Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the March issue of The Diplomat Magazine!

From South Asia to the city-state of Singapore, from Indonesia to Tajikistan, the past sets precedent and informs national narratives. Governments draw what lessons they need from the past, though not always taking with them the lessons they should. And all too often, this means that the more things change, the more they stay the same: new faces and new circumstances, but the same familiar problems playing out over and over.

One year ago, India launched airstrikes on Pakistani soil, the first such strikes outside the context of a war and the first since the two neighbors became nuclear powers.The Balakot strikes, intended as retaliation for a terrorist attack that had killed 40 Indian security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir, redefined the dynamic of deterrence and escalation between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. In our cover story, Sitara Noor – a senior research associate at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies, Islamabad – and Dr. Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan – Distinguished Fellow and head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in New Delhi – each elucidate the lessons India and Pakistan took from the fraught episode. The main takeaway? The long-standing belief that nuclear deterrence would prevent conventional conflict between India and Pakistan may be gone for good.

Then Evan A. Laksmana takes us to the Natunas, where he argues that Indonesia and China do not have a dispute. “A dispute implies both sides equally have some rights under the law to begin with,” Laksmana, a senior researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, writes. China’s claim to the waters off Indonesia’s Natuna Islands is based not on international law, but on vague “historic rights.” Nevertheless, the strategic balance over the last quarter century has shifted heavily in China’s favor while Indonesia has been slow to respond.

Ten years ago, the Tajik opposition – in the form of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT) – was under pressure but legal. Five years ago, the party was all-but-destroyed by the government, led by Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon. As Edward Lemon, the DMGS-Kennan Institute Fellow at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School, explains, the IRPT’s downfall is intimately linked to Rahmon’s consolidation of his family’s position of ultimate power in the state. As a result, the always-thin fiction of Tajikistan as a functioning multiparty state has been scrapped entirely.

Finally Kirsten Han, a Singaporean freelance journalist and editor-in-chief of New Naratif, outlines the political atmosphere in Singapore heading into the next general election, expected sometime this year. The election will be the swan song of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who plans to let the “fourth generation” leadership take over the reins. But the new generation doesn’t seem to have many new ideas for governing the city-state. Meanwhile, the already tight space for civil society to operate continues to shrink, raising more questions about Singapore’s political future.