New imperatives for Asia’s growth (Vinod Thomas, Brookings)

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2016/11/01/new-imperatives-for-asias-growth/

Tides and eddies of Asia power shifts (Graeme Dobell, The Strategist)

http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/tides-eddies-asia-power-shifts/

Podcast: The Future of U.S. Statecraft in Asia (Elizabeth C. Economy, Kurt Campbell, Council on Foreign Relations)

http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2016/10/27/podcast-the-future-of-u-s-statecraft-in-asia/

Is Asia doing the heavy lifting in the G20? (Adam Triggs, East Asia Forum)

In 2014 the G20 promised to implement country-specific reforms to increase G20 GDP by 2 per cent by 2018, or about US$2 trillion. But according to the IMF’s latest forecasts the G20 is falling short by US$5 trillion. G20 GDP will be 3 per cent smaller in 2018 instead of being 2 per cent larger. So which countries aren’t pulling their weight?

To have done its fair share, each country needs to have grown its GDP by at least 2 per cent since October 2013 (the baseline for the commitment). To cut to the chase, Asia is not doing the heavy lifting, contrary to popular opinion. The region tends instead to be fairly mixed in terms of its performance.

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/10/14/is-asia-doing-the-heavy-lifting-in-the-g20/

Friday Asia Update: Five Stories From the Week of June 10, 2016 (CFR)

http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2016/06/10/friday-asia-update-five-stories-from-the-week-of-june-10-2016/

Asia does jaw-jaw (Graeme Dobell, ASPI The Strategist)

Asia long ago took to heart Churchill’s admonition that it’s better to jaw-jaw than war-war

http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/asia-jaw-jaw/

Friday Asia Update: Five Stories From the Week of May 27, 2016 (CFR)

http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2016/05/27/friday-asia-update-five-stories-from-the-week-of-may-27-2016/

China's Strategy for Asia: Maximize Power, Replace America (Robert D. Blackwill, The National Interest)

China’s primary strategic goal in contemporary times has been the accumulation of “comprehensive national power.” This pursuit of power in all its dimensions—economic, military, technological and diplomatic—is driven by the conviction that China, a great civilization undone by the hostility of others, could never attain its destiny unless it amassed the power necessary to ward off the hostility of those opposed to this quest

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-strategy-asia-maximize-power-replace-america-16359

What happened to Russia’s ‘pivot to Asia’? (Dmitry Filippov, Peter Marino, East Asia Forum)

In early 2014, Russia faced economic sanctions in response to its annexation of Crimea. Many in the country viewed the sanctions as proof that the West has contempt for Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’ in Ukraine and was trying to subvert Russian foreign policy. Responding to this pressure from the West, Moscow turned its attention to the East — specifically, to China

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/05/19/what-happened-to-russias-pivot-to-asia/

Can Asia break free of great-power dynamics? (Hugh White, ANU, East Asia Forum)

Asia’s recent decades of economic growth have depended, among other things, on a remarkable period of regional peace and stability. The region will only keep growing if that can be sustained. We cannot take this for granted. The peace we have known has resulted from an unusual situation that emerged in the early 1970s, when China decided to follow Japan in accepting the United States as the primary strategic power in Asia. That has meant that US primacy has been uncontested by any major regional power in Asia, eliminating major-power rivalry as a source of tension and conflict.

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/03/27/can-asia-break-free-of-great-power-dynamics/

Asian Growth in Turbulent Times (Changyong Rhee, Project-Syndicate)

A new reality is emerging in Asia. In recent decades, many of Asia’s economies have boomed. The region today accounts for about 40% of the world’s GDP – up from 25% in 1990 – and contributes about two-thirds of global economic growth.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/asia-economic-growth-despite-global-turbulence-by-changyong-rhee-2016-03

Friday Asia Update: Five Stories From the Week of March 4, 2016 (Elizabeth C. Economy, Rachel Brown, Lincoln Davidson, Gabriel Walker, CFR)

http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2016/03/04/friday-asia-update-five-stories-from-the-week-of-march-4-2016/

Water infrastructure and connectivity: Growth and SDGs in Asia (Sonali Mittra, Rohan D'Souza, ORF)

