https://www.scmp.com/rss/325240/feed en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com Belarus needs an out. And Asia – of all the continents – is best placed to engineer and negotiate that out. But can it? Does it know how? Does it have the strategic vision, diplomatic confidence and sense of tactical opportunity to play at this level? Three scenarios present themselves over the coming few weeks, as the impasse in Minsk between the government and protesters consolidates. This is, as I have stressed before, an impasse not over a single election but rather over the very post-Soviet... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3099137/protest-riven-belarus-needs-heroic-diplomacy-can-asia-supply-it?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3099137/protest-riven-belarus-needs-heroic-diplomacy-can-asia-supply-it?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 27 Aug 2020 15:00:11 +0000 Tolstoy famously wrote that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And yet today, three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, most post-Soviet states are happy in different ways but unhappy in exactly the same way. While the stand-off in Belarus steals the headlines, the bloodiest recent clash in the vast post-Soviet theatre – smack in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic – saw a return last month to kinetic border exchanges between... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3097704/how-russias-response-belarus-could-lead-globalised-conflict?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3097704/how-russias-response-belarus-could-lead-globalised-conflict?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 17 Aug 2020 11:51:39 +0000 The world that exits the Great Quarantine will be one of deep distrust and growing disintegration of international systems and structures. It will thus be in desperate need of institutional renovation and, yes, invention – to repair relationships across borders, spur economic growth, and avert the prospect of war among the great powers of the day, namely the United States, China and Russia. If the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) were arguably the two major... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3083605/how-new-arctic-league-can-save-post-coronavirus-world?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3083605/how-new-arctic-league-can-save-post-coronavirus-world?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 10 May 2020 21:00:12 +0000 Despite my sincerest hopes, it is more likely than not that the world’s three major powers – the United States, China and Russia – will fail to cooperate coming out of the current international coronavirus crisis. This is a function of deep mutual distrust and what I call the consolidation of ideological belief within the leaderships of Washington, Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Moscow. Perhaps leaders in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, India or Japan will step in to save the day, but this... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3081442/after-coronavirus-could-us-collapse-within-next-year-or-two?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3081442/after-coronavirus-could-us-collapse-within-next-year-or-two?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 26 Apr 2020 21:00:07 +0000 If we know anything about the post-pandemic world, it is that it will be “different”, and that three countries – the United States, China and Russia – will be decisive in shaping it, for better or worse. These three countries are not only the most powerful strategic, military and, in two of the three cases, economic players of our time but they are also countries whose governments think and operate in “rule-setting” ways. Each of them will carry an effective veto on the world-building plans of... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3079356/will-us-china-and-russia-come-together-shape-new-world-order-post?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3079356/will-us-china-and-russia-come-together-shape-new-world-order-post?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 10 Apr 2020 18:30:12 +0000 Back in 2005, a year after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I asked a taxi driver in the port city of Odessa how things were going in that post-Soviet country. His reply: “We have a saying about our politicians. Some are in jail, others have been to jail, and everyone else is going to jail.” Ukrainian gallows humour aside, the taxi driver could have been describing the state of affairs in at least 12 of the 15 former Soviet states (the three Baltic states manifestly exempted), and most... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3046966/pulling-xi-jinping-vladimir-putins-power-play-modern-russia-not?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3046966/pulling-xi-jinping-vladimir-putins-power-play-modern-russia-not?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 21 Jan 2020 05:07:20 +0000 The present breakdown in relations between Canada and China is neither morality play nor conspiracy. It is, instead, a tragedy in the making. There is, in my view, nothing inevitable or natural about Canada and China becoming enemies. Indeed, I am a firm enemy of the proposition that our two countries should ever become enemies. Canada does not know today’s China in any deep sense, and China surely overestimates the degree to which it understands Canada’s domestic and regional complexities.... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2183477/meng-wengzhou-and-detentions-usmca-and-arctic-5-rules-unfreeze?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2183477/meng-wengzhou-and-detentions-usmca-and-arctic-5-rules-unfreeze?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 24 Jan 2019 21:30:30 +0000 The recent massive, two-way diplomatic expulsions by Moscow and multiple European and North American capitals prove once and for all that, between Russia and the West, it is only Asia that has not been radicalised. Indeed, it is only Asia that can save Russia, Ukraine and the West from themselves. How did we get here? Back in 2012, when I was visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, my distinguished colleague Kishore Mahbubani, then dean, would say that Asia... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2140666/only-asia-can-save-russia-and-west-themselves?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2140666/only-asia-can-save-russia-and-west-themselves?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 07 Apr 2018 03:32:11 +0000 The line separating nuclear war in northeast Asia and a Nobel Peace Prize for the reunification of the Koreas has undoubtedly become very thin under US President Donald Trump. But does this logic still ring true in light of recent, apparently warm meetings between the North’s supreme leader and Seoul officials, the prospect of both Korean heads of state attending a summit in April, and news that President Trump has agreed to meet Kim Jong-un in person soon after? The answer: most... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2136594/trump-meeting-kim-so-what-we-may-be-headed-nuclear-war?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2136594/trump-meeting-kim-so-what-we-may-be-headed-nuclear-war?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 10 Mar 2018 03:04:52 +0000 The presidency of  Donald Trump has made the dividing line between nuclear war and a Nobel Peace Prize increasingly thin. The very same extreme caprice and disregard for precedent that have amplified the military pressure and posturing on the Korean peninsula over the past year can quickly transform the logic of the endgame to one of spectacular peace and reconciliation. To be clear, if the thinking in Washington today no longer excludes the idea of pre-emptive and, by likely implication,... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2134311/its-no-joke-north-korean-nuclear-crisis-could-get-trump-nobel?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2134311/its-no-joke-north-korean-nuclear-crisis-could-get-trump-nobel?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 25 Feb 2018 02:00:45 +0000 In the light of Beijing’s public release of its first-ever Arctic Policy, here’s an interesting fact of which Chinese and Canadian leaders alike seem generally unaware: Canada, one of this century’s major Arctic powers, is as close – if not closer – to China as Australia.  When I worked on secondment in the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra over a decade ago, it was perfectly clear to Australian strategists that Australia was, for all practical purposes, “in”... https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2131565/how-chinas-polar-silk-road-can-make-canada-next-big-asian-power?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2131565/how-chinas-polar-silk-road-can-make-canada-next-big-asian-power?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:30 +0000 Peacekeepers in southeastern Ukraine are suddenly back on the global policy agenda, and Asia now has its first major opportunity of this century to rescue Europe from itself – and, by extension, to save the world entire. The recent announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the BRICS summit in Xiamen to the effect that Russia was in principle open to a peacekeeping force in the Donbass comes over two years after the Ukrainian government first announced its own interest in a peacekeeping... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2112023/how-china-and-india-can-keep-peace-ukraine?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2112023/how-china-and-india-can-keep-peace-ukraine?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 21 Sep 2017 04:29:11 +0000