Letter From the Editors
From North Korea to Myanmar, feel-good stories can turn sour in a hurry.
Welcome to the February issue of The Diplomat Magazine!
A diplomatic breakthrough with a nuclear-armed rogue state. A rare bilateral visit between two leaders whose countries have much to gain from cooperation. Burgeoning commitment in a small, liberal democracy to counter foreign interference from a more powerful, autocratic neighbor. And a Nobel Peace Prize laureate winning the first free election her country has known in decades.
What do all these stories have in common? The answer, sadly, is that their endings – or at least their current trajectories – have fallen far short of the optimism they once inspired. From North Korea to Myanmar, feel-good stories can turn sour in a hurry.
“Whatever happened to the North Korea peace process, which in 2018 looked so promising?” begins our cover story this month. Aidan Foster-Carter, a noted Korea scholar, returns to the pages of the The Diplomat with a much needed and thorough update on North Korea. As Foster-Carter explains, 2017’s bombastic exchanges of insults between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gave way to remarkable diplomacy in 2018. But in 2019 everything went sideways and Foster-Carter warns that in 2020 Kim is bound to return to provocation.
India had an unusual chief guest at its Republic Day festivities this year: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. To put that visit in context, Ketan Mehta, a junior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation’s Strategic Studies Program, traces the history of India’s approach to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). To date, outreach has been so sparse that LAC has been dubbed India’s “forgotten continent,” Mehta notes. But the potential is immense should India seek to take engagement to the next level.
When self-professed Chinese intelligence operative Wang Liqiang sought the protection of Australia, he brought already heated discussions down under about foreign interference to a boil. As Yun Jiang and Adam Ni, Australia-based researchers and co-editors of the “China Neican” newsletter, explain, foreign interference often takes advantage of the openness inherent to democratic societies. The challenges for Australia in confronting the issue of foreign interference – and China is the only regular suspect – will be to balance deterring and stopping foreign interference with preserving individual liberties and social cohesion. It’s not an easy task.
Finally, Christina Fink adds some necessary context behind one-time democratic darling Aung San Suu Kyi’s shocking decision to personally defend her government – and the Myanmar military – against accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Fink, a professor of practice of international affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, notes that the military campaign against the Rohingya plays very differently within Myanmar, where the Buddhist majority population has been encouraged to view Muslims, including the Rohingya, as an existential threat. Facing other domestic challenges, including stalled constitutional reform, a deadlocked peace process, and a slowing economy, facing the genocide charges in person may ironically be Suu Kyi’s ticket back to power in this year’s election.