Peaceful Change in Northeast Asia: Maintaining the “Minimal Peace”

Author(s):  
Bhubhindar Singh

Northeast Asia is usually associated with conflict and war. Out of the five regional order transitions from the Sinocentric order to the present post–Cold War period, only one was peaceful, the Cold War to post–Cold War transition. In fact, the peaceful transition led to a state of minimal peace in post–Cold War Northeast Asia. As the chapter discusses, this was due to three realist-liberal factors: America’s hegemonic role, strong economic interdependence, and a stable institutional structure. These factors not only ensured development and prosperity but also mitigated the negative effects of political and strategic tensions between states. However, this minimal peace is in danger of unraveling. Since 2010, the region is arguably in the early stages of another transition fueled by the worsening Sino-US competition. While the organizing ideas of liberal internationalism—economic interdependence and institutional building—will remain resilient, whether or not minimal peace is sustainable will be determined by the outcome of the US-China competition.

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 1002-1026 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byungwon Woo ◽  
Eunbin Chung

How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid even to those who support its position already. We empirically demonstrate that the US provides more aid to countries who hold unfavorable positions to the US only in the post-Cold War era.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimia Zare ◽  
Habibollah Saeeidinia

Iran and Russia have common interests, especially in political terms, because of the common borders and territorial neighborhood. This has led to a specific sensitivity to how the two countries are approaching each other. Despite the importance of the two countries' relations, it is observed that in the history of the relations between Iran and Russia, various issues and issues have always been hindered by the close relations between the two countries. The beginning of Iran-Soviet relations during the Second Pahlavi era was accompanied by issues such as World War II and subsequent events. The relations between the two countries were influenced by the factors and system variables of the international system, such as the Cold War, the US-Soviet rivalry, the Second World War and the entry of the Allies into Iran, the deconstruction of the relations between the two post-Cold War superpowers, and so on.The main question of the current research is that the political relations between Iran and Russia influenced by the second Pahlavi period?To answer this question, the hypothesis was that Iran's political economic relations were fluctuating in the second Pahlavi era and influenced by the changing system theory of the international system with the Soviet Union. The findings suggest that various variables such as the structure of the international system and international events, including World War II, the arrival of controversial forces in Iran, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, the US and Soviet policies, and the variables such as the issue of oil Azerbaijan's autonomy, Tudeh's actions in Iran, the issue of fisheries and borders. Also, the policies adopted by Iranian politicians, including negative balance policy, positive nationalism and independent national policy, have affected Iran-Soviet relations. In a general conclusion, from 1320 (1942) to 1357 (1979), the relationship between Iran and Russia has been an upward trend towards peaceful coexistence. But expansion of further relations in the economic, technical and cultural fields has been political rather than political.


1995 ◽  
pp. 445-482
Author(s):  
Brigitte Schulz

With the end of the Cold War, much attention has been paid to the nature of the emerging new world order. By what criteria will power and influence be measured in this new era? Who will be the winners and losers? What types of allegiances will develop? Or is Francis Fukuyama's argument correct that, with the collapse of communism, we have reached the "...endpoint of man's ideological evolution" and thus "the end of history". Unlike Marx, who saw socialism at the end of humanity's arduous journey, Fukuyama tells us that the search is off because we have already arrived at our evolutionary destination: liberal capitalism...Other analysts envision less optimistic scenarios...One of the most popular scenarios over the past few years has been to anticipate growing tensions between the three main core powers: the US, Germany, and Japan... The first task of this paper, then, is to look at Germany within the context of the radically altered post-Cold War period... We argue that Germany, based on a multitude of factors which will be outlined below, is not now, nor will it ever become in the foreseeable future, a global hegemon... Indeed, as will be asserted in the second part of this paper, Germany will enter into a close alliance with the United States to form a reinvigorated trans-Atlantic marriage in which the common bonds of "culture and civilization" will replace a virulent anti-communism as the common vow.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Radoslav Yordanov

This paper offers a broad historical overview of US economic sanctions against Cuba, starting with the imposition of the partial trade embargo on 19 October 1960, taking the story up to the present day. Additionally, it develops a comprehensive survey of the numerous scholarly and policy debates which closely follow the changes in United States’ post-Cold War attitudes and actions towards its southern neighbor and which demonstrate the thinking behind centers of power in Washington and Miami related to US’ Cuba policies. The paper also glances over the latest developments under Cuba’s new President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the notable return to the harsh Cold War rhetoric, which transcends the boundaries of the localized Washington-Miami-Havana axis of the past thirty years. Referring to historic patterns, the paper concludes that the conjecture between the recent complication in the US-Cuba relations and Moscow’s ambition to reinstate its erstwhile position as an unavoidable international factor would afford Havana with the opportunity to reclaim once again the dubious honor of becoming one of the focal points in the renewed competitive coexistence between the United States and Russia.


