1 Gorbachev sees new cold war (Philip Ottermann in
The Guardian) As Berliners watch 8,000 balloons being released into the night
sky this evening, old divisions between east and west will symbolically vanish
into thin air with them. Yet the runup to the festivities has already served up
plenty of reminders that, 25 years after the fall of the wall that divided the
city for three decades, the scars of history are hurting more than ever.
Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev warned
that the world was “on the brink of a new cold war” and strongly criticised the
west for having sown the seeds of the current crisis by mishandling the fallout
from the collapse of the iron curtain.
“Instead of building new mechanisms and institutions
of European security and pursuing a major demilitarisation of European politics
… the west, and particularly the US, declared victory in the cold war,” said
the man behind the Soviet Union’s glasnost and perestroika reforms. “Euphoria
and triumphalism went to the heads of western leaders. Taking advantage of
Russia’s weakening and the lack of a counterweight, they claimed monopoly
leadership and domination in the world.”
The enlargement of Nato, Kosovo, missile defence
plans and wars in the Middle East had led to a “collapse of trust”, said
Gorbachev, now 83. “To put it metaphorically, a blister has now turned into a
bloody, festering wound.”
2 The idea of Asia (Bilahari Kausikan in Straits
Times) Asia is a political and not just a geographic concept; it is politics
that defines geography. Asia as a political concept has a history stretching
back to at least the late 19th century. I want to focus on the most recent phase
in the evolution of the concept of Asia that began in the early 1990s.
By the end of the 1980s, the potential for
geopolitical complications was high, arising from a combination of factors: the
end of the Cold War; consequent Western/American triumphalism; China just
beginning to take off as a serious challenge to the West; both US and China
freed from constraints of a de facto anti-Soviet alliance, and an inexperienced
US administration - until President Bill Clinton was elected in 1993, Democrats
had been out of power for 25 years except for the untypical four years under
President Jimmy Carter.
Why were we concerned? US-China relations are the
most important axis of East Asian international relations, affecting the entire
region. When they are stable, the region is calm; when US-China relations are
roiled, the entire region is unsettled.
There is now a consensus across the region that
while the US is still a very necessary condition for stability, it is no longer
a sufficient condition and the US presence needs to be supplemented -
supplemented, not supplanted - by some new architecture to preserve stability
for growth. But US-China relations will certainly be the central pillar around
which any new architecture will eventually be erected, and when Washington and
Beijing reach a new modus vivendi, a new concept of Asia will emerge and we
will all have to live with it.
Who is to be regarded as "Asian" is still
ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. No one as yet really can predict the final
architecture. Asean is at the centre of this and has been able to establish
platforms that could play a supplementary role in channelling US-China
relations. The most important decisions are going to be made in Washington and
Beijing, not in Asean capitals or even in Tokyo, New Delhi, Seoul or Canberra.
Still it is better to play even such a secondary role than just be a helpless
spectator.
But rapid change is inevitably internally
destabilising and China's history has taught China's leaders to fear most those
historical moments where external uncertainty coincides with internal unrest.
This is such a period. Beijing is now embarking on a second and more difficult
stage of reforms that must loosen the centre's grip on the economy in
significant ways, while preserving the rule of the Communist Party of China
(CPC).
Can it be done? One should hope so because the
alternatives are all probably worse, but no one really knows, least of all
China's leaders, although their determination should not be under-estimated. In
the realm of practical statecraft, success is the ultimate virtue; and success
in statecraft must first of all rest on economic success.
3 Smartphones ‘hurt’ intimacy (Khaleej Times) Heavy
smartphone use during midnight hours is destroying intimacy in relationships,
leading to break-ups, cheating and divorce, says a study. As the quality of our
physical connections gets diluted, people expect less and forget what real
romance is, it added.
Researchers from the Oxford University in Britain
studied 24,000 married European couples. They found a direct link between use
of social networking sites and marital satisfaction. “The more couples read
about others’ exciting lives on social media, the more likely they were to view
their own with disappointment and disdain,” the authors noted.
In a separate study, researchers from the University
of Missouri in the US interviewed hundreds of Facebook users aged between 18
and 82. They found as the use of social media increased with the help of
smartphones past midnight, actual intimacy suffered.
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