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Latest Policy Briefs and Reports
Peace and Security in Northeast Asia
Reassurance Measures in the Taiwan Strait: Research Cluster Report
Summary Report No.242 - August, 2025 • By Hugh Miall
This report identifies the scope for reassurance measures in the Taiwan Strait dispute. At a time when tensions in the Taiwan Strait are high, the positions of the parties remain incompatible, military preparations are ramping up, and there is no official dialogue between the parties. The Toda Peace Institute convened a research group to identify how the parties could shift from relying on deterrence to putting more emphasis on reassurance. The aim was to identify which reassurance measures the main parties seek from others, and what reassurances they can offer to others. This report summarises the main conclusions of the papers and discussions and provides an overview of the potential contribution of reassurance measures to peace and stability in the region.
Casting a Long Shadow: Trump 2.0’s Impact on Aotearoa New Zealand
Report No.241 - August, 2025 • By Kevin P, Clements
This report examines the alarm felt in Aotearoa New Zealand during the first seven months of the second Trump administration as an autocratic President has managed to undermine basic democratic values and institutions, show open disdain for multilateral organisations, and do harm to global trade through his tariff policy. These developments challenge New Zealand’s deeply held political principles and values as well as a long tradition of empathetic and compassionate politics. This is a moment for co-operation rather than competition, and for building solidarity between progressive social democratic movements and polities all around the world.
Is Trump Adding to the Backsliding of the ‘World’s Biggest Democracy’?
Report No.240 - August, 2025 • By Debasish Roy Chowdhury
This report examines the consequences for India of a second Trump presidential term. With his steep tariffs and cheap insults, Trump has eroded a decades-old Indian public consensus of a pro-America policy and revived old animosities towards the US. If an estranged India’s strategic engagement with America and the democratic world loosens, it can only be more bad news for its troubled democracy. Not that America has ever seemed to care about Modi’s assaults on democracy, or he, about its sensitivities.
Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament
A Sceptic’s Take on the Nuclear Bomb
Report No.239 - August, 2025 • By Ramesh Thakur
This report states that the spread of nuclear weapons to a total of nine countries today, and the spell they cast on the leaders and scientists of many other countries who are enchanted by the magic of the bomb, rests on several mutually reinforcing myths. The author outlines these myths and the five paradoxes which set the context for the global nuclear arms control agenda. The possession of nuclear weapons by nine countries leaves the world exposed to the risk of sleepwalking into a nuclear disaster. A more rational and prudent approach to reducing nuclear risks would be to actively advocate and pursue the minimisation, reduction, and elimination agendas for the short, medium, and long terms.
The Sultanization of US Politics
Report No.238 - August, 2025 • By Wolfgang Merkel
This report examines the terminology applied to the second presidency of Donald Trump. It has been called ‘fascist’, a ‘descent into fascism’ or a ‘revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court’. The US itself has been described as a ‘flawed democracy’. What are the arguments for describing Trump's USA as a plutocracy or fascism? Don't we rather see the bizarre features of a form of rule described one hundred years ago by the German sociologist Max Weber as patrimonial, or more precisely, sultanistic?