Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the June 2021 issue of The Diplomat Magazine!

We don’t often indulge in the complicated art of prognostication here at The Diplomat. As the saying goes, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But sometimes it’s useful to step back from the never-ending series of individual headlines to ask what the long-term implications are. In this issue we do precisely that: take stock of topics that have been generating some the past year’s biggest news stories and look at where the broader trendlines could be pointing.

In our cover story, Richard Javad Heydarian argues that “the South China Sea disputes are today’s version of the early 20th century Balkans, where ‘some damned foolish thing’ can trigger a devastating global conflict.” Heydarian, a professorial chairholder in geopolitics at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, lays out the concerns of many that Chinese actions and a failure of imagination on the part of critical players in the South China Sea could result in a global cataclysm. A multilateral “Goldilocks” approach, which balances both deterrence and engagement, he writes, is needed to avoid disaster.

Next up: June 30, 2021 marks one year since Beijing unveiled the new national security law for Hong Kong. In the year since, the city has transformed into a police state, argues Victoria Tin-bor Hui, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame. Hui traces the arc of the still-unfolding crackdown in Hong Kong, from police violence against protesters to the mass arrest of political opposition figures over the past year. The erstwhile “city of protests” is almost unrecognizable just one year on, and Beijing’s work isn’t finished yet.

Then, we turn our attention to Afghanistan. In April, President Joe Biden announced that U.S. forces would withdraw from the country by September 11, 2021. What should we expect to happen after the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan? When Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, some predicted the mujahideen would quickly overrun the communist Afghan government without its Soviet security backing. As Dr. Jonathan Schroden of the CNA Coroporation’s Countering Threats and Challenges Program notes, many have made similar predictions about the Taliban quickly overwhelming Kabul. But reality, both then and now, is far more complex.

Our final lead sounds a note of caution about the inherent limitations of prediction, especially in regard to competition between China and the United States. “In trying to frame the future in order to prepare for it, we cast events in recognizable grand-strategic terms,” writes Jacob Parakilas, an analyst focusing on U.S. foreign policy and international security. Of course, as Parakilas points out, there is no guarantee that the past will be truly predictive of the future, especially given the vast differences between the 20th and 21st centuries (including, to name just a few, the rise of autonomous weaponry, the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, the exponential growth in transnational interest groups and actors, and the existential global threat of climate change). Ultimately, a failure to imagine how these new trends will impact geopolitics, and the China-U.S. relationship specifically, will result in a world that is woefully unprepared for whatever challenges the future actually brings.

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