Conflict Prevention

Since at least December 2012, China, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States have contributed in different ways to the polarization of geopolitical interests around maritime security in East Asia. Regardless of how we might judge which country is most responsible for the recent decline in regional trust beginning almost four years ago, the court of international public opinion is now asking many more questions of China than of the other states.

China’s bold moves to build military-­grade airfields on artificial islands in the middle of what most countries think of as open ocean and far from its mainland territory has shocked the entire world. As a long­term analyst of China’s maritime frontier and the country’s strategic policies across the board, I was definitely also surprised by the scale and scope of the island-­building.

Yet, unlike most observers, I can understand why China did it. Its airfield building is only a bigger and better version of what Vietnam and the Philippines had previously undertaken in the long-­disputed area, a fact acknowledged by the Pentagon. I sympathize with those in China who see their country’s actions as defensible and who cannot understand the damage the island-­building has done to the country’s international reputation.

But the overriding geopolitical reality is that China’s novel form of maritime rights protection has smashed a very big dent into the pre­existing pattern of trust and goodwill that most of China’s regional partners were showing. Both it and the United States now see themselves as locked in a newly militarized competition for strategic influence in maritime East Asia. While both countries are somewhat confused about the rules of the competition, both are now staking a lot more than they previously had on the competition for the hearts and minds of third parties beyond direct stakeholders (rival claimants) in the disputes with China. Non-­claimants like Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Australia, are the main targets for these efforts.

For the United States, this is a geopolitical gambit in a distant region that involves the interests of key allies, but for which successive administrations had made clear they would not spill American blood. For China, the newly militarized competition is very different. It is existential, visceral, and cuts to the very core of the historical pivot point at which the Chinese Communist Party leaders believe they have arrived.

There is little comprehension outside China that its biggest strategic concerns on the maritime frontier relate not to disputes in the central reaches of the South China Sea, but rather to the much larger geopolitical project with the aim of the successful integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan (both lying on the northern edge of the South China Sea) into a unified China. Everything China does with regard to its maritime disputes is informed by the country’s concept of sovereignty and its plans for the peaceful reunification with Taiwan.

Thus, for many reasons, there is a gulf in perception between the two major powers about the heightened maritime competition between them.

As each new escalation pushes up the heat of political rhetoric, the most senior leaders of the two countries have put pressure on Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea and Australia to re­evaluate their geopolitical alignment on maritime security issues.

None of the target countries see the issue in the stark terms with which China and the United States portray it. These regional neighbors are genuinely concerned about renewed China­-U.S. tensions but continue to believe, perhaps wrongly, that the military tension can be contained. For this reason, they also believe that the putative choice (either siding with China’s view or that of the United States) is not one that they will be forced to make any time soon. These key regional actors (Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea and Australia) simply reject outright the notion that China has created a new “Great Wall of Sand” on the maritime frontier that somehow forces them to choose one camp or another. For example, South Korea even resumed talks with China in April 2016 on delimitation of their overlapping maritime resource zones.

Nevertheless, the political loyalty of these key states to one side or the other in a deepening geopolitical confrontation between the United States and China is now a question being posed around the Western Pacific.

Australia as a Test Case

If you had polled the United States Congress in 2005, they would have voted Australia to be America’s most loyal ally. This was the year that American legislators created a unique category of work visa available only for the Aussies, a major U.S. ally in the Pacific War from 1941­1945, and their only ally in every major war involving the United States since that time. A measure for the unique E­3 visa category was passed, and signed into law by George W. Bush, as part of a package of supplemental provisions for the war on terror.

Barack Obama is the latest U.S. president to be a beneficiary of Australian strategic trust and loyalty. He scored early by gaining Canberra’s commitment to support the “pivot,” now called the “rebalance.” The policy foreshadowed a shift, beginning in earnest in 2011, of strategic and military attention by the world superpower to the Western Pacific. Many viewed this as aimed at constraining the rise of China’s political influence. In November that year, Obama visited Indonesia and Australia to raise the stakes in a renewed competition for regional pre­eminence between the two great powers. At the time, Australia was prepared to identify politically with the “pivot” by agreeing very quickly to a rotation of several hundred U.S marines into the port city of Darwin for training. (At the time, the number of marines was planned to increase to a modest 2,500 by 2017.)

