Letter From the Editors
In politics, as in life, promises are not always kept.
Welcome to the April issue of The Diplomat Magazine.
Talk is cheap, the saying goes, and yet so much of politics the world over revolves around just that: talks. From politicians campaigning during election season to diplomats seeking to forge new deals and relationships, promises and verbal assurances are a staple of the political trade. Yet reality nearly always gets in the way, sidetracking, altering, or even abrogating official pledges despite the best of intentions. In this issue, we take a look at the ways actions have ended up speaking louder than words.
Our cover story is devoted to India’s upcoming elections, which will hinge on perceptions of how well (or how poorly) Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP delivered on their 2014 campaign rhetoric. Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, provides a data-driven analysis of the political base for the BJP, and then looks at how popular support has changed among those regions and demographic groups. This election, Sircar writes, will test whether the BJP can campaign in 2019 as successfully as a governing party as it did as an oppositional force back in 2014.
Next, Tiffany Ma, a senior director at BowerGroupAsia, and Jessica Drun, a fellow with the Party Watch Initiative, take a look back at one of the most remarkable instances of the U.S. legislative branch dictating foreign policy: the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, passed to guarantee that the United States maintained a robust relationship with Taiwan even after severing official diplomatic ties. Forty years on, Ma and Drun note, the U.S.-Taiwan relationship is strong, but simultaneously under pressure from an increasingly powerful China intent on national unification. As the geopolitical, economic, and social sands have shifted, how well has Washington lived up to the TRA’s promises?
When Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) swept into power in 2015, peace was named as a top priority. But four years later, the process is stalled and peace elusive. Amara Thiha, a senior research manager at the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security (MIPS) and a nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center, explains the status of the peace process; unsurprisingly, it’s complicated. Now stakeholders suspect the government may be merely keeping the process on life-support through the next elections rather than pushing for breakthroughs.
The late February summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ended as a sadly predictable flop, as both sides walked away with little of what they’d wanted upon arrival in Hanoi. What went wrong and what lessons can we learn from the second Trump-Kim summit? Olivia Enos, a policy analyst in the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, walks us through the consequences of the summit and what steps should come next. Even in failure, there are lessons to be learned about each side’s priorities and their blind spots.
We hope you enjoy these stories, and the many more in the following pages.