Eastern Asia

As is well known, both the geographical position of Japan and its need for the import of hydrocarbon fuels have facilitated the development of relations of that country with Russia. Only the long-standing Kuril Islands dispute stopped Japan from becoming one of the main Russian economic partners even several decades ago.

While, at the end of 2017, we can see a relative warming in the relations between Beijing and Seoul, relations between Beijing and Pyongyang have also entered an interesting phase – a phase which could be described as a tactical cooling, although as yet it is not clear whether this phase has finished.

South-East Asia has now entered into a new phase of its development: the influence of the US administration is waning in the region, and instead, increasingly, the main area of confrontation in the region is the relationship between China and Japan. In an attempt to limit the expansion of China in South-East Asia Japan has begun to show that it has considerable power to both preserve the status quo and also to find new forms of political and economic integration in the wider East Asian region.

As it is known, all the states bordering with India are the zones of the Indian-Chinese struggle for the economic, political, and military dominance (except for Pakistan – a traditional opponent of India either with or without China). Even those that have traditionally cooperated with India, such as Bangladesh, the Maldives Republic, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, are gradually moving to the camp of the PRC allies.

Global military and political confrontation between two leading world powers (the USA and the PRC), which is shifting to the center of a new geopolitical game, is most clearly manifested in a sea strip, bordered, on the one hand, by the coast of China and, on the other hand, by the so-called “First island line”.