Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the January 2024 issue of The Diplomat Magazine and welcome to 2024!

As usual, for our January issue we’ve gathered Diplomat authors from across Asia to help us peer into the coming year. Our cover story, organized by country or region, highlights events, trends, or themes to keep an eye on in 2024. We aren’t trying to predict the future – that’s a fool's game – but we are trying to calibrate expectations and help you prepare for the year ahead.

2024 promises to be a tumultuous year, not the least because of a host of elections across the region, from presidential contests in Taiwan, Indonesia, and the United States, to general elections in India, Pakistan, and the Solomon Islands, and legislative polls in South Korea. Japan and Singapore might join that list, if their ruling parties roll the dice with snap elections. Amid this churning in Asia’s political pools, there are worrying economic tides and a number of festering conflicts, especially in Myanmar. In the new year, we’ll see if the pivotal moments of 2023 hold true or if nascent hopes are dashed.

The diverging fates of two Northeast Asian trilaterals – one between the U.S., Japan, and South Korea and another between Japan, South Korea and China – encapsulate the most significant geopolitical trends in the region. Minseon Ku, a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth, carefully contrasts these two trilaterals, one on the rise and the other seemingly stalled. She notes that South Korea’s improving relationship with Japan would not have been possible without commitment from President Yoon Suk-yeol – but it has come at a political cost for Yoon. The legislative election looming in April 2024 will tell us just how steep that cost is.

The rapidly approaching Indonesia presidential election, set for February 14, 2024, will be a litmus test for the country's democracy, writes journalist Joseph Rachman. Prabowo Subianto – Indonesia’s defense minister and son-in-law of the former dictator Suharto – is the odds-on favorite to win, completing his remarkable rise from disgraced exile to front-runner. It certainly helps that he has popular incumbent President Joko Widodo’s son at his side as his vice president pick. Worryingly, Rachman writes, Indonesian state institutions seem to be working to help ensure Prabowo’s victory; and with little experience in elected office, how Prabowo will rule is an unknown.

Finally, we turn to Central Asia, where a climate change-induced water crisis is already underway. A trio of Central Asian scholars – Jahan Taganova, Anna Shabanova-Serdechna, and Niginakhon Saida – lay out the dire situation in the region, where climate change, inadequate infrastructure, and existing agricultural practices are already straining water resources. Climate-smart agriculture presents one avenue by which Central Asian states can sustainably adapt to a changing climate, they write, also noting that collaboration and cooperation among the region’s states will be necessary.

We hope you enjoy these stories, and the many more in the following pages. And to all our readers, best wishes for the new year.