Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the May 2017 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

This month in the magazine we’re examining a series of key moments -- halfway points, strategic shifts, first meetings. As always, our goal in the magazine is to go deeper into each topic and wider across the region, to tell the stories that make Asia tick.

Our cover story highlights Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will pass the three-year mark of his expected five-year term this month, and evaluates the challenges he faced initially and how his policy plans have fared so far. As Rick Rossow, a senior adviser and Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), writes, Modi has become India’s most powerful political figure in a generation.

Then we turn to one of the Pacific’s lowest key players: France. But as Cleo Paskal, an associate fellow at Chatham House and director of the Oceania Research Project at CÉRIUM, explains, Paris has significant interests in the Oceania region and has been quietly, but seriously, pursuing stronger relationships with the region’s powers, most notably Australia and China. Can the Parisian pivot change the strategic map of Asia?

Next, Peter Frankopan explains the logic which has led Beijing to link its present pan-Asian grand strategy -- the One Belt, One Road -- to the Silk Roads of the past. Frankopan, a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and author of the international bestseller, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, notes that if the 21st century is indeed the Asian century, it’s really a return to the past, with Europe’s period of power an anomaly in the historical view.

Last, Yun Sun, a senior associate with the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center, takes an optimistic view of the outcomes of the April summit at Mar-a-Lago between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. The summit, she writes, saw the two leaders build personal chemistry and sets a good tone for future relations -- regardless of Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric.

We hope you enjoy these stories and the many others awaiting you in the following pages.

Sincerely,

Shannon Tiezzi, Editor-in-Chief
Catherine Putz, Managing Editor