This paper examines current water management ideologies and practices and the impact they create on strategies for pan-Asian connectivity. It suggests that 'business-as-usual' management principles and the harnessing of transboundary rivers tend to undermine efforts at achieving economic and ecological sustainability goals, as well as meeting long-term development challenges. The Mekong and Ganga basin regions, in particular, suffer from inadequate attention to their socio-ecological complexity; institutional arrangements are absent to take on the larger task of managing the region's water resources through meaningful infrastructural development. The paper recommends that infrastructural plans for pan-Asian connectivity be linked to efforts that are, simultaneously, aimed at realising Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Local communities and their livelihood strategies, moreover, should be drawn into efforts at knowledge creation for addressing climate-change adaptation challenges.

http://www.orfonline.org/research/water-infrastructure-and-connectivity-growth-and-sdgs-in-asia/

IMF reform agenda good news for Asia (Adam Triggs, East Asia Forum)

On 4 February IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned that the global financial safety net — the international resources and institutions designated to fight economic crises and prevent contagion — has become too fragmented and asymmetric. The safety net, she said, needs to be reformed and strengthened.

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/02/21/imf-reform-agenda-good-news-for-asia/

Will the TPP transform intellectual property regulation in Asia? (Peter Drahos, East Asia Forum)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may yet be the agreement that most transforms national regulatory systems. It could be even more transformative than the Uruguay Round (1986–1994) that delivered the WTO and the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). But much depends on if, and when, China joins the TPP.

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/02/17/will-the-tpp-transform-intellectual-property-regulation-in-asia/

Six Challenges for US–Japan Cooperation in Asia (Hitoshi Tanaka, JCIE, East Asia Forum)

In 2016, the regional order in East Asia will continue to be characterised by a sense of instability. A key question as 2016 progresses will be: how best to focus US–Japan cooperation to address both the challenges and opportunities that accompany the rise of China? There are six thorny issues that carry the potential to undermine US–Japan cooperation. Close, careful US–Japan consultation and cooperation is required to ensure that these issues do not create a wedge in the alliance.

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/02/15/six-challenges-for-us-japan-cooperation-in-asia/

Russia's asian rebalance (Lowy Institute)

http://www.lowyinstitute.org/news-and-media/audio/russias-asian-rebalance

(Book) Connecting Asia: Infrastructure for Integrating South and Southeast Asia (ADB Institute)

http://www.adb.org/publications/connecting-asia-infrastructure-integrating-south-southeast-asia

A New Baseline for North Korea Policy: What the Next US President Needs to Know (Van Jackson, The Diplomat)

North Korea’s launch of a long range missile this weekend – its sixth – has once again thrust the country into the world’s headlines.

No matter who wins the election, the next U.S. president is going to be faced with a North Korea problem that’s become quite different from that which faced previous presidents. The United States can’t afford to get the Korean Peninsula wrong, and policies that may have historically worked (or at least been acceptable) may prove inadequate going forward.

The perspective offered below challenges many (but not all) of the old images and preconceptions we have about North Korea and how to deal with its regime. These should become the new baseline for future North Korea policy.

Provocations Have Become a Strategic Risk

This is a major implication of my new book on the subject. The historical U.S. stance on small-scale North Korean violence—that it’s undesirable but something we can live with—is becoming untenable for two reasons.

First, it puts the United States wholly at odds with the stance its South Korean ally has adopted since 2010. For understandable reasons, South Korea will not tolerate continued North Korean violence, which is why they’ve promised wicked vengeance if it occurs in future. If South Korea makes good on that threat, the stability that has held for 60 years will be at risk; if it fails to make good on the threat, South Korea will have proved their own threats hollow, inviting further provocations.

Second, continued provocations erode the credibility of U.S. commitments to South Korea. The last time this state of affairs happened, in the late 1960s, South Korea’s president embarked on a secret nuclear weapons program and plotted the assassination of North Korea’s leader, Kim Il Sung. If either of these efforts resurfaced today, the sustainability of a stable Northeast Asia would be in doubt. The United States can’t afford to live with violent provocations because its ally can’t; instead, it should take the lead in retaliatory responses, to the extent circumstances allow.