We should note though, as then-­Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard pointed out in 2013, that the United States never left East Asia. And as Tom Christensen has observed, a number of the military measures announced as part of the pivot were in the plans before Obama took office. Thus in the first two years of its life, the “rebalance” policy was rather unexceptional and presented few challenges to U.S. allies in the region such as Australia and South Korea, or to close partners like Singapore. They felt entirely comfortable remaining close in strategic policy to the United States while simultaneously deepening economic relations with China. They saw little need to question the premises of the pivot.

Australia Betwixt and Between

In April 2016, when Australia’s present prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, visited China, Australian newspapers widely reported that China had warned Australia to be careful about siding with the United States in the emerging maritime confrontation. Details on official statements to that effect were not forthcoming but most media outlets relied on an article in China Daily on April 14 warning Australia to be careful in its positions on the South China Sea or risk losing its access to Chinese investment. The article carried the sub­heading: “Canberra must choose between economic interests, toeing US line.”

According to one of Australia’s most astute defense policy specialists and scholars, Hugh White, the situation we now face in the South China Sea “is forcing Australia to choose about the future of U.S. maritime primacy” in the Western Pacific. Interviewed for this article, White sketched an intensifying trend of political competition between China and the United States for Australian allegiance beginning as far back as 2003. He pointed to the rather bizarre coincidence on consecutive days that year (October 23 and 24) of the presidents of the two countries addressing the joint House of Parliament. On that occasion, President Hu of China was the first non-­American head of state or government leader (not counting the Queen of Australia) invited to address a joint sitting. There had only been two such addresses by a foreign head of state (both Americans) in the previous 102 years of the history of the Australian Commonwealth parliament.

Eleven years later, in 2014, after the leaders of Indonesia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, as well as Barack Obama, had been so invited, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, was back on that most symbolic of ceremonial stages in this theater of trilateral strategic drama. As if in response, through 2015 and 2016, the United States undertook its most intensive campaign ever of senior military visits to Australia calling for solidarity and joint action on any joint military endeavor. The subject was the need to stand up to China in the South China Sea.

Diplomatic Alignment

On paper and in principle, the positions of Australia and the United States on South China Sea issues are very close.

Australia, like the United States, takes no position on the territorial claims of the parties to the Spratly and Paracel Islands, or Scarborough Shoal. The two countries regularly assert that disputes of such kind, as well as the ensuing disputes over maritime resource boundaries, must be resolved peacefully. Both governments, like most states, believe that international law provides for innocent passage of warships in another country’s territorial sea without prior notice. In support of this view, the navies and air forces of the two countries exercise freedom of navigation rights in accordance with international law both for ship transits and aircraft overflights. Both governments have called on all parties to avoid further militarization of the disputes. The two governments have manifested increasing concern since the escalation of maritime tensions first in 2012-­2013 in the East China Sea and then again in 2014 and since in the South China Sea.

In private and public, senior officials of the two defense organizations make it fairly plain that they see China as the main provocateur, based in part on its efforts to assert claims to territorial and maritime jurisdiction, but in part premised on their belief that China has the ambition of becoming a regional hegemon. Officially and in private, leaders of the two countries paint China as a potential threat to merchant shipping simply by dint of its more militarized actions in disputed areas and its overall naval modernization (often labeled by these leaders as “naval expansion”).

Australia and the United States, in common with a large number of other states, see an additional cause for concern in China’s determination to reject the findings of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the case brought by the Philippines against China. Even though China may be within its rights not to be bound by the case, based on its reservations to the Law of the Sea Convention provisions on arbitral proceedings, Australia and the United States feel that the case is an opportunity for China to rebuild strategic trust and remove ambiguity about its maritime claims. This concern has given rise to a new element in diplomatic rhetoric toward the South China Sea about the need to abide by a “rules-­based international order.” I do not share the Australian and U.S. concern on this point, but in practical diplomatic terms, China is passing up an excellent opportunity to rebuild trust.

Behind the Diplomacy

The close alignment on broad principles for dealing with the South China Sea is only to be expected given that Australia and the United States share common political values on, and interests in, regional security, especially in the maritime domain. The two countries also attach a very high political value to the alliance and solidarity. They consult closely on all major security issues, including in an annual 2+2 format (secretaries of defense and foreign affairs of each side).

Australia is not a subservient and unquestioning ally of the United States. It operates a mature foreign policy based on its national interests and political values. One recent example among several of this maturity and independence is its special relationship with Singapore. This includes relaxed visa arrangements, the regular presence of Singaporean military personnel in Australia for training, and a relationship akin to that between Australia and New Zealand. The terms of the Singapore/Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership were finalized only in May 2016. We do need to see Australia’s alignment with the United States on South China Sea issues as a considered position, not blind followership.

