Author: Matthew Bunn, Harvard University

As bad as it is, Japan’s nuclear accident is dramatically less catastrophic than Chernobyl. That accident spread millions of curies of radioactivity — 3-4 per cent of all radioactivity in the reactor core — around the surrounding countryside, exposing millions of people in several countries.

Large areas are uninhabitable to this day. Here, there is no real prospect of a runaway chain reaction as occurred at Chernobyl. Instead, what has happened is the melting of fuel in reactor cores, leading to the release of a very modest amount of cesium and other fission products. Read more…

Author: Georgy Toloraya, Russian Academy of Science

The old row on the four islands — an eternal irritant in Russian-Japanese relations — broke out rather unexpectedly last November with President Dmitry Medvedev’s spontaneous visit to one of the Islands.

It should be noted that although Russia, in accordance with the 1956 Declaration, agreed in principle to secede to Japan two of the four islands, lost to the USSR as a result of the Second World War, the island the President landed on, Kunashir, was not among them, and is indisputably considered by Russia to be its own territory. Read more…

Author: Feng Chongyi, UTS

The factors contributing to the waves of revolution reverberating through North Africa and the Middle East are visible in China.

They include widespread discontent caused by despotism, corruption, social inequality, social injustice, unemployment and inflation, and the rise of the middle class and rapid growth in internet users brought about by the gathering pace of economic modernisation. Read more…

Author: Iftekharul Bashar, RSIS

While the world remains engrossed in debates triggered by Wikileaks, a new threat from cyberspace is emerging.

Social networking sites have now become a potential space for recruiting extremists. This could be called the Facebook jihad. Read more…

Author: John Hemmings, RUSI and CSIS, Washington

Russo–Japanese bilateral relations appear to be at an all-time low. Terse diplomatic exchanges between Tokyo and Moscow have followed Russian promises to build up their military strength in the Russian Far East. The immediate cause of tension is the disputed Kuril Islands (or Northern Territories, as they’re known in Japan), seized from Japan by Stalin in the fading days of the Second World War, which prevented the two states from signing a formal peace treaty. Following the eviction of Japanese civilians in 1945 from the four islands off the coast of Japan’s northern-most island Hokkaido, the Soviet Union settled ethnic Russians onto the islands, who now fish the same waters as their Japanese predecessors.

The dispute stretches back nearly 66 years, so why has it taken on a new life? Read more…

Author: Stuart Harris, ANU

International oil prices have risen of late to levels not seen for two and a half years. The immediate cause is concern over political unrest in the Middle East and its effect or potential effect on the supply of crude oil from Middle East sources. In practice, however, that price effect is superimposed on a more fundamental influence on the current level of prices.

The existing uncertainties, exacerbated by the potential loss of Libyan oil production and exports already being experienced from the conflict or through sanctions, have stimulated sharp price increases. Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale

The political debate in Australia is currently consumed by a furious stoush over climate change policy.

Sensing sufficient support from the independents and Greens, who hold the balance of power over the minority government, Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has declared battle once more in the off-again, on-again campaign to introduce a national carbon price (this time via the transition of declaring a price on carbon and later moving to an emissions trading scheme). Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale

The economic aftershocks of the earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan on Friday are only slightly less difficult to fathom than the scale of the human tragedy and physical devastation.

This massive event was bigger than the Great Hanshin quake that devastated Kobe in 1995. Its economic impact may be less severe. Read more…

Author: Ross Garnaut, ANU and University of Melbourne

Human induced climate change is a global problem and an effective solution requires large mitigation contributions from all major developed and developing countries, and from the rest of the world too.

The search for effective climate change policy is partly a search for effective cooperation amongst countries of a kind and dimension that has never previously been known on a global scale. Read more…

Author: Mendee Jargalsaikhan, UBC

The Chinese Foreign Minister’s brief visit to Mongolia on 24 February, like the Chinese Premier’s visit last June, did not trigger any negative public debate or protests in the streets of Ulaanbaatar.

Rather, an op-ed by well-known columnist Baabar on the repression and marginalization of Chinese ethnic minorities during the communist era received wide attention. Read more…

Author: Amin Saikal, ANU

The Afghanistan of today remains a nightmare.

Since Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the collapse of its protégé regime in 1992, three different ideological groups have laid claim to rule consecutively: Islamist Mujahideen, who humbled the Soviet power with the full support of the US and its allies; the Taliban, who marginalised the Mujahideen and established their own savage theocratic rule with the weight of a US ally, Pakistan, behind them; and the so-called democrats under the leadership of Hamid Karzai, who came to power shortly after the US-led intervention.

The Karzai government has been propped up and maintained by the US and its allies ever since. Read more…

Author: Colin Mackerras, Griffith University and Renmin University

The mass protests and changes sweeping the Arab world cannot fail to have implications for China. The enormous crowds of pro-democracy demonstrators seen in Tahrir Square in Cairo are reminiscent of those that filled Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But the demonstrations of 1989 were violently suppressed, and there has been nothing similar in China since. Read more…

Author: Matthew Gray, ANU

Now that the Middle East protests are well over two months old — the protests in Tunisia began in mid-December, and the president was gone on 14 January — perhaps some tentative assessments can be made about what the longer-term impact of the protests might be on the politics and societies of the Middle East. While the protests seem profound and ground-shifting, they will only prove so in a handful of countries. For the most part, Arab regimes are unpopular but durable, resilient to public pressure, and at times brutal. Tunisia and Egypt may change slightly, and Libya may descend into a real civil war, but most of the other 20 or so countries in the region will see little change of substance.

Along this line, one of the first lessons from the protests is how uneven they have been: in their starting points; in whether or not they have gained momentum; and, of course, in their impact. Read more…

Author: Benjamin Reilly, ANU and SAIS

Julia Gillard’s visit to Washington has so far followed a familiar script.

Among the Prime Minister’s first official pronouncements were a $3 million bequest to Washington’s famous Vietnam memorial to highlight Australia’s role as a US ally, and a bilateral meeting with President Obama which stressed what he later called a ‘shared sense of open spaces and a pioneer spirit’ between both countries.

Yesterday, in a speech to the powerful US Chamber of Commerce, Ms Gillard bestowed similarly lavish praise on her hosts, wading into the politically-charged issue of American ‘exceptionalism’ — the popular US conceit that it is both different from and (by implication) superior to other nations. Read more…

Author: David Dapice, Harvard University

Vietnam recently devalued its currency to about 21,000 dong to the US dollar. At the end of 2008, the rate was 17,000 — a decline of 24 per cent in about two years. In fact, it is worse since the ‘free market’ rate is over 22,000, and many people wanting dollars need to pay that rate. That rate would make it nearly 30 per cent depreciation. Since interest rates on dong bank deposits are only about 15 per cent, it seems safer to keep dollars under the mattress than dong in the bank.

While most Asian nations are worrying about excessive capital inflows and currencies that will be too strong to support exports, Vietnam is in the unenviable position of having almost run out of foreign exchange reserves  — the exact amount is secret but probably worth six weeks of imports and half of reserves a year or so ago. Read more…