North Korean Decision-Making is Rational

As I’ve written elsewhere, one of the biggest myths about North Korea is that it’s unpredictable or crazy. This is patently false, at least when it comes to its foreign and defense policy decisions. North Korea is rational, based not on theoretical assumption but historical observation. Kim Il Sung read Thomas Schelling in the 1960s. He believed, as does his progeny, that a brinkmanship strategy against a stronger power could be a useful way to pursue political goals. North Korea has a strong track record of restrained and measured decision-making about when and how it uses violence, even when its threatening rhetoric reaches comical levels of absurdity.

When it engages in violence, it does so through faits accompli or isolated incidents in order to control escalation. When it takes issue with South Korean NGOs sending propaganda balloons North, it aims fire at the balloons, not the NGOs. When it bristles in response to South Korean propaganda broadcasts across the DMZ, it fires warning artillery shots but doesn’t dare take out the propaganda speakers themselves. And when it gets into crises, it looks for face-saving off-ramps even as it blusters.

These are not the actions of an irrational actor, but rather evidence of one that wishes to appear irrational. Anyone who claims North Korea “could do anything” has a high burden of proof given the long history to the contrary. The regime under Kim Jong Eun values its own preservation above all else. It will not commit suicide by taking deliberate actions that put that priority in jeopardy. So during the next crisis, no matter what threatening posture North Korea adopts, know that North Korea will not annihilate Seoul or resort to nuclear first-strikes; these are last-resort actions that North Korea would only pursue if the regime believed its days were numbered.

North Korea is a Nuclear-Armed Adversary

This point isn’t lost on the average person, but it often seems that U.S. and South Korean policy toward North Korea doesn’t take it into account, and it has implications for deterrence, escalation, warfighting, and diplomacy. Hoping for North Korean collapse, promising disproportionate retaliation if North Korea conducts provocations, and wielding thinly veiled nuclear threats against North Korea; these things might have made sense 20 years ago (or even ten years ago), but they’re dangerously naïve these days.

The presence of nuclear weapons changes certain aspects of strategic interaction. It increases North Korea’s freedom of action to pursue a wider range of violence short of war, including some options that were historically unacceptable. It makes large-scale invasion or the massing of U.S. troops from outside the region impossible without risking nuclear war. It increases the stakes and risks of haphazard nuclear signaling, like the recent B-52 overflight in response to North Korea’s nuclear test. And it increases the importance of fighting back—within the constraints of the nuclear shadow—should North Korea pick a fight (hence my frequent arguments about limited war).

Finally, where North Korea’s nuclear program was once negotiable, its possession of nuclear weapons make meaningful denuclearization talks a fantasy. Sanctions won’t change that, nor will military exercises or propaganda broadcasts. Over time, nuclear weapons are going to become more salient to how North Korea thinks about its security, not less. Denuclearization is a laudable vision, as is Korean unification or President Obama’s Global Zero. But like these other ambitions, they’re too far removed from the constraints of current circumstances to take seriously at the policy level. If we’re serious about any kind of diplomatic engagement with North Korea, its proximate focus can’t be denuclearization; it doesn’t mean we have to give up on that vision, but it shouldn’t be treated as a realistic planning factor.

North Korea Wants Peace…But Not the Kind We Seek

Some things don’t change. At some point during the next president’s tenure, North Korea will dangle the possibility of negotiating a peace treaty. This wouldn’t be the first time. I think North Korea does sincerely want peace, but not the way we imagine it. It wants a peace that formalizes its nuclear weapons program, elevates its status as the “legitimate Korea” above South Korea by excluding it from the treaty, and removes U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula. As seductive and intuitive as a peace treaty sounds, in the Korea context it’s a way to get backdoor legitimation of its nuclear status and a deliberate wedge issue for the U.S.-ROK alliance. Even if these terms of peace were acceptable to the United States, which seems unlikely, it would only be a U.S.-North Korea peace; relations between North and South Korea would likely be as hostile as ever. None of this means we shouldn’t open peace treaty discussions at some point, but it’s imperative to be clear-eyed about what that means for U.S. alliances and the nuclear nonproliferation norm.

Every Korea watcher is familiar with former Secretary of Defense William Perry’s famous observation in 1999: “We must deal with North Korea as it is, not as we wish it to be.” Current U.S. policy deals with the North Korea of the past; one whose nuclear weapons were negotiable, whom we could invade and occupy if necessary, and whom could be brought to heel by sanctions or other forms of pressure. That’s not the North Korea of today.

The views expressed belong to the author and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, DKI-APCSS, or the U.S. Government.