A closer look at the diplomatic practice and political interests of Australia begins to expose some areas of divergence from U.S. positions.

In 2015, Obama publicly challenged the Australian prime minister over Canberra’s decision to lease two wharves in Darwin port to a Chinese company for 99 years. Obama felt that Australia should have discussed this first with his government, implying that U.S. security interests were involved. Obama also implied that Australia had kept the negotiations on the port secret. In reply, Turnbull rather ebulliently dismissed the assertion as groundless: “The fact that Chinese investors were interested in investing in infrastructure in Australia is ... hardly a secret.” He suggested that U.S. embassy staff should have read the newspapers. The rebuke by Obama followed two months of “emergency” negotiations between officials of the two countries about the Australian decision.

Australia also takes a more subdued approach to exercising freedom of navigation rights than the United States. The latter has a dedicated “FONOPs” program: deployments made specifically and conspicuously for the purpose of asserting the right. In contrast, Australia relies on a practice of using the opportunities created by normal operations for other purposes to pass through the territorial sea as a direct manifestation of the right of innocent passage.

Underpinning these differences, the sentiment among strategic specialists in Australia is, with notable exceptions, simply not as inflamed as it is in China or the United States. For example, two prominent and highly respected analysts who are both retired senior naval officers, James Goldrick and Sam Bateman, have challenged U.S. and Australian characterizations of the implied Chinese threat to shipping in the South China Sea.

White believes that in the most likely scenarios for a crisis in the Western Pacific involving China's maritime interests, the United States will not spill blood. “The Americans would only consider going that far if there were a direct attack on Japan's main islands,” White said. “I doubt they would even go that far in the event of a direct attack on Taiwan, and the Chinese probably know that,” he added.

White also suggested that the United States appears to have raised the ante on the maritime disputes in a way that leaves it nowhere to go: “When the United States backs down on the South China Sea confrontation, as it must eventually, then Australia’s choices about the future of American military primacy in the Western Pacific may have been settled for it.”

I can agree with White’s characterizations of the geopolitical dynamics. There may be more room, however, than he has allowed for pragmatism to come into play before any of the parties reaches the crisis point that he has foreshadowed. It will take creative and robust diplomacy by Australia and other U.S. partner countries in the region (such as Singapore and South Korea) to avoid that crisis point. The wild card, or in one case the joker, remains the political cycle as it unfolds in the key protagonists: the United States, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.

Greg Austin is a Professorial Fellow with the EastWest Institute in New York and a Professor at the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Click here to read the article on The Diplomat.

In an interview that aired on May 26, Miller said President Obama's "historic" visit was the culmination of what the U.S. had been slowly building towards.

Miller said the visit could be seen from two perspectives. Many would see it as insensitive towards war veterans, he argued, but many would also see it as a model for Obama's nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Obama paid a visit to Hiroshima on May 27, becoming the first sitting American president to do so.

Click here to listen to the full interview with VOA.

Click here to read Miller's commentary about the visit to Hiroshima that appeared in Al Jazeera.

The EastWest Institute and the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO) held a two-day confidential dialogue meeting between participants from Iran and Saudi Arabia in Bonn on April 27-28, 2016.

The two groups from Iran and Saudi Arabia were composed of former diplomats, senior analysts, and security and military experts. In addition, a group of distinguished experts from the European think tank community contributed with their input and analysis.

Held under strict Chatham House Rule, the dialogue aimed at gaining insights on how Saudi Arabia and Iran view the ongoing crises in the Middle East and how they believe Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen can be stabilized and how the escalating refugee crisis can be contained.

The report can be downloaded here.

Related: 

"Know Your Enemy - Iranian and Saudi Perspectives on ISIL."

