After the adoption of UN Security Council Resolutions 2270 of March 2, 2016 and 2321 of November 30, 2016, there appear many assumptions about North Korean collapse in near future. Experts in the West consider this collapse as probable and even very close.
Supposedly, the economic hardships from sanctions will cause social unrest and turmoil that will lead to the change of leadership in the North. Immediately, Pyongyang will abandon its nuclear and missile programs, all citizens will condemn and...
For many years now North Korea has been relentlessly trying to perfect its nuclear program by conducting four nuclear tests and developing ballistic missiles that could be topped with nuclear warheads.
A Russian regional security expert in Vladivostok says North Korea cannot but continue to develop nuclear weapons because it believes that is the only way to guarantee regime survival.
"It is a defensive weapon for them a political tool for survival and some extent a tool of black mailing and...
Kim Jong-un is scheduled to visit Moscow this May as one of the Kremlin's numerous guests of honor for the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. This will be his first visit abroad since he succeeded his father Kim Jong-il as the ruler of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in December 2011.
Kim Jong-un's trip to Moscow is one indication of the warming relationship between Russia and North Korea. The past year has seen a flurry of high-level exchanges...
According to the classical ‘arms race’ theory by Lewis Richardson, military preparations of one’s side are directly proportional to rival’s potential and inversely – to its own accumulated arsenals. However differential equations don’t leave space for political choice as mathematically there can be only three possible scenarios: arms race, mutual disarmament or parity. The one valuable note made by Richardson after the World War I that nations tend to accumulate...
If the next world war is to happen, it will most likely be in Asia and feature a clash between the incumbent hegemon, the United States, and the principal challenger, China. The good news is China does not want war now and in the foreseeable future, primarily because Beijing knows too well that the odds are not on its side. But if we look ahead 20 years from now, in 2034, the circumstances will have shifted significantly.
NOT NOW
There are three reasons war is unlikely anytime soon.
First,...
An Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is airspace which extends beyond national borders. It has no basis in international law, but is not illegal as long as it does not violate existing rules of international law. Its purpose is usually to identify aircrafts approaching the territorial airspace. Even though it is only in the territorial airspace the state is allowed to take measures of enforcement, by setting up an ADIZ, thanks to an early identification, the state can better prepare for its...
The collision of a Chinese ‘fishing’ boat into vessels of the Japanese Coast Guard in September 2010 near the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands triggered the rise of tension between China and Japan. After the arrest of the captain and crew of the boat, there was an uproar of violent protests all over China, demanding the return of their heroes as well as the ‘stolen’ islands. There was another round of violent protests in September 2012 after the Japanese government’s purchase...
At noon on the 1st of October 2012, the first Osprey V-22 aircraft landed at Futenma Marine Corps Air Station on Japan’s Okinawa Island. The controversial deployment of this ungainly looking aircraft (a hybrid between a helicopter and fixed-wing plane) has exposed tensions between centre and periphery in Japanese politics, revealed major fault-lines in the U.S.-Japan military alliance, and demonstrated far-wider strategic shifts and geopolitical miscalculations by key states in East Asia.
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