Author(s):  
Ilmi Dwiastuti

AbstractSince the fall of the Shah, the US-Iran relations have changed significantly. During the Shah regime, US-Iran experience a warm relationship through economic and military partnerships, however, it changed since the Iran revolution until today. Iran turned out to be one of the axis of evil during the Bush administration. The fall of the Shah also changes the direction of the foreign policy of the US. It then led to the proposition of whether the US foreign policy has been more anti-Iranian than pro-Arab with the fall of the Shah. This paper seeks to answer this question through historical analysis. It examines the US policy during the Cold War era and the post-Cold War. Therefore, the US policy in the region is not always anti-Iranian than the pro-Arab case. The changed regional architecture influences the priorities of the President of the US at that time to put aside Iran's issue, as it happened on George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administration. Thus, the characteristic of the leader also heavily influences US posture in Iran, as Bush and Trump's personality and policies are clearly against Iran. However, despite the dynamic relations of the US-Iran, Iran has always been one of the threats for the US interest in the Persian Gulf since the Shah has fallen.


Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Evelyn Goh

Chapter 4 begins in present-day NEA, and unpacks its core strategic problem of uncertainty associated with an apparent power transition, relating it squarely to the enforced alienation between the two indigenous great powers, China and Japan. It argues that neither a purely power-political understanding nor one that overly emphasizes nationalism and domestic impediments has been especially helpful to advancing our understanding of how Sino-Japanese alienation serves to constrain the development of East Asia’s post-Cold War order. Instead, one should understand the contemporary problem as resulting from the disintegration of the region’s post-Second World War settlement that centred on the United States acting as a ring-holder between China and Japan. Introducing the great power bargain framework, it shows how we might usefully distinguish between the constitutive and regulative aspects of such bargains. It then employs this framework to analyse Sino-Japanese alienation after the long nineteenth century, examining how efforts to create a partial new bargain between 1945 and 1989 were eventually undermined by the two countries’ changing characters and politics after the Cold War.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 456-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Callahan

AbstractAs Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 423-436
Author(s):  
Sanjeev Kumar H.M.

The interface between religion and politics has become strong in the wake of expansion of modernity in its contemporary form. This can be regarded as cultural globalization. To interpret this phenomenon, the demonization of Islam by the West led by the US has been taken as a key epistemological point. This article argues that this policy, framed as part of the American strategy in the global war on terrorism, has constituted a key component of the larger US agenda. One facet of this agenda is primarily related to America’s bid to perpetuate the institutional structure of the permanent war economy envisaged during the Cold War period. The structure consists of the vocational interests of the arms lobby and the hawkish politico-bureaucratic-strategic condominium in the US. To accomplish this goal, communism, the United States’ Cold War enemy, has been replaced by a new enemy, Islam, at the end of the Cold War. The events of 11 September 2001 brought all this to a full circle and facilitated the US to advance justifications for continuing the permanent war economy and to substantiate the transformation of the ideological conflict of the Cold War into a cultural conflict in the post-Cold War period. In this regard, the rise of US soft power, made possible by the pervasive impact of globalization, has helped defend America’s post-Cold War proposition regarding an emergent war culture and the portrayal of Islam as the Manichean other in this war.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-613
Author(s):  
BHUBHINDAR SINGH

AbstractThe paper examines the domestic politics explanations to Japanese security policy expansion between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In response to the various explanations offered in the literature, such as the implementation of administrative and institutional reforms since 1994 that resulted in the centralization of the decision-making process, changes to the balance of power of political parties within the Japanese political system, and shift in the type of politicians that dominate the LDP, opposition parties and security policymaking structure, this paper argues that it is important to incorporate collective identity into understanding Japanese security policy expansion. Two reasons highlight the importance of collective identity – first, without collective identity, it is difficult to understand the type of security policy produced as the discussion of vision is omitted; and, second, collective identity reveals the organizational make-up of the security policymaking structure that is responsible for the formulation of security policy. To explicate the collective identity–institution relationship, this paper focuses on Japanese security identity and the Japanese security policymaking regime in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Two security identities for Japan are examined – the peace-state and international-state; and three elements of the regime are studied – the agents involved or marginalized in the security policymaking process, the decision-making structure of the security policymaking, and the role of the US. This paper aids in our understanding of how collective identities are sustained and supported within an institution, and how Japanese security policy expanded in the post-Cold War period.


2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Stokes

Orthodox narratives of US foreign policy have been employed as uncontested modes of historical interpretation with US post-Cold War foreign policy in the Third World characterised by discontinuity from its earlier Cold War objectives. Chomsky's work adopts an alternative revisionist historiography that views US post-Cold War foreign policy as characterised by continuity with its earlier Cold War objectives. This article examines the continuities of US post-Cold War policy in Colombia, and explains this in terms of the maintenance of US access to South American oil, the preservation of regional (in)stability and the continued need to destroy challenges to US-led neoliberalism.


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