Envisioning the Future: Iranian and Saudi Perspectives on the Post-Oil Economy

Executive summary of the brief:

To successfully contain and defeat ISIL, the deeply fractured and war-torn Middle East needs to be stabilized. This strategic goal cannot be achieved without functional relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Against the backdrop of recent escalating tensions between the two countries, a newly developed emphasis on shared interests and common challenges between Tehran and Riyadh is more crucial than ever. To this end, CARPO and the East West Institute (EWI) brought together experts from both countries in the fall of 2015 to exchange respective views on the regional threat posed by ISIL. Both sides agreed that a comprehensive strategy against this terrorist group needs a focus on root causes and must entail: (1) addressing socio-political grievances that create conducive environments for the flourishing of violent extremism, (2) undermining the ideological oxygen that feeds terrorism, (3) targeting internal and external financial resources, and (4) dismantling the bureaucratic, infrastructural and -8state' capacities of ISIL. While fostering regional cooperation, Western states need to adopt a balanced approach that abstains from playing out regional actors against each other. The regional responsibilities of Iran and Saudi Arabia must be addressed and shared interests emphasized, in order to pave the way for an effective and long-term campaign against ISIL, led by the two regional powers.

The entire report can be downloaded here.

Related:

 "Victimized by Geopolitics: Iranian and Saudi Perspectives on the Refugee Crisis."

Envisioning the Future: Iranian and Saudi Perspectives on the Post-Oil Economy

Early in March, North Korea announced that it had finished work on miniaturizing a nuclear warhead that, if accurate, would enable nuclear blackmail of the U.S., South Korea and Japan. The veracity of Pyongyang's claim is questionable, but the larger threat posed by the North to Japan—and the region more broadly—should not be questioned. North Korea's string of recent provocations—highlighted by its fourth nuclear test and a subsequent missile test—reinforces the need to enhance Japan's security and intelligence capabilities.

Aside from the sustained threat from North Korea, there are other evolving security challenges facing Japan. The most pressing of these is rapid military modernization in China, coupled with Beijing's assertiveness in the maritime domain. This is most acutely threatening to Japan's interests in the East China Sea, where Chinese vessels are constantly entering Japan's territorial waters around the disputed Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyu islands. Of secondary, but not insignificant, importance are Chinese efforts to change the status quo in the South China Sea through land reclamation and gradual militarization of its alleged sovereign territory.

In addition to regional concerns, there are transnational threats that should capture Tokyo's attention. In four years, Japan will be in the final stages of its multi-faceted preparations to host the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020. In addition to the pomp and ceremony and the diplomatic prestige that the Games bring, there will also be significant pressure on Japan's police, immigration, security and emergency management bodies to fend off potential threats and acts of terrorism and ensure the protection of its critical infrastructure and "soft targets" such as public places and malls.

These concerns also transcend targets within Japan, as Japanese companies and expatriates continue to operate and live overseas—sometimes in unstable environments with rapidly evolving security situations. A key area of concern here remains the Middle East and North Africa, where Japanese companies remain engaged and continue to seek greater market share—especially in the natural resource sector. The hostage-taking—and eventual deaths—in January 2013 of several Japanese nationals working for a gas plant in Algeria is a prime example of these threats.

Since his election in late 2012, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has expended a large amount of political time and capital on security and defense reforms. Some of the key changes during Abe's tenure include last year's passage of legislation on the reinterpretation of Japan's right to collective self-defense and reforms to the ability of its Self Defense Forces to assist Japanese nationals in danger overseas. Other key changes include the establishment of Japan's first ever national security strategy, the creation of a National Security Council, new legislation on the security of classified information, revised national defense program guidelines and changes to development and arms exports policies.

Underpinning all these changes is a strengthening of Japan's alliance with the United States through revised bilateral defense guidelines agreed last year. The new guidelines not only serve to strengthen the mutual commitment to the defense of Japan—including the Senkaku islands—but also give teeth to a "seamless" and coordinated approach to evolving security challenges in Tokyo's neighborhood.

Click here to read the full article on Nikkei Asian Review.

On March 9, 2016, EWI's Perot Fellow and Vice President David Firestein appeared on a Shanghai Media Group broadcast to comment on recent trends in China's foreign policy and U.S.-China relations. Firestein addressed international perceptions of China's approach to the South China Sea and the overall continuity of China's foreign policy, and also assessed the impact of the U.S.-China agreement on cybersecurity reached at Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to the United States in September 2015.

Click here to watch the video. 

Last December, the Obama Administration notified the United States Congress of its intent to make available to Taiwan an arms package valued at $1.83 billion. It was the first notification to Congress of a planned U.S. arms sale to Taiwan since 2011, ending the longest gap between such notifications since the United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan (the Republic of China) to the People’s Republic of China on the mainland in 1979.

