Kim Jong-un is scheduled to visit Moscow this May as one of the Kremlin's numerous guests of honor for the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. This will be his first visit abroad since he succeeded his father Kim Jong-il as the ruler of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in December 2011.
Kim Jong-un's trip to Moscow is one indication of the warming relationship between Russia and North Korea. The past year has seen a flurry of high-level exchanges...
From world-economy to American world-empire
What is the nature of the modern world order? Answers to this question are incalculable many. However, the one provided by Salvatore Babones, a native New Yorker and currently a professor at the University of Sydney (salvatorebabones.com), has recently struck me as probably the most compelling. His article, published by Far Eastern Federal University’s Oriental Institute Journal, is available here (FULL TEXT)
Challenging a conventional wisdom...
On July 3, 1988 Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the US Navy cruiser USS Vincennes. All 290 people on board were killed. The civilian airliner was shot down in Iranian airspace while flying a regularly scheduled flight on its registered flight path. The incident occurred more than 10,000 km away from the United States.
There were no international calls for sanctions on the United States. American businesses were not penalized and American officials were not inconvenienced...
... task: anti-aircraft and ballistic missile defence; anti-submarine and surface ships warfare; supporting the amphibious operation or suppressing enemy’s military and economic infrastructure. In the Asia Pacific Aegis-equipped ships are deployed by the USA, Japan and Republic of Korea. There are plans in Australia, Canada, Taiwan to build such destroyers. Moreover China and Russia have Aegis analogs of indigenous design. It’s notable that Aegis-equipped ships are the backbone of the Japanese ...
The cancellation of Obama’s visit to Moscow made compellingly clear what previously many have suspected: the current presidents of the United States and Russia are in a state of conflict. Perhaps the problem is the two men’s individual psychological incompatibility – this sometimes happens between politicians. However, in this particular case much more fundamental differences may be playing out. And here I am not referring to the divergences in national interests of Russia and the...
The rivalry between the US and China for primacy in the Asia-Pacific, and then possibly on a global scale, is becoming the main story of world politics in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
But how, in the first place, did China grow so strong as to be able to challenge the world’s only (as yet) super-power? The answer is well known: the colossal growth of China’s economy. From 1980 to 2012, the PRC’s GDP increased 50 times.[1] As one might have expected, Beijing is...
At noon on the 1st of October 2012, the first Osprey V-22 aircraft landed at Futenma Marine Corps Air Station on Japan’s Okinawa Island. The controversial deployment of this ungainly looking aircraft (a hybrid between a helicopter and fixed-wing plane) has exposed tensions between centre and periphery in Japanese politics, revealed major fault-lines in the U.S.-Japan military alliance, and demonstrated far-wider strategic shifts and geopolitical miscalculations by key states in East Asia.
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