Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the September 2020 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

As Diplomat readers well know, the world is not a static place. In the COVID-19 era, old assumptions have been shaken to their core; it’s time for a rethink of received wisdom to see if it still holds true. From the EU and Australia rethinking their approaches to Asia (and, more specifically, China) to re-evaluating the actual state of a long-feared terrorist group to the ever-changing nature of inter-Korea relations, this issue takes stock of the current realities taking shape (at least for the moment).

In our cover story, Therea Fallon, the founder and director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies (CREAS) in Brussels, outlines the rapidly changing perspective of the EU on China. While scrutiny of the relationship was underway in 2019, COVID-19 tilted the scales of public opinion heavily against China, and thus sped up the soul-searching in Brussels. As of early 2020, hopes were high for a historic September summit between Xi Jinping and all the EU member state leaders. Now the summit has been cancelled, and the usual China-EU summit this summer had a noticeably harsher tone.

Next, journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska sits down with a former member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and later the Islamic State - Khorasan Province now in prison in Afghanistan. Following the journey of Sherzod Boltaev, a 38-year-old Uzbek man, Pikulicka-Wilczewska maps out the path of the IMU from its roots in Central Asia to partnerships in Afghanistan, exile in Pakistan, and back into the Afghan theater. The IMU itself might no longer be an important player in the complex landscape of international jihad, but it may yet be too soon to portend its total demise.

“Australia is embarking on the most significant reorientation of its strategic policy settings in more than a generation – and it’s all about assuming a more active role in defending a stable regional order in the Indo-Pacific.” So begins an analysis of Australia’s 2020 Defense Strategic Update by Ashley Townshend and Brendan Thomas-Noone, both affiliated with the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. The update is Canberra’s reaction to a changing world order, playing out particularly rapidly in the Indo-Pacific region that surrounds Australia. The new strategy envisions Australia as a capable actor within a network of like-minded partners; an ambitious agenda, but a necessary one.

Finally, Christopher Green, an assistant professor of Korean Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, takes stock of the inter-Korea relationship, which has been enough to give analysts whiplash over the past three years: from the bellicose rhetoric on display from Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump in 2017 to the high spirits of the 2018 Olympic Games and subsequent summitry to the souring of ties in 2019. Things ended in a literal bang with the detonation of the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong in 2020. The dreams of permanent peace in 2018 were always unrealistic, Green writes, but there are reasons to believe the relationship won’t completely regress to the pre-2017 status quo.

We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.