Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the August issue of The Diplomat Magazine. Across Asia, expectations –  met, missed, misunderstood – drive the politics of power. North Korea, for example, after a bombastic 2017 turned swiftly to diplomacy in 2018, shedding the expectation that the hermit kingdom would remain belligerently isolated. In another Asian flashpoint, expectations about Taiwan’s ability to fend off a Chinese invasion drive military planning on both sides of the Taiwan Strait – misjudgment of those expectations by either side would be costly. In India, as the world’s largest democracy looks toward elections next year, voters will need to re-evaluate their expectations of Narendra Modi and whether he’s risen to the bar set by his party’s landmark 2014 victory. Meanwhile, assumptions and expectations about politics among Pacific Island states focus too heavily on the role of outside powers, missing the intricacies of relations between individual Pacific Island states.

In our cover story, Aidan Foster-Carter, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University, charts North Korea’s seemingly sudden U-turn from bellicose hermit kingdom to diplomatic dynamo. Kim Jong Un, in Foster-Carter’s assessment, has loosed three hares with intertwining paths: one in the form of detente with South Korea; a second, the repairing of the Chinese-North Korean bilateral; and a third, outreach to the mercurial Trump administration.

Next, Ian Easton dives into what amounts to an existential question for Taiwan: How well would Taiwan be able to defend itself against a Chinese attack? Easton, a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute and author of a recent book on the subject, parses what’s known and unknown about Taiwan’s capabilities and walks through what could be expected should the mainland ever decide to invade.

Then, Dr. Kartikeya Singh, deputy director and fellow of the Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), assesses the prospects for Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in next year’s general election. In discussing whether Modi can win again, Singh confronts what voters expected and what Modi delivered in his first term.

The Pacific Island states are often viewed as a bloc, obscuring intrastate politics and divergent interests. In our final lead, Jenny Hayward-Jones, a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, carefully moves beyond surface-level expectations about Pacific Island diplomacy and into the dynamics driving regional diplomatic matters.

We hope you enjoy these stories, and the many more in the following pages.