Asia & the Pacific

Proponents of “transactional” diplomacy argue that comprehensive deals to transform political relationships are unrealistic, and that zeroing in on the most pressing issue is the only way to make any tangible progress. The “grand bargainers” retort that any deal that isn’t comprehensive will face fatal opposition from important stakeholders.

Both arguments have some merit, but the perceived distinction between them is a false one: Past engagements with Iran and North Korea were premised on the hope that piecemeal transactions could provide a platform for more sweeping diplomacy. And the best nonproliferation progress has been achieved when all sides perceived diplomatic transactions as incremental steps toward broader reconciliation.

What sounded so simple during last year’s presidential campaign has turned out, like everything related to Iran, to be quite complicated.

Trump tied American jobs to endless wars in the Middle East. Biden should link them to renewed diplomacy.

Chernobyl still stands for the world’s worst nuclear accident. The full impact of a nuclear disaster on this scale is difficult to compute, not least because the effects that count most are often those that are most difficult to count. Beyond the number of lives lost and people displaced, beyond the money spent on accident mitigation and remediation, there are long-term health, environmental, social, economic, and political consequences that defy quantification. Thirty-five years on, we are still grappling with the full extent of Chernobyl’s impact on the world. Yet in a very real sense, we live in a world shaped by Chernobyl.

Ten years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the suffering of many tens of thousands of people lingers—as does the slowdown in global nuclear energy growth that followed the meltdowns. The broad impact of the disaster prompts us to ask not only how it happened, but how the world community can best prevent such disasters in the future.

Ten years on, the lessons learned from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident continue to focus on improving safety culture and regulatory oversight. However, the executive decisions that failed to prevent the disaster also demonstrate the necessity to re-examine the legal entities most often relied on for producing nuclear power: corporations.

1. We must learn from and remember the lessons of the past—while recognizing that Fukushima is not going to “happen again” as future accidents will have their own characteristics; while remembering the past, we must also avail ourselves of advances in seismology, climatology, engineering, etc.

The cryptocurrency depends on the integrity of the blockchain. But China's censors, the FBI, or powerful corporations could fragment it into oblivion, warn Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier.

Joseph Nye writes that the world is increasingly obsessed with the ongoing power struggle between the United States and China. But the technology-driven shift of power away from states to transnational actors and global forces brings a new and unfamiliar complexity to global affairs.

The 1994 Agreed Framework called for North Korea to dismantle its plutonium-production complex in exchange for civilian light water reactors (LWRs) and the promise of political normalization with the United States. Political and technical analysis reveals how the LWR project helped build credibility for the political changes promised in the Agreed Framework.