Because of the deep mutual mistrust from both sides, especially the US concern over China’s military build-up, friction and cooperation will coexist in the development of the China-US naval relationship. Only when political mutual trust reaches a high level, can the military relationship stride forward beyond the stop and go cycle of the last 30 years.
While the lessons of the Libyan crisis for international relations are many, the most important lesson is the need to change the way that humanitarian interventions are conducted, as the violence experienced by civilians since the foreign intervention has increased substantially.
The adjectives ‘critical’ and ‘realist’ are habitually presented, in the field of International Relations Theory, as antithetical. But might there have been a misunderstanding among critical theorists with regard to their definition of realism?
Russia has made a concerted attempt to become an ‘independent regional power’ since the demise of Yeltsin, with limited results in Eastern Europe, but with greater success in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Russia’s behaviour has been entirely predictable. Nonetheless, as China looks set to challenge Russian power in Central Asia in the future, Russia’s response remains unclear.
Within the antagonism between capitalist and communist ideas in the period of the cold war the Sino-US rapprochement appears as a very out of character phenomenon, culminating in the spectacular visit of president Richard Nixon in 1972, as the first president to enter Chinese Communist soil.
In his book ‘Paradise and Power’, Robert Kagan states that since the falling of Soviet Russia, the apparent cracks between American and European psyches have become more apparent. As such, questions have been raised as to whether US-EU ideals were ever on the same axis.
In the new millennium, the idea of South-South Cooperation has become more popular, especially due to the continued widening of the development gap and the seeming failure of North-South development strategies. South-South Cooperation initiatives could lead to the dawn of a new economic order, where the global South is on equal terms with the global North.
Although the race for nuclear weapons created a very tense atmosphere during the Cold War, it was also an effective means to maintain stability because both superpowers had the incentive to avoid using their weapons knowing it would lead to their mutual destruction. Such conditions and incentives do not exist in either unipolar or multipolar systems. Bipolarity is therefore stable thanks to the balance of military power that exists between two superpowers.
In four books from 1997 to 2008 Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a comprehensive American foreign posture around the geopolitical grail of Central Asia. Since 1945 the United States has been largely defined as the first non-Eurasian thalassocracy to prevail in the Great Game, yet for how long?
African societies are already suffering from poverty, inequality and weak social cohesion. Since its emergence, HIV/AIDS has added a multifaceted layer of new dimensions to the former. It impacts on the economy, education and the food security of the household, creating a paradigm in which poverty is a challenge in stopping the HIV/AIDS epidemic and HIV/AIDS is a challenge in stopping poverty.
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