Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the February 2021 issue of The Diplomat Magazine!

This issue is devoted to the oxymoron, the complicated contradiction: A peace deal that has resulted in increased violence. The pursuit of a “rules based order” in a region where the dominant power makes its own rules. The government with the world’s best COVID-19 response shut out of the WHO. And a First President who is now simultaneously a former and a forever president.

In our cover story Franz J. Marty, an Afghanistan-based journalist, revisists the U.S.-Taliban deal settled on February 29, 2020. The United States, with just 2,500 troops left in the country, is on the precipice of a full withdrawal, but it’s yet to be seen what the new administration in Washington will do. Meanwhile, intra-Afghan talks are underway, but at an achingly slow pace given the great distance between the Taliban’s and the Afghan government’s priorities. The U.S.-Taliban deal has, a year on, yielded precious few concrete results. Optimistically titled the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” it has yet to do so. What’s next for the war-torn country?

The European Union, though located halfway around the world, has significant stakes in the South China Sea – and not only because so much of its foreign trade passes through those waters. As Sophie Boisseau du Rocher, a senior research fellow at the Center for Asian Studies, French Institute of International Relations, explains, the South China Sea disputes have come to embody existential issues for the EU: how to defend a world order based on the rule of law and peaceful coexistence. “Apparently, the world China wants to create, as exemplified in the South China Sea – one based on strategic intimidation and threats – is not of the same nature as the one the EU envisions,” Boisseau du Rocher writes. The EU approach to the South China Sea – and, more generally, to China – will help determine whether the values that underpin the bloc’s very existence can thrive in a new world order.

Taiwan was one of just a handful of success stories in the fight against COVID-19. That success came despite being shut out of the World Health Organization – or, as Lev Nachman, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California Irvine, argues, possibly because of that forced self-reliance. With robust institutions, hard-learned lessons from SARS, and a democracy that kept the virus a strictly non-partisan issue, Taiwan’s COVID-19 triumph won it a rare moment of recognition around the world. And that, in turn, has strengthened the hand of President Tsai Ing-wen, a fact she hopes to take advantage of throughout the rest of her second (and final) term.

And finally, we turn to Kazakhstan which recently held its first parliamentary elections under President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who took over as president when Nursultan Nazarbayev resigned in March 2019 after nearly 30 years in office. As Paolo Sorbello, a Kazakhstan-based journalist and researcher, explains, the recent election – the outcome of which was a predictable victory for the ruling party – is nevertheless a perfect primer on three illusions that characterize the so-called post-Nazarbayev era: transition, competition, and pluralism.

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