Bridge the Gap

Grad School Days

I just uploaded a group of papers from my days at Johns Hopkins SAIS.  These were on my old personal website and people seemed to enjoy them.  If you have some time, you can check out some ramblings on politics, economics, and defense issues related to China, India, Japan, Korea, and Mexico by following the links in the Grad School Days section on the right side of the page.

WSJ on Japan's Nuclear Options

Insightful article from today's WSJ on Japan's nuclear options, arguing that any major change to the status quo will take time due to constitutional issues and lack of political consensus.

Download testing_japans_resolve_wsj_11606.pdf

From If to When

I was sitting on a boat in Halong Bay when North Korea announced they had tested a nuclear device and set off the latest global diplomatic crisis. And the first thing that came to mind when I logged on back in Hanoi and saw the news was “Oh Shit.” I won’t pretend to do a detailed analysis here, but we now have a more forceful stance from a North Korea that is still in economic crisis; an increasingly concerned China that is extremely unhappy and has just lost a huge amount of face in the international arena courtesy of one of its supposedly closest allies (this at a time when the PRC is trying to prove that it can and should play in the first tier of the international diplomacy game); Japan has a new Prime Minister that is more nationalistic than Koizumi (and the papers were immediately debating whether Japan will now go nuclear, too); South Korea is still afraid to provoke its neighbor, whether out of national brotherhood or being scared shitless that Seoul will get leveled I am not sure.

So what does it all mean? I don’t know. Still, I can’t help but feeling that we have moved from the time of if to when there will be conflict in East Asia. Between a nuclear North Korea, a reflexively nationalist China, a Japan that is increasingly less willing to leave its security guarantees to the US, the Taiwan problem looming in the wings, I am very pessimistic about the stability of this part of the world. It may not be today or tomorrow, but within the next 10 years the probability of conflict in the region feels as if it has moved from somewhere around 25% to 50+% in a very short period of time.

Like I said, this is not a hard core analysis. Things may cool down soon.  But when I bring up Japan to educated, successful Chinese , and they immediately speak about how all Chinese hate the Japanese (in the tone that they will always be mortal enemies), I have to wonder how long it will be before nationalism, economics, old axes to grind, and military calculations stir up the pot enough to cause armed conflict…