In mid-October, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev voiced support for a proposed ban on smoking in public places by 2015. “The government is not at war with smokers,” he said, “but we are making a stand against smoking.”

Compared to Russia, where about a third of the population smokes, China has “the biggest tobacco problem in the world.” As Cheng Li pointed out in a recent publication, China is “the world’s biggest tobacco producer, largest cigarette consumer, and gravest victim of the smoking-related health crisis.” Read more »

While we on the East Coast of the United States get battered by the hurricane, reports suggest that the most recent wave of strife in Rakhine State has cooled, at least temporarily. The Irrawaddy reports that at least 22,000 people have been displaced by the most recent conflict in Rakhine State, according to the UN, but that calm has been restored for now, albeit with a significantly larger presence of security forces on the streets of major towns and cities in the state, including 5,000 more police and at least 1,000 more border security forces.

Although it is certainly good that some calm has been restored, no one believes that another explosion of violence will not occur soon in Rakhine State. Read more »

No doubt about it, David Barboza of the New York Times has achieved a journalistic coup. His deep dive into the financial wherewithal of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s family exposed a total net worth of a staggering $2.7 billion. Other journalists, of course, have investigated the family holdings of other Chinese leaders: a team of Bloomberg reporters broke the secrecy barrier with reports on the wealth of Bo Xilai’s family and last June published an in-depth look into the burgeoning financial holdings—almost $400 million—of soon-to-be Chinese president Xi Jinping’s extended family. Frankly, anyone who spends much time in China knows about the oligarchic nature of the Chinese elite, but the extent and distribution of the Wen family wealth is eye-opening. Read more »

Over the past week, violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine State, in the western part of Myanmar, has flared up badly once again. According to reports in local media and the news wires, over the past seven days at least sixty —and as many as one hundred— people have been killed in clashes. The local security forces allegedly have been firing on some crowds, and other reports suggest that the refugee camps set up for Muslims in the area have already become so overcrowded that they can no longer hold new arrivals. Read more »

U.S. secretary of defense Panetta and ROK minister of defense Kim Kwan-jin released a joint communique following the 44^th annual Security Consultative Meetings (SCM) on Wednesday.  Since this meeting is an annual event that rotates between Washington and Seoul, I decided to compare this week’s communique with the one issued four years ago (at the end of the Bush administration) under Lee Myung-bak’s first defense minister Lee Sang-hee and his counterpart Robert Gates to provide a sense of how the relationship has developed during the stewardship of Presidents Lee and Obama.  Here are my takeaways: Read more »

For more than two decades beginning in 1956, CBS and then NBC aired a television show “To Tell the Truth,” in which a panel of celebrities attempted to identify which one of three contestants was telling the truth about who he/she was. I always found the show rather painfully gripping as I waited for the final reveal, when the host would ask, “Would the real [so and so] please stand up?”  Read more »

The agenda for the annual U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meeting to be held this week in Washington between South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin and his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, will inevitably focus on how to keep the Korean peninsula stable against potential North Korean provocations. However, with South Korea’s decision to contribute resources to a variety of international peacekeeping and stabilization missions, U.S.-ROK security cooperation has gone global. Read more »

As Western economies continue to struggle, while China and many other large developing nations are now being looked to as potential saviors of indebted European nations, the idea that the twenty-first century will be dominated by the “rise of the rest” —i.e., non-Western nations, most of them in Asia —has only become more powerful. Indeed, from Goldman Sachs’ first landmark report predicting the emergence of the so-called “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India and China) to, more recently, the originator of the famous term “Washington Consensus” publicly wondering whether the Washington Consensus had been replaced by a Beijing Consensus, the “rest” already seem to have risen quite far, while the West has nowhere to go but down. Read more »

South Korea tries for the third time to successfully launch its own satellite into earth orbit using Russian technology this Friday, October 26, 2012. A new essay by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Clay Moltz analyzes South Korea’s space strategy in a new U.S.-Korea program essay. The essay analyzes South Korea’s program achievements and strategic challenges in the context of rapidly advancing Chinese, Indian, and Japanese programs. Moltz also analyzes opportunities and challenges to enhanced U.S.-ROK cooperation in space as part of my edited volume released earlier this year entitled The US-South Korea Alliance: Meeting New Security Challenges. Read more »

Over the past six months, the insurgency in southern Thailand, which seemed to be cooling off late last year, has once again heated up. Incidents of daily violence are up, and the insurgents are using increasingly sophisticated bombing and gunning techniques. The recent ceasefire deal in the southern Philippines between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has shifted attention to the south Thailand insurgency, yet the prospect of change in the Thai south looks remote. Read more »