East Asia

Richard Samuels and Robert Madsen have a thoughtful piece on US-Japan relations in The National Interest, in which they push for a “limited liability partnership”: “a cooperative scheme in which Tokyo’s military role is scaled back significantly and the U.S. presence in Japan is rendered less onerous.” The strength of the article lies in its […]

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has just released its annual Bluebook, which is available in Japanese here. (Unfortunately, if past years are any indication, it will be months before a proper English language translation comes out.) [Clarification: what I’m discussing here is the executive summary of the Bluebook, not the 200+ page report. […]

Henry Hoyle, the China blogger at FPA, has done a bang up job explaining this week’s Nuclear Security Summit and its implications for US-Chinese relations – and Chinese diplomacy in general. As Hoyle suggests, a number of events prompted Chinese President Hu Jintao’s last-minute decision to attend the Summit, including the Department of Treasury’s decision […]

Thanks to Congressman Hank Johnson (D – Georgia), the debate surrounding the relocation of American troops to Guam just got messier. One might say its reached a tipping point…. It makes you wonder why the Hatoyama administration hasn’t raised the same concern for their tiny island.

“China’s involvement in the AfPak issue is, and will likely remain for some time, generally convergent with U.S. interests, given a basic continuity in China’s strategic outlook toward Washington,” concluded a recent think tank report by Michael Swaine, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (follow the link for a pdf download). […]

The House Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Global Environment held a hearing yesterday on US-Japan Relations. The subcommittee brought together a panel of experts (half in government, half think tankers) to discuss the current state of the Alliance and the best possible ways to strengthen ties. I found it surprisingly […]

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington D.C. think tank, has a new project on its research agenda: Tocqueville On China, an intellectual experiment that channels the penetrating observations of the French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville in order to elucidate the current state of China’s civil society. According to the project’s mission statement, this […]

How did Commodore Matthew Perry convince the Tokugawa bakufu to accept his terms and conditions, and open up Japan? A persuasive Power Point presentation, according to Hayashi Yuuji. This is just too good to keep to myself – apologies to non-Japanese readers.

Just as quickly as Japan watchers fell silent on Futenma, they’ve picked it back up. This is nothing if not expected: it wasn’t until PM Yukio Hatoyama and his party offered up a policy proposal for the protracted re-negotiations that much else could be said on the topic. They promised an answer by May, and […]

US Special Envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, is making the rounds in Beijing this week to drum up support for the stalled six-party talks – the diplomatic framework first implemented in 2003 that seeks to peacefully resolve the security concerns springing from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Although Ambassador Bosworth has still not indicated […]

It seems that my interest in Northeast Asian rapprochement is shared with many others. Indeed, since writing a recent post on Japan’s effort to rein in its historical rows with its neighbors, I’ve discovered a number of interesting takes on the issue. Anyone interested in understanding Sino-Japanese relations and the latent historical tensions that affect […]

Recent events in Iran have brought its relationship with China into sharp focus. Yesterday’s crackdown on protesters commemorating the revolution in Iran elicited numerous comparisons to Tiananmen Square (though not nearly on the scale of the comparisons made in the aftermath of the June 12th protests). The government’s crackdown on internet activity smacked of the […]