Eastern Asia

Since 2017, South Korea has been a home for the American anti-ballistic missile defense system, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), which was installed in Seongju, 300 kilometers southeast of Seoul, despite strong protests from China and North Korea.

Most global crises and disasters compel countries and people to join together to tackle the troubles they are faced with more successfully, and to build a better society and wider world. However, the response to the coronavirus pandemic that has engulfed the world has been the complete opposite so far.

New Eastern Outlook articles have repeatedly pointed out that issues stemming from the SARS COV-2 pandemic (with medical problems not necessarily posing the key challenges), which have recently become prominent features of the media and political landscape, have, essentially, not had any effect on the long-established trends in world politics. In fact, some political “activists” from various countries have been able to use the global health crisis in their own interests.

A fierce confrontation between the United States and China, which has further intensified during the Coronavirus era, has become a staple in recent years. In order to exacerbate this conflict, Washington has employed numerous tools, such as pulling out of a number of bilateral and even international agreements; aggressively using sanctions; ramping up propaganda efforts and even escalating disagreements with China within international organizations.

150 years ago, on April 21, 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, was born. According to many, he was the greatest revolutionary of all times, a man who gave birth to both internationalism and anti-imperialism.
It is time to “revisit Communism”. It is also time to ask some basic, essential questions:

Our last piece on the US-South Korea military cost-sharing agreement known as the Special Measures Agreement (SMA) was published two months ago, yet no progress has since been made.

In Japan, the process of returning to “normalcy” is often tied with the desire of the nation’s leadership to remove limitations imposed on the country by Article 9 of its pacifist constitution adopted in 1947 under (to put it mildly) “pressure” from the US-led occupation administration. And according to a more radical viewpoint, the draft of this document for post-war Japan was in fact written at the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the occupation administration.