Many observers were surprised that the announced package wasn’t larger, given the length of time it had been since the United States had last announced such a sale. The smaller-than-expected scale of the package, coupled with the timing of the announcement—a decent interval after the state visit of President Xi Jinping to Washington, a month before presidential elections in Taiwan in which the KMT was clearly sputtering, and, perhaps most importantly, in the relatively quiet news week before Christmas—suggested to some that the United States was making an effort to limit the negative impact of the announcement on U.S.-China relations. And in fact, China’s reaction to the news was unusually subdued. The episode blew over quickly, with the U.S.-China relationship evidently no worse for the wear.

At face value, the fairly quiet way in which the matter was handled suggests that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, long an irritant in the U.S.-China relationship and a major bilateral trust-drainer from the Chinese point of view, are now a thoroughly manageable issue. But the low-key tone around this latest announcement masks a more fundamental, if perhaps less immediately perceptible, truth about the overall cross-Strait equation: namely, that the status quo is, for different reasons, sub-optimal from the standpoint of Taiwan, mainland China and the United States; or to put it another way: that current policies, taken as a whole, are actually failing all three stakeholders.

This is easiest to see when looking at the matter from the perspective of Taiwan. In 1979, Taiwan was widely viewed as having the capacity to defend itself effectively, and over a long period of time, in the event of a conventional attack from the Chinese mainland. The general assessment was that Taiwan possessed a military capability sufficiently robust to repel an amphibious assault, defeat China or at least fight it to a draw in the air, and ensure Taiwan’s continued survival and way of life for a protracted and perhaps indefinite period of time. But today, after some 37 years—and after about as many billions of dollars’ worth of Taiwan arms purchases from the United States during that period—the virtually unanimous assessment is very different:  the cross-Strait balance of power has shifted so dramatically in favor of the mainland that, for the first time in its history, Taiwan is now vulnerable to existential military defeat at the hands of the mainland.

Making this point more emphatically than perhaps any other expert on record, cross-Strait military analyst Mark Stokes told a key U.S. Congressional commission in 2010, “every citizen on Taiwan lives within seven minutes of destruction” (principally via China’s massive and growing arsenal of ballistic missiles opposite Taiwan), something that indisputably was not true in 1979 (when China lacked a ballistic missile capability altogether). So much for the idea that U.S. arms sales are helping Taiwan maintain its self-defense capacity; and so much for the idea that status quo policies are benefitting Taiwan.

Given the sharp deterioration in Taiwan’s net security position relative to the mainland, one might conclude that things are at least going well for the mainland. But in fact, that is not the case, either. Mainland China’s ultimate objective regarding Taiwan is reunification—essentially, by any means necessary, but with a stated preference for a political solution rather than a military one. With this ultimate objective in mind, China has deployed a massive ballistic missile arsenal in southeastern China, the primary purpose of which would appear to be to coerce Taiwan. Judging the cross-Strait picture against the mainland’s goal of reunification, it is fair to say that China is further from the attainment of that goal today than at any time since 1949. That may sound counterintuitive to those who view the closer economic and cultural integration of the mainland and Taiwan in recent years as evidence of an inexorable trend toward convergence and ultimately unification, presumably on terms defined by the more powerful mainland. But the reality is, pro-(re)unification sentiment is close to an all-time low, as evidenced by any number of recent public opinion polls.

Meanwhile, the independence-sympathetic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is just coming off its most decisive electoral victory in history—a landslide triumph by Tsai Ing-wen in the presidential balloting and an equally monumental win in the Legislative Yuan, where the DPP now commands a majority for the first time ever. Indeed, based on the results of Taiwan’s last six presidential elections, the trend line is unmistakable: the DPP is generally gaining voter share, moving from relative marginality (just 21% of the popular vote) in 1996 to electoral dominance (over 56% of the popular vote) just twenty years later. And the hard demographic reality is that those in Taiwan with the strongest personal, familial and historical links to the mainland are dying off with each passing year and decade; and a very vibrant and distinct sense of uniquely Taiwanese identity has concomitantly blossomed in place of those disintegrating links. When it comes to the issue of reunification, time is clearly not on the mainland’s side. And thus, it is evident that the status quo isn’t any more advantageous to mainland China than it is to Taiwan.

