President Obama’s renewed call for cuts in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals has, perhaps inevitably, sparked a renewed round of missile defense posturing between Russia and the United States. Arms reduction will be difficult, according to Russia, if the United States continues to pursue a missile defense system that puts the Russian deterrent at risk.  

This is a familiar dance; last month Michael Krepon termed the serial complaints of Russia and China over America’s Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) plans “ritualized anxiety.” The post strikes a chord; even to the extent that most (or all) conversations about national security involve overwrought symbolism, the contours of the missile defense debate appear especially ritualized.

The sketchy prospect of psychotic madmen who might commit national suicide by loading an experimental warhead onto an experimental missile and lobbing it towards Alaska, or some unspecified part of the Atlantic Ocean, gives cause for BMD advocates to demand extraordinary sums for a very few “utils” of national security. The United States demonstrates its commitment to European, Japanese, and South Korean security by emphasizing BMD cooperation; Russia, China, and North Korea display anxiety over these developments, which gives the national defense establishments in Tokyo, Seoul and the capitals of Europe the excuse they need to shift resources to high technology constituents.

Even in the Israeli case, the argument for missile defense depends to great extent on discredited Douhetianism, the notion that civilian life will collapse when placed under threat from a finite number of unsophisticated rockets and missiles launched from Lebanon and Gaza. This fear justifies the expenditure of virtually endless amounts of Israeli (and American) money in pursuit of the last sediments of national security.

The nub of genuine utility is this; ballistic missile defense can help protect the forward military installations of a state from attack by hyper-accurate ballistic missiles designed to destroy and disrupt military capability. Soviet plans to strike Western European airbases and staging areas with short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) during the opening hours of a NATO-Warsaw Pact war helped drive a sensible interest in theater missile defense.  Similarly, the U.S. Navy is quite correct in pursuing BMD options that can protect aircraft carriers and Pacific airbases from the PLA’s Second Artillery.

Unfortunately, little of the public conversation on BMD is held on these terms, either in the United States or abroad.  The operational details of ballistic missile usage and the utility of defense are difficult to explain to a general public that is uneducated in and largely indifferent to military affairs. Consequently, BMD advocates drum up the direst possible scenarios to make their case to the public at large, initiating the ritualistic cycle that plays out across the world. This, in turn, hampers realistic assessments of risk, threat, and capability.

South Korea is purchasing bunker-busting long-range missiles from a European company, allowing it to hold at risk nuclear and missile sites in North Korea, Yonhap News Agency reported on Thursday.

According to the report, the ROK’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) approved the purchase of Taurus bunker-busting, air-to-ground missiles for the military’s F-15K fighter jets. The missiles are equipped with GPS-guidance and have a range of 500 km while carrying a 480-kg warhead that can penetrate 6 meters of concrete. Its Circular Error Probable (CEP) is 2-3 meters.

As the report points out, this would allow the ROK military to target many strategic assets inside North Korea without leaving South Korean airspace, where the aircraft could be vulnerable to North Korea’s surface-to-air missiles.

South Korea first expressed interest in acquiring bunker-busting missiles back in 2008. Since then, ROK military officials have repeatedly expressed interest in purchasing Lockheed Martin’s Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs).

Back in April Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin told Parliament that the military had decided on the Taurus because of the United States’ reluctance in approving the JASSM sales.

"U.S. missiles were one of the options we were considering, but because it is difficult for them to be sold to Korea, the only option we have is the Taurus," Kim said at the time.

The Taurus missiles are made by a joint venture between a German subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company and Sweden's Saab Bofors Dynamics. This will make it the first strategic strike weapon Seoul isn’t purchasing from a U.S. company.

According to the Yonhap report, the only long-range strike missile in the ROK’s current inventory has a range of 278 km, just over half that of the Tