Asia

Spinto dall’incertezza circa il futuro dell’accordo sul nucleare e le relazioni con l’Europa, l’Iran guarda a Est. Già lo scorso febbraio, la Guida suprema Ali Khamenei in un discorso pubblico aveva dichiarato che l’Iran avrebbe privilegiato l’Est all’Ovest, e in particolare le relazioni con Cina e Russia.

North Korea (DPRK) and Syria could have never been closer than today. On April 13^th, at night, Donald Trump ordered to bomb Damascus with 120 Tomahawks, which were directly aimed at Assad’s suspected chemical facilities. A similar military operation was conducted exactly twelve months earlier, followed by the delivery of a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast – known as MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) – to an ISIS camp in Afghanistan.

Moon Jae-in will be remembered in history books as one of the three South Korean presidents who met with their North Korean counterpart – the other two being Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008). Throughout his electoral campaign, Moon vowed to revive the engagement policy and restore economic cooperation with Pyongyang, after his predecessor – Park Geun-hye (2013-2017) – had severed all contacts with North Korea in 2016, as a result of the fourth nuclear test and various missile launches.

Famously, Donald Rumsfeld once said there are “known knowns, and then there are known unknowns”. With the current North Korea situation, this expression seems apt. There are things that we appear to know, for example the actual planned events, the negotiations which are moving dramatically forward, going from vague promises to actual dates. There are even known knowns about negotiating positions – so we know that the US does not wish to remove its troops from the Peninsula without a dramatic reduction in the threat to its ally the ROK.

Tough talk and the wrong priorities. That or something like that is what Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can contribute to the outcome of the upcoming inter-Korean summit. Indeed, limiting himself to repeating U.S.