Eastern Asia

The beginning of 2017 was marked by the aggravation of the situation in Northeast Asia. And this time the Republic of Korea (ROK) was in the center of this negative trend.

On December 29, 2016, the government of the Republic of Korea expressed its vehement protest to the Japanese authorities about the visit made by the Minister of Defense of Japan, Tomomi Inada, to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The indignation was caused not only by the visit itself but by the Minister’s statement during the visit to the temple that “any state can honour the memory of those who gave their lives for their country.”

There has been a drastic increase in tension in the relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea: the Ambassador in Seoul and the Consul General in Busan have been temporary withdrawn, the talks on foreign exchange swaps have been suspended, and the conclusion of the agreement between the two countries on the exchange of military information is under a threat.

On December 25, a Chinese aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, used the Strait of Miyako as a passage way out of the East China Sea into the Pacific Ocean, accompanied by five other Chinese Navy surface ships. The strait separates the eponymous island from Okinawa, the largest island of the Ryukyu archipelago, which is generally known to belong to Japan.

Watching the next round of the Korean factional struggle and subsequently failing to build a logical and consistent version of the events surrounding this quagmire, the author has constantly felt that some piece of the puzzle is missing.

During Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe trip to Hawaii, which occurred at the very end of December, he paid a visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial to honor American servicemen who died on December 7, 1941. This day in history was marked by a devastating sneak attack of the Japanese aircraft carrier group on the ships of the US Pacific Fleet that were stationed in Hawaii.

On New Year’s Eve, the author will allow himself to get distracted from the routine affairs by pondering what the Republic of Korea is expecting after Park Geun-hye. Whoever comes to power and under whatever scenario, either Ban Ki-moon or Moon Jae-in or Ahn Cheol-soo, the new president will be faced with a set of tough challenges, the response to which will be very complex, as some of these problems are inevitable and unavoidable.

In our previous publication on the war over the history of South Korea we covered the heated discussions around the attempts to create a unified national history textbook for junior and secondary schools, which was composed “in order to form a correct and well-balanced view of history and the state”, as “the existing textbooks have liberal and sometimes even pro-North Korean content.”

Sometimes small victories or positive actions are almost as important as major international ones as they can give a new quality of impulse to many related developments, what physicists call the “butterfly effect.” To be more precise, a butterfly effect says that “a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state,” or that small causes may have large effects. That’s tied to the reality that every part of our Cosmos is interconnected.

Despite a concerted backlash against what US political leaders and policymakers claim is Russian interference in America’s internal politics, the US continues to openly interfere in the internal politics of other nations worldwide, including most recently, China.
Berating Russia Over Alleged Hacks