Nor is the status quo serving the United States well. The stated purpose of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which are mandated by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, is “to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability”; though it is not articulated explicitly, that envisaged self-defense capability is clearly understood to be relative to the mainland, which has always been seen in the United States (and Taiwan) as constituting the only credible military threat to Taiwan. A corollary of this basic policy purpose is that the United States wants to minimize the likelihood that it will have to become involved in a cross-Strait conflict that would potentially pit the United States against China in a hot war an ocean away from the U.S. mainland. This is why the United States, for decades, has articulated an enduring interest in the cross-Strait issue being resolved peacefully and in accordance with the will of people on both sides of the Strait. But what has happened in recent decades? The balance of power, as noted above, has shifted sharply in favor of the mainland, Taiwan is less secure relative to the mainland than at any time in the island’s history, the costs to the mainland of a possible campaign against Taiwan have decreased, and, as a result, the likelihood of a cross-Strait conflict has actually increased on the aggregate. In 1979, China would not have felt a conventional war with Taiwan was necessary (given the high level of support for the “one-China” construct that existed in Taiwan at that time) or winnable; today, the available evidence suggests that China believes such a war might be more necessary—and more winnable. And thus, the likelihood of conflict is greater, even if marginally; and concomitantly, the likelihood of the United States becoming embroiled in a cross-Strait conflict has likewise increased, even if marginally.  In short, the status quo around the cross-Strait issue is failing the United States, even as it is failing Taiwan and mainland China.

The issue of Taiwan is unlikely to devolve into a conflict in the immediate future.  But the issue is also less settled and benign than commonly thought. Current assessments of the cross-Strait situation are predicated on the notion that the status quo, however delicate, is the optimal state of affairs—basically, the “least-worst” scenario that is actually practicable. But this is not the case. Though the situation could be worse, it could also be better; smarter policies are available, achievable and necessary. (See here for one set of concrete policy recommendations put forward by the EastWest Institute.) Looking for the potential hot spots in the world or in East Asia, Taiwan does not typically rise to the fore. Going a little deeper, however, and applying the criteria of one new theory of major international conflict, it is clear that the China-Taiwan dynamic includes all the key ingredients for conflagration:  at least one state actor, at least one non-democracy, at least one non-nuclear power, the implication of at least one existential or identity-related national interest, and a healthy dose of exceptionalist thinking (in this case, on both sides). Reducing the threat of a cross-Strait flare-up will require vision, wisdom and skill. But above all, it will require the realization that, in fact, there can be a better status quo for all.

Click here to read this article on The Diplomat.

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Last week, North Korea delivered another shock to the international community with its release of photographs, through its state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper, claiming that it has perfected the process of miniaturising nuclear warheads to be placed on its ballistic missiles.

If accurate, such claims would effectively provide the North with short to medium-range capabilities to deliver a nuclear strike aimed at either South Korea or Japan. Pyongyang has long maintained the capability to strike Japan conventionally with its missiles, but these new developments would prove to be a game changer—not only for Tokyo but for the region more broadly.

North Korea's somewhat predictable cycle of provocations—underscored by its announcement of miniaturisation, along with its recent nuclear and missile tests—has jolted the United States, South Korea and Japan to look at ways to bolster their deterrent to further aggression from Pyongyang.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Security Council—under heavy pressure from Washington, Seoul and Tokyo—unanimously adopted the toughest set of sanctions against the North in years.

There is also renewed talk of potentially deploying a more sophisticated—and controversial—anti-ballistic missile system to the Korean peninsula to deter Pyongyang from attempting to leverage its technological advances for "nuclear blackmail".

But while the North's isolation—both regional and international—continues, there is another glaring defeat for the administration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Since his election in late 2012, Abe has stressed the importance of resolving the long-running unresolved saga of kidnapped Japanese nationals brought to North Korea. During the 1970s and 1980s, several Japanese nationals were abducted from coastal areas of Japan and other parts of the world.

As tensions continue to increase on the Korean peninsula, it is time now for Abe to cut his losses and maintain a united front alongside the U.S. and South Korea in deterring the Kim Jong-un regime.

Despite repeated efforts to resolve the matter, Tokyo has been unable to achieve much traction. The closest Japan has come to closure on the matter was the return of five children from the abductees, which followed former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's landmark meeting with Kim Jong-il in 2002.

To read the entire article on Al Jazeera, click here. 

As part of his recent visit to Moscow and engagement with leading thinkers on key issues that can help re-build trust and cooperation between Russia, United States and its European partners, Dr. William Parker, COO of the EastWest Institute, was interviewed by Sputnik Radio. Here, Dr. Parker shared his insights on areas where the United States and Russia, building on mutual interest, can find additional scope for cooperation, in particular in the fight against ISIS.

Click here to listen to the complete interview.