Letter from the Editors

Governments love to make big pledges. They promise to cut harmful emissions, overhaul regional politics through grand diplomatic initiatives, and usher in widespread change at home – either creating something entirely new or returning to a lost golden age. But often – arguably almost always – these grand promises and buzzwords fail to materialize in reality. Either good intentions met a harsh reality or the promises were hollow from the start.

In this issue we dive into the disconnect between rhetoric and action in India’s climate change conundrum, great powers’ Pacific Island diplomacy, and political promises of a fresh start in Kazakhstan and the Philippines.

Monika Mondal, an independent environmental journalist, outlines India’s energy/environment nexus, with the two combining in a vicious circle: Power is crucial for helping Indians survive increasingly brutal heatwaves, but to rapidly scale up energy supply, India relies on coal – which increases emissions and thereby helps ensure even worse heatwaves in the future. It’s a wicked problem that demonstrates the real-world hurdles for finding a just solution to climate change, as the people most susceptible to extreme weather events and energy shortages are the poor. Renewables are the future, but India needs to meet its surging energy demand in the present, too.

The Pacific Island countries have been the focus of nonstop diplomatic outreach since this spring, when China’s new security agreement with Solomon Islands was first leaked to the public then hurriedly signed. While both China and the United States see the region as crucial to their geopolitical interests, to date Washington has not shown much interest in getting to know the individual Pacific Island countries – and understanding what the Pacific Island peoples themselves want. Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes that the Pacific Islands share deep-rooted cultural bonds, but each country is also distinct – engaging the Pacific Islands as a bloc will only take a regional strategy so far.

In Kazakhstan, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has taken to extolling a “New Kazakhstan” to distance himself from the increasingly criticized first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Tokayev pushed through a constitutional referendum last month to inaugurate that vision. Bruce Pannier, a journalist who has covered Central Asia since the 1990s, addresses a basic question: What’s actually “new” about Tokayev’s Kazakhstan? Not much, it turns out. Despite the recent constitutional referendum, the same elites still dominate political and economic power structures. Given the unrest that exploded into violence in January, Tokayev has every incentive to rebrand his leadership as something new but it may not work in the long run.

When Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the Philippines’ presidential election on May 9, he completed a “a full-fledged counterrevolution,” bringing his family back to power over 35 years after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was ousted amid popular demonstrations. Marcos Jr. engineered his family’s comeback through a combination of “authoritarian nostalgia and populist antics,” writes Richard Javad Heydarian, a Manila-based academic and author. Through the deft application of revisionist history, the Marcoses became a beacon of hope for Filipinos frustrated by widespread corruption and elitism – two things the long-time ruling family has been accused of for decades. But Marcos Jr. is not his father; he seems to lack both the elder Marcos’ ambition and his political acumen. Whether those differences are for better or for worse remains to be seen.

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