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On Sunday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye returned from a four-day visit to China that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said heralded a new chapter in bilateral relations. While the trip led to a number of minor economic agreements between South Korea and China, the most important outcome was that it allowed Park and Chinese President Xi Jinping to develop their relationship. “The main accomplishment is it really offered South Korea an opportunity to forge political and strategic relationships with China without feeling that there were elements of betrayal or contradiction with the U.S.-Korea alliance, and so there’s a foundation […]

On his way to the G-8 Summit in mid-June, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a stopover in Warsaw for his first summit with the Visegrad Group, a subregional European alliance of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia commonly called the V-4. While the gathering was held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of V-4-Japanese cooperation, a closer look reveals its deeper significance: The summit was emblematic of the growing importance of Central Europe in the international arena. Individually, the Visegrad states, with the possible exception of Poland, are neither particularly rich nor influential. Viewed collectively, however, they have roughly […]

Who cares about Darfur these days? The conflict in the western Sudanese region, which galvanized public opinion in the middle of the last decade, is now rarely in the headlines. This is not because the area is calm. Renewed violence has displaced 300,000 of its inhabitants this year alone. The United Nations and African Union still have 19,000 troops and police officers trying to keep the peace there. But fresher crises, such as those in Mali and Syria, have long replaced Darfur at the top of the international agenda. Yet policymakers grappling with these newer conflicts should keep Darfur in […]

On June 15, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi announced he was cutting diplomatic ties with Syria and backed the creation of a no-fly zone over the country. In an email interview, Eric Trager, Next Generation fellow and an expert on Egyptian politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, explained how Syria’s war has affected Egypt and Morsi’s influence on the broader region. WPR: How are the effects of the Syrian war being felt in Egypt? Eric Trager: The effects of the Syrian war are being felt in three ways in Egypt. First, in the past few weeks, President Mohammed […]