Blog Posts
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Thursday, 11 May 2017
Uncertainty concerning President Donald Trump’s China and North Korea policies have instilled new fears of war in East Asia, a region that has enjoyed a surprising level of peace for almost four decades. Yet, if China treats Trump with care, the region may remain peaceful. The text in this post is a slightly modified version of a text published in a Policy Brief by the think tank ThinkChina.dk. The Story of the East Asian Peace In order to assess the future of peace in East Asia we need to understand how it came about. As can be seen in the ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Tuesday, 25 April 2017
When Chinese president Xi Jinping met US president Donald Trump in Florida on 6–7 April, Xi convinced his host that it is not easy to exert influence on North Korea, but apparently promised to help the United States to the best of his ability. In practice, it may be Trump who helps China. Following the summit at his holiday paradise of Mar-a-Lago, Trump has said that he promised Xi favourable trading terms with the United States on the condition that Xi helps the United States against North Korea. There are means of exerting forceful pressure, but using them is risky Many people are ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Tuesday, 21 March 2017
Stein Tønnesson delivered this year’s The Fjord Memorial Lecture at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. The lecture discusses Trump’s team of advisors, calls for fighting the increasing use of lies in political campaigning, sees Trump’s election as having weakened democracy worldwide, and perceives a major risk to world peace. Tønnesson ends the lecture with four scenarios for how Trump’s foreign policy may develop: chaos, status quo, lucky bargaining, or war. Oh Mr Fjord, – it feels strange that you’re fictional while Donald Trump is real. You, the trainee reporter at the Norwegian local newspaper The Dawn [Dagningen]; the ...
Posted by Pavel Baev on Thursday, 30 June 2016
Expectations regarding President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing on Saturday (June 25) had been rather subdued, and the modest results were mostly immaterial. Last year, the two leaders grandiosely celebrated their countries’ World War II victory over the Axis powers; and in 2014, they announced a great increase in economic ties and an allegedly historic natural gas deal (see EDM, May 22, 2014). But the implementation of this deal has been delayed, and the volume of bilateral trade—instead of the promised fast expansion—has contracted by about 30 percent. Thus, Putin’s argument that the Russia-China relationship should be redefined from a ...
Posted by Pavel Baev on Friday, 22 April 2016
With the explosion of the Ukraine crisis in spring 2014, Russia made a determined effort to upgrade its strategic partnership with China and achieved instant success. Large-scale economic contracts were signed in a matter of a few months, and the military parades in Moscow and Beijing in respectively May and September 2015, in which the two leaders stood shoulder to shoulder, were supposed to show the readiness of two world powers to combine their military might. In fact, however, the partnership has encountered serious setbacks and as of spring 2016, is significantly off-track. It is the economic content of bi-lateral ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Thursday, 3 September 2015
70 years ago, Japan signed an agreement of formal surrender on an American warship in Tokyo Bay. The anniversary of this event will be marked in Beijing today, September 3rd by a massive military parade in which Chinese and Russian soldiers march together. President Xi Jinping’s most important guest during the parade will be Russian president Vladimir Putin. Thanks to Putin, the memory of World War II has shifted from Europe to Asia. Xi and Putin will celebrate their joint victory over German Nazism and Japanese militarism. When Russia invaded Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine last year, an ...
Posted by Pavel Baev on Tuesday, 1 September 2015
The bilateral meeting in Beijing will be demonstratively cordial but loaded with mutual disappointment. Putin cannot fail to see that his hopes for harvesting rich dividends from closer Russian ties with China have failed to materialize and delivered him to a position of one-sided dependency. Xi, meanwhile, has few doubts about the trajectory of Russia’s crisis and probably understands that Putin’s mismanagement brings risks of a catastrophically hard landing. While Russia’s aggressive assault on the European security system is not helpful for China’s plans regarding the evolutionary transformation of the global order. Vladimir Putin has announced his intention to address ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Friday, 24 July 2015
Since the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979 – a period of 36 years – there has not been one single war between states in the whole of East Asia, a region comprising one third of mankind, and which was ravaged by some of the word’s worst wars from the 1840s to the 1970s. There have been internal armed conflicts in several Southeast Asian countries since then (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand) but no interstate wars. Yet there have been some serious incidents, like the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in 2010, presumably by a North Korean torpedo, ...
