Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the February 2025 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

This month we consider the age-old question of what’s next? For a such a forward-looking query, its answer is always rooted at least in part in the past. From Bangladesh’s recent revolution to the appearance of North Korean soldiers on Ukrainian battlefields and the rise of a new Red Scare in the United States, as we ask ourselves what might come next it’s critical to take in the context from which these events arise.

As Bangladesh marks the six-month anniversary of the Monsoon Uprising, it’s worth reflecting on the events that led to Sheikh Hasina’s dramatic fall from power. Naomi Hossain, a professor at the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, asks and answers the central question: “How did Hasina fall so far, so fast?” Part of the answer lies in the shocking brutality Hasina unleashed on student protesters in the early stages of the movement. However, the larger cause, Hossan argues, was “the failure of the development model on which Hasina had prided herself, and on which the regime’s legitimacy had rested.” Simply put: Bangladesh’s economic development, once surprisingly equitable, had become divorced from improvements to ordinary people’s lives. Hasina’s Awami League could no longer keep up their end of the implicit bargain: economic growth in exchange for the death of true political pluralism.

In the last quarter of 2024, North Korean soldiers began to appear alongside Russian troops on the battlefields of the Russia-Ukraine War. John Erath, senior policy director for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, writes that the time has come to examine not only the effects and effectiveness of North Korean troops in combat, but the wider implications for international security and conflict management of Russia’s usage of foreign forces to wage its war in Ukraine. History tells us that there exists a tipping point at which casualties pile too high for any government to maintain public support for a war. In an effort to put off that point, Russia has sent North Koreans to do some of the dying. The outcome of the conflict will set new precedents for how governments handle their wars in the future.

Seventy-five years after the original Red Scare began, a new paranoia has risen in the United States. The first Trump administration’s launching of a trade war with China in 2018 kicked off a downward spiral in relations between Beijing and Washington. That government-level trend was accompanied by rising public suspicion in the United States directed toward Asians in general and ethnic Chinese in particular. Qian He, Vice-Chancellor Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, charts the contours of this new Red Scare, writing that it “poses not only persistent challenges for Asian and Asian American communities” but presents a “unique opportunity to renegotiate their collective future on their own terms.”

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