Global Outlook

On October 24, 75 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the nuclear ban treaty. It will enter into force on January 22.

In a subtle diplomatic move, the Government of Canada has ceased its opposition and now “acknowledges” the reason for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which will enter into force on January 22, 2021. The new treaty, which has been ratified by 50 states, has been denounced by the Trump administration and also rejected by NATO.

COVID-19 has changed the global landscape. One of the side effects is that air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced as a result of restrictions on economic activity and the movement of people around the world. This has led to an advocacy to create a more sustainable and healthy society through the recovery process, in other words, a "green recovery”.

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.