Posted by Pavel Baev on Wednesday, 22 July 2015
The United States needed Russian support to conclude the Iranian nuclear deal. As U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged, “we would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us.” But with U.S.-Russian relations at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War, Russian support came as somewhat of a surprise, even to Obama. So, why was Russia willing to support an Iran deal that even the normally anti-American Russian media describes as Obama’s personal achievement? As usual, the answer is far from simple and resides ultimately in the fevered mind of ...
Posted by Espen Geelmuyden Rød on Tuesday, 3 March 2015
Today almost half of China’s 1.3 billion inhabitants are online, along with 85 million Russians and 17 million Saudis. The proportion of people with Internet access in these countries will soon be comparable to that of the United States, Germany and Japan. But what are the political consequences of allowing people living in dictatorships Internet access? This question has been hotly debated in recent years and for good reason. Access to the Internet fundamentally changes the way people obtain information and communicate with each other. Since authoritarian governments rely on controlling the information flow and restrictions on communication to stay ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Tuesday, 24 February 2015
The Ukraine crisis has made Russia more dependent on China. Putin is popular in Beijing, and Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are the best of friends. But can China save Russia from its crisis? 70 years ago, from 4-11 February 1945, Josef Stalin received US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British prime minister Winston Churchill, at Yalta in the Crimea. Stalin was at the height of his power. Without informing Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who had been fighting against Japan since 1937, the “great leaders” agreed that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan as soon as ...
Posted by Erica Chenoweth on Tuesday, 17 February 2015
Since at least 2011, the Chinese government has censored numerous websites on the topic of nonviolent resistance, including websites for the Albert Einstein Institution, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, an online bibliography of scholarship of nonviolent action, and the website for the NAVCO data project, among others. A month ago, the Chinese government allegedly blocked Google, along with a variety of search terms such as the phrase “waging nonviolence.” It’s revealing that content related to nonviolent struggle would be so concerning to the Chinese government. Read more at Political Violence @ a Glance, where the full text was posted ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Monday, 17 November 2014
Russian and Chinese presidents aim to divide US and allies, including Japan, with WWII celebration. When Chinese President Xi Jinping met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Beijing for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, he stated that “Japan must look at history squarely and more towards the future.” Xi’s carefully selected words were taken from a text agreed upon in advance by the two countries’ foreign ministries. Behind the words lurk an agreement Xi has made with Russian President Vladimir Putin to jointly use the 70th anniversary in 2015 to “safeguard the outcome of the victory of World War II ...
Posted by Pavel Baev on Wednesday, 12 November 2014
In a case of striking symbolism, President Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if seeking reassurance against the specter of a mass public uprising. The dismantling of that icon of the Cold War signified a breakthrough in finally achieving a Europe united by the vision of freedom and democracy. But for Putin, as his past remarks suggest, it was a painfully traumatic experience that left him forever in fear of a sudden explosion of popular discontent (Gazeta.ru, November 4). The Chinese leadership shares his deep hostility to revolutions and ...
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Wednesday, 8 October 2014
World War 1 was primarily a European War. World War 2 was both European and Asian. World War 3 has not yet occurred. If it does, it will be mainly Asian. Provided the pattern of alliances and strategic partnerships continues to look the way it does today, World War 3 will pit a Russia-supported China against a grand alliance of the United States, Japan, India, Indonesia and Australia. This grand alliance will win the war but at the prize of unimaginable destruction, even risk of a nuclear exchange. The New Centre of the World East Asia is now the world’s ...