April 19,2016 Open Forum

Russia-Southeast Asia Relations: In China’s Shadow?

From May 19-20, the leaders of Southeast Asia nations will convene for the Russia-ASEAN summit at the Black Sea resort of Sochi to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the ASEAN-Russia Dialogue Partnership.1 Moscow attaches great importance to this summit as a step forward to reassert Russia’s global standing damaged by the reverberations of the Ukraine crisis in..

Vitaly Kozyrev
APEC , EAS , EEU , regional security architecture , Russian Far East
April 07,2016 Review Article

Ex-ambassadors to Seoul Advise It to Change

G. A. Ivashentsov and Shin Beom-shik, eds., Bezopasnost’ i Sotrudnichestvo v Severo-Vostochnoi Azii: Sovmestnyi Dokument Rossiiskikh i Iuzhnokoreiskikh Ekspertov (Security and Cooperation in Northeast Asia: Joint Document of Russian and South Korean Experts) (Moscow: Spetskniga, 2015) Muto Masatoshi, Nikkan Tairitsu no Shinso (The True Face of the Opposition between Japan and South..

Gilbert Rozman
Historical consciousness , North Korean threat , Sino-US Relations , trilateralism
April 07,2016 Open Forum

Washington Insights (Vol. 4, No. 2)

Sino-US Relations While many are discussing the dominance of competition over cooperation in Sino-US relations, one DC presentation argued that both threads are intensifying under the strong leadership of Xi Jinping. After many years in the 2000s when Washington had urged China to play a more active role in regional and global affairs—becoming a “responsible stakeholder”—ra..

Editorial Staff
Eurasian Five , Japanese nationalism , Obama-Xi Summit , Russian Far East , South China Sea
March 30,2016 Alternative Scenarios

Negative Scenario II

Key terms over the past quarter century in strategizing about the Russian Far East include: complementarity, geo-economic competition, modernization, intimidation, and geostrategic competition. Reflecting on them, I revisit the limited optimism in the Positive Scenario II posted in this issue of the journal. There may be grounds for some positive outcomes, but I argue the barriers are more se..

Gilbert Rozman
complementarity , Russian Far East
March 25,2016 Country Reports

Country Report: Russia (March 2016)

Vladimir Lukin, after explaining shortcomings of the United States, wrote in Rossiia v Global’noi Politike, no. 1, about his conceptions of China and India. He praised Deng Xiaoping for controlling China’s not inconsiderable foreign ambitions to devote all energies to resolving severe domestic problems. Over the following three-and-a-half decades, China lost not in the least its ..

Editorial Staff (with the assistance of Olga Puzanova)
EEU , Russian Far East , Silk Road Economic Belt , Sino-US Relations , TPP
February 23,2016 Open Forum

Synopsis: German Marshall Fund Workshop on Sino-Russian Relations After Maidan—A New Reality? (February 4, 2016)

In 2015, Sino-Russian relations figured into debates on international relations more than at any time since the end of the Cold War. There was notable divergence on the state of these relations. There was also concern about what should be done to limit the relationship from drawing closer with little consensus on how to proceed. From the point of view of US relations with allies, there was disagre..

Editorial Staff
Sino-Russian Relations
January 25,2016 Alternative Scenarios

Negative Scenario I

For a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Far East (RFE) has been caught between Moscow’s failed promises, bureaucratic barriers of a local nature, and unrealized appeals for investment from neighboring countries. The response at every turn has been that, despite earlier problems, things are changing. At the beginning of 2016, the optimistic case for the RFE is ag..

Gilbert Rozman
Economic Relations , Russian Far East , Sino-Russian Relations