North Korea's Kwangmyongsong Satellite Launch: What We Know and Don't Know (Ankit Panda, The Diplomat)

North Korea’s latest so-called earth observation satellite launch raises a lot of questions about just how far its ballistic missile technology has come. With each test of its Unha, Taepodong, and Nodong ballistic missiles, North Korea acquires important scientific knowledge that could potentially hasten its path to developing a successful inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). Sunday’s test, which successfully resulted in the Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite entering polar orbit, probably iterated on the December 2012 Kwangmyongsong-3 Unit 2 test, which used an Unha-3 launch device.

While there’s a lot we don’t know yet about just how evolutionary Sunday’s launch was over its predecessor in 2012, Melissa Hanham of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of  International Studies has a useful round up of just what we do know. In particular, I’d highlight the preliminary image assessment of the outside appearance of the rocket, which is confusingly called the Kwangmyongsong (not to be confused with its satellite payload, which is the Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite). Hanham notes a “perfect fit”between the chassis of the 2012 launch device and the Kwangmyongsong rocket.

Similarly, the first and second stages of the Kwangmyongsong launch device have very similar splash zones to the 2012 Unha-3 rocket. Hanham notes that this suggests that the internals of the rockets might not have been too different. The payload and third stage of the rocket remain in orbit. As of this writing, it’s not known if North Korea has been able to successfully transmit information to or establish communications with the Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite. In 2012, the Kwangmyongsong-3 was able to transmit data at a downlink frequency of 470 MHz.

In 2012, we learned a lot more about the Unha-3 after experts were able to analyze the components recovered from the wreckages of the first and second stages of the rocket. A 2014 United Nations Security Council report summarized these findings, noting that while most of the components were domestically made and assembled in North Korea, several foreign-sourced components were found in the debris, including parts manufactured in the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, the United States, and South Korea.

We’ll no doubt learn more about Sunday’s launch going forward. North Korea appears to be intensifying the rate of its missile and nuclear weapons technology testing. Between December’s the KN-11 submarine-launched ballistic missile ejection test, January’s test of what was likely a boosted fission bomb, and Sunday’s Kwangmyongsong launch, Pyongyang appears determined to push ahead with its goal of attaining a reliable nuclear device and delivery vehicle.

It’s unclear if the Unha series of rockets are ideally suited for use as an ICBM in the future. John Schilling,writing at 38 North ahead of the latest test, notes some of the limitations:

But if the Unha-3 is intended for use as an ICBM, it’s not a very good one. The second- and third-stage engines don’t have enough thrust to efficiently deliver heavy warheads; a militarized Unha might deliver 800 kilograms of payload to Washington, DC. The North Koreans can probably make a nuclear warhead that small, but it would be a tight fit. With bigger upper-stage engines, which we know the North Koreans have, they could deliver substantially larger payloads. This would allow bigger and more powerful warheads, more decoys to counter US missile defenses, and a generally tougher and more robust system.

The Unha is also too heavy and cumbersome to be survivable in wartime. Too big for any mobile transporter, it can only be launched from fixed sites. Its highly corrosive liquid propellants require hours of pre-launch preparations. That’s a bad combination for North Korea; their fixed launch sites are going to be watched very closely, and particularly in a crisis, any indication that an ICBM is being prepared for launch could trigger a pre-emptive strike.

Despite North Korea’s two successful tests of multi-stage satellite launch vehicles in 2012 and now 2016, Pyongyang hasn’t shown that it will be able to use its existing technology to deliver a nuclear device. Miniaturization of its existing nuclear weapons is one area of concern. Intelligence assessments from the United States and South Korea differ in their confidence that North Korea has successfully miniaturized a nuclear device. North Korea claimed to have done so in May 2015.

Additionally, we haven’t seen North Korea test a survivable reentry vehicle yet–a must for an ICBM warhead, which would need to undertake atmospheric reentry to strike any target. Finally, even if Pyongyang solves the reentry and miniaturization problems, it’ll have to work to ensure accuracy at long distances. (The Taepodong-2, for example, is related to the Unha series of launch vehicles and has an estimated operational range of up to 6,000 kilometers.)

Meanwhile, after all we’ve seen from North Korea in the past few months, a fifth nuclear test may be in the offing soon, according to South Korean intelligence.