Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the November 2023 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

This month we look back to look ahead. As the United States fills out nascent frameworks designed to bring about a new economic order, the Biden administration strives to make clear its achievements and plans. Meanwhile, in Nepal a leader in precarious domestic position juggles with massive neighbors and the weight of history. In rural Kyrgyzstan, a summertime football match provides a touchstone to connect with, and contemplate, the difficult life along the border. And in Cambodia, a chosen son ascends to power as long anticipated, but groundwork laid does not always yield expected results.

Once again, we return to the notion that what’s past is not always prologue in our rapidly changing world.

In November, the United States is hosting the APEC summit for the first time in 12 years. The gathering in San Francisco will be the culmination of the Biden administration’s new economic approach to the Indo-Pacific, one that eschews the traditional pillars of the international trade order, including market access. Erin Murphy, a senior fellow for the Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., explains that domestic politics have forced a change in how Washington pursues economic policy; instead of free trade agreements, it is offering a hodgepodge of different initiatives, from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework to various infrastructure investment plans. The trick will be tying these threads all together into a coherent whole – and making sure they can survive past the 2024 election.

In September, Nepal’s Prime Pushpa Kamal Dahal finally made his way to China. Dahal broke with precedent by visiting China before India during his first stint in power, and during his second, in 2017, he enthusiastically signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative. But the political ground has shifted. He returned to the prime ministership in late 2022 as the head of the country’s third-largest party; and so Dahal’s domestic political position is precarious. As Bipin Ghimire, a doctoral candidate at South Asian University in New Delhi, explains, Dahal’s recent trip to China demonstrated a clear balancing of aspirations and pragmatic realities, both on the domestic and international fronts.

On a hot summer day, the women of Kök-Tash – a village in the borderlands between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – took a break to play football. It was a rare joy amid a difficult life on the border. Journalist Emilia Sulek and photographer Danil Usmanov take us to Kök-Tash and introduce us to one of the village’s three nurses as well as the men who manage the community’s dwindling water supply. “Are we to die here scorched by the sun, or is the government going to help us?” nurse Danagul Abdiraimova asked, holding in her mind all the complexities of living in a dry, distant, sometimes dangerous, corner of Kyrgyzstan.

Hun Manet took over Cambodia’s prime ministership from his father, Hun Sen, in August 2023. But the son’s path to security in power will be difficult, writes Dr. Neil Loughlin, an assistant professor of comparative politics at City, University of London. Manet must carefully navigate a system his father built over the course of decades and, to a large degree, still controls. Manet’s ascension may have been preordained, but the future is less assured. The elite patronage system that Hun Sen built, and on which rests Hun Manet’s power, necessitates maintaining a certain degree of growth, continued allocation of spoils and position, and political stability.

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