The summer of 2000 witnessed a drought that decimated crops throughout Central Asia. Previously, Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev raised the spectre of water-inspired insecurity in Central Asia, and in March an OSCE delegation visited the Central Asian republics to discuss water management issues.
The Bush administration faces a Russia that is at a critical and perhaps defining juncture in its history. The country's leadership has launched a reform agenda that, if carried through, will take Russia further down the path toward becoming a modern, market-oriented democracy. The resistance to change in Russia is significant, and the ultimate success of these reforms is far from assured. Yet the reform initiative gives the United States and Russia an opportunity to set their relationship on a new foundation that will enhance international peace, stability, freedom and prosperity in an increasingly interdependent world.
The South Asia program has recently concluded a year-long study entitled “Rising India and U.S. Policy Options in Asia” with a final conference that was held on October 15, 2001. The “Rising India” project seeks to analyze aspects of the U.S.-Indian relationship, examine the effectiveness of U.S. diplomatic tools in the context of different growth trends in India, and put U.S. policy toward India within a broader Asian context. This summary reflects the project study, amplified by presentations made at the conference.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, Economics, and Politics
Nothing could be more central to U.S. and world security than ensuring that nuclear warheads and their essential ingredients—plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU)—do not fall into the hands of terrorists or proliferating states. If plutonium and HEU become regularly available on a nuclear black market, nothing else we do to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons will succeed. Similarly, unless stockpiles of nuclear warheads and fissile materials can be secured, monitored, and verifiably reduced, it will be impossible to achieve deep, transparent, and irreversible reductions in nuclear arms. Measures to control warheads and fissile materials, therefore, are central to the entire global effort to reduce nuclear arms and stem their spread. The tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of tons of plutonium and HEU that remain in the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles represent a deadly legacy of the Cold War, and managing them securely must be a top U.S. security policy priority.
Topic:
Security, Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, and Terrorism
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Territorial development processes and patterns in Korea from the 1950s have encountered four turning points. The first involved the reconstitution of the Korean nation state, which, following radical land reform, implicitly focused on the expansion of the Seoul Capital Region. The second came with the launching of strategies for export-oriented urbanindustrial growth in the early 1960s, which led to the development, in the 1970s, of an urban-industrial corridor moving from the rapidly expanding metropolis of Seoul to the southeast coast, centered on Pusan and heavy industrial complexes. The third turning point was brought about by rising wages and labor costs; the ascending value of the Korean currency; and the overseas relocation of labor-intensive industries, which saw a repolarization of growth in Seoul and a deindustrialization of other metropolitan economies. While some regions outside of Seoul began to register high rates of economic growth around automotive and electronics industries in the early 1990s, this pattern was abruptly challenged at the fourth turning point, the 1997 financial crisis in East and Southeast Asia. Recovery from the crisis is being pursued under a fundamentally new political and economic strategy of decentralized policymaking. The major territorial development question facing Korea at this turning point is whether localities can create capacities to rebuild and sustain their economies through direct engagement in a turbulent world economy.
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Richard Bush is chairman of the board and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), a private organization that conducts unofficial relations with the island of Taiwan on behalf of the United States government. Established in April 1979, AIT has a small headquarters in Washington, D.C., and offices in Taipei and Kaohsiung. Dr. Bush was appointed to the AIT Board by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on September 2, 1997, and was selected as chairman and managing director on the same day.
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
Now, more than at any point since 1949, Hong Kong's economic future is tied to that of China. This commonplace observation must be coupled with the less obvious, but equally fundamental point that Hong Kong's future with China is based largely on activities that arise in or pass through the Pearl River Delta. This region, however, is cut in half by a sovereign border and governed by a patchwork of political authorities. The Delta as a whole is rich with opportunities, but it is increasingly apparent that these can be realized only if integration moves forward, both in a metropolitan and regional sense. This prospect is currently marked by serious uncertainties.
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
American military power underpinned the security structure of the Asia Pacific region during the Cold War. Post-Cold War, its role is still vital to peace and stability in the region. The most overt manifestations of American military might are the Japan–America Security Alliance (JASA) and the Korea–America Security Alliance (KASA). These bilateral alliances, together with a modified Australia–New Zealand–United States (ANZUS) treaty relationship, point to the diversity of security interests and perspectives in the region. Even during the height of the Cold War, the region never quite presented the kind of coherence that would have facilitated the creation of a truly multilateral defense framework of the sort exemplified by NATO. In Southeast Asia, the lack of strategic coherence resulted in a patchwork of defense arrangements between local and extraregional states. Dominated by the United States, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was only nominally regional.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
United States, America, Asia, Korea, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
This paper discusses the relationship between the United States and the Republic of China (ROC) from 1949 to 1979. This was an association that began and ended with an American determination to distance itself from the government on Taiwan, in the interests of improved relations with the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. In the intervening years, the United States and the ROC were aligned in a relationship—formalized by a mutual defense treaty from 1955 to 1979—which weathered two (almost three) military confrontations with the PRC.
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
It is now almost a cliché to say that domestic politics and foreign policy are closely connected. Yet however trite this expression, nonetheless it is true. Japan's international behavior and particularly its security policy cannot be fully understood without analyzing its domestic politics. In post–World War II Japan, security policy has been the dominant theme of domestic politics and source of ideological divide.