclimate change conference in Copenhagen, Bangladesh continues to face agrim fate should global warming continue at an accelerated pace. Bymid-century, one-fifth of the nation could be under water, renderingabout 20 million people homeless.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal speaks with Charlie Rose about what”winning” in Afghanistan would mean. McChrystal’s assessment ofAfghanistan has been at the core of the new Afghanistan strategy. Hesays that the United States’ overall goal should be to give the Afghanpeople a reason to believe that they can live in peace. In a conflictcolored by political and cultural complexities just as much as combat,McChrystal says the Afghan people will ultimately determine who has wonthe war.

We’ve been linking pretty regularly in the Off the Radar News Roundups to the Hatoyama government’s difficulty in finding an acceptable alternative solution to the Futenma base relocation in Japan. Which is a problem, because the DPJ campaigned pretty extensively on renegotiating the issue. Clearly it looks like Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama will have to backtrack, and clearly there will be political costs to that, among them, possibly losing his upper house majority due to a coalition partner’s defection. Tobias Harris offers some insights into how Hatoyama’s calculations ended up so wildly off the mark. He also makes a compelling […]