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Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares to take an oath in Beijing, March 2023. Mark R. Cristino / Reuters

MundoAsia

Figuring out how policy decisions are made in authoritarian regimes has always been hard.  Winston Churchill famously referred to Soviet policymaking as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—and he was not much wrong. Observers in the West could see the policy output of the Soviet Union, be it under Joseph Stalin or Leonid Brezhnev, by what those leaders said publicly and how they acted. But it was not easy to figure out what was going on inside their regimes, because access to information was so limited and fear prevented insiders from communicating even what they thought outsiders ought to know.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsiaEuropa, , , ,

From within a war, it is hard to think about what comes next. Rarely has this been more true than for the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Our thinking is necessarily clouded by the suffering that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression has inflicted on the people of Ukraine. It is also hindered by lack of experience with this kind of warfare. Together, these make it hard to imagine where we go from here, especially amid the dangers of the era of great-power rivalry that this invasion has brought into being. It will be a time of intense competition and menace—much less stable than the Cold War and much riskier than any time since that conflict ended.…  Seguir leyendo »

A display in “Seventy Years of the Atomic Industry: A Chain Reaction of Success,” organized by the Rosatom agency, Moscow, Russia, September 2, 2015

Europa, , , ,

As Russian tanks rolled on their way to encircle Kyiv, and Russian bombs and rockets drove Ukrainians toward their borders as refugees, a familiar sense of helplessness spread in the West. We can assist those who flee. And we can hit Moscow with sanctions and exclusions. But as was the case with Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, we cannot intervene directly to help. We cannot deploy NATO’s vastly superior air force to close the skies over Ukraine and save the thousands of Ukrainians who will otherwise die as a result of Russia’s war of aggression. We in the West cannot send our troops to fight alongside the heroic defenders of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro.…  Seguir leyendo »

President George H. W. Bush, left, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1991. Credit Rick Wilking/Reuters

Europa, , ,

The Cold War as a system of states ended on a cold and gray December day in Moscow in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence. Communism itself, in its Marxist-Leninist form, had ceased to exist as a practical ideal for how to organize society.

“If I had to do it over again, I would not even be a Communist,” Bulgaria’s deposed Communist leader, Todor Zhivkov, had said the year before. “And if Lenin were alive today, he would say the same thing. I must now admit that we started from the wrong basis, from the wrong premise.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

For a long time China has prided itself on the gradual improvement and solidification of its relations with the countries of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, mainly through economic means. Since Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s, Chinese leaders have emphasized the significance of shedding decades, if not centuries, of mistrust and confrontation and moving toward cooperation and integration. The China-ASEAN free-trade zone, which came into effect four years ago, was intended to be the symbol of this new relationship.

Over the last five years or so, however, many of the most promising aspects of this cooperation have come into doubt.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

China's more assertive foreign policy over the last two years has played a key role in getting two arch-conservatives — Japan's Shinzo Abe and South Korea's Park Geun-hye — elected to lead their respective countries. Some Chinese observers believe that Abe and Park will be forced by China's inexorable rise to come to terms with their giant neighbor. Don't count on it. To much of its region, China's behavior as it is coming of age as a modern superpower is eerily reminiscent of its past policy as a regional hegemon.

For a very long time, imperial China dominated its wider region.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

There are few economies and societies on earth more complementary than China’s and Japan’s. The Chinese are relatively young, poor and restless and fiercely committed to economic growth. The Japanese are relatively old and sated, but technologically advanced and devoted to guarding their high standard of living. Proximity would seem to make the two nations ideally suited to benefit from each other.

But Japan is afraid of China’s rise, because the Chinese economy is so much more dynamic than Japan’s. And China is troubled by Japan, because the island nation seems to act as an unsinkable American aircraft carrier just off its coast.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

When he takes over as party leader this week at the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Vice President Xi Jinping will face a host of ills. For all its newfound wealth, China is — to put it simply — very badly governed.

Corruption is rampant, the provinces are neglected, and current party leader Hu Jintao has put off much-needed political reforms for a decade.

To make changes at home easier to push through, Xi, who is expected to become president next year, may be tempted to pursue a populist foreign policy. Xi has already positioned himself in line with the nationalist instincts of many younger Chinese on a number of foreign matters.…  Seguir leyendo »