The prospect for reunifying the island of Cyprus is fading, with hardliners in charge of the ethnically Turkish north and, in 2023, the likely election of Nikos Christodoulides as president of the ethnically Greek Republic of Cyprus in the south. Ankara has played a more active role in the political affairs of Northern Cyprus since the collapse of negotiations over reunification in 2017 and has embraced a two-state solution to the crisis. Meanwhile, many Greek Cypriots in the south are content with the status quo, seeing reunification as too politically and economically risky.
In late 2015, after Justin Trudeau became Canadian prime minister, Ottawa’s relations with Beijing seemed on the verge of becoming more cooperative, with increasing levels of bilateral trade and investment. But relations deteriorated sharply in 2018 amid a worsening trade war between the United States and China and after Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the request of law-enforcement officials in the US. There is little prospect that relations will improve in the near term, regardless of whether the Meng affair concludes by the end of 2021 or whether the next Canadian government is formed by the Liberals or the Conservatives.
Turkey’s successful support of Azerbaijan in the November 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh seems to have encouraged Ankara to pursue new diplomatic and economic initiatives further east, in Central Asia. Its appears that Turkey is seeking to create markets for its exports in the region while gaining access to Central Asian oil and gas reserves. However, given the parlous state of its economy, Turkey is vulnerable to measures that China, Iran or Russia might to take to oppose these new initiatives.
Japan – with the world’s third-largest economy and a pacifist constitution that limits its military capability – has long used economic tools to pursue its international goals. However, China’s rise as a geo-economic power has driven the Abe administration to reshape its foreign-policy bureaucracy to compete with China in this regard and to recalibrate its approach to economic statecraft.
Hypersonic weapons are becoming a reality with the deployment of Avangard glide vehicle by Russia and the successful testing of such weapons by China and the US. Built to overcome ballistic missile defenses, these weapons are often touted as unstoppable and a possible game-changer. Unlike traditional missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles glide towards their targets giving the defender no time to respond and intercept them. These weapons impact strategic stability by compressing the decision-making time, increasing counterforce temptations due to their precision targeting, and by causing a new arms race. The ability to carry both conventional and nuclear warheads off these weapon can also lead to miscalculation and inadvertent escalation. With weakening arms control and trust deficit at the global level, the global strategic stability would be under stress with the induction of these weapons in nuclear-weapon states’ inventories until some confidence-building measures are adopted. They will continue to challenge the strategic stability even after new systems are developed to counter them.
