Global Outlook

How accurate is it to call the current Sino–US hostility Cold War Two? Could it tip the world into a shooting war in which neither emerges victorious and everyone loses? In an agenda-resetting speech at the Hudson Institute in October 2018, US Vice President Mike Pence outlined a thick catalogue of predatory practices and aggressive behaviour by China.

After three years of an erratic approach to North Korea, the Trump administration has made little progress in reducing the nuclear threat and enhancing peace and security on the Korean Peninsula. Today, North Korea continues to enrich uranium, enhance its missile capabilities, and reverse the inter-Korean conciliatory measures taken in 2018. The next US president will have to address this grave situation.

The Cold War-era weapons governance structures are no longer fit for purpose. In contemporary geopolitics, nuclear dyads have become nuclear chains. In an increasingly polycentric global order, the current nuclear arms control structure, built on the idea that disarmament can be managed via trade-offs between pairs of states whose very survival is dependent on stable strategic dyads, neither regulates nor constrains the choices of other nuclear-armed states.

October 19 2020 will showcase some of the sharpest minded high-level individuals from the Pacific Islands, who will be sharing their extensive and rich experiences living in their own country and fighting daily the impacts of climate change. Two of the speakers are former leaders of their country, Honourable Enele Sopoaga and former Kiribati President His Excellency Anote Tong. Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat Climate Change Advisor Mr Exsley Taloiburi and Climate Change Activist and Poet Ms Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands will complete the panel. The October 19 online forum is the first of a series of online forums on the topic of climate change and sovereignty. The hope is to bring to light the indigenous knowledge and experiences that are vital to understanding why sovereignty in the Pacific is unique, and why it is different to the notion of sovereignty being perpetuated by the Westphalian version of sovereignty which we are starting to see as a concept that needs to be decolonized.

Within a short time, perhaps by year’s end, 50 of the current 84 signatories to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the TPNW) will complete their ratification processes, bringing the TPNW into force. None of the nine States currently possessing nuclear weapons has expressed any positive interest in the Treaty, continuing with impunity to reject every effort by the international community at beginning the process of nuclear disarmament. When the TPNW enters into force, it will for the first time present the entire international community – including the nine nuclear-armed States (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) – with a fait accompli, a legal framework intended to encourage progress toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons, to verify every step taken, to detect cheating, and to celebrate advances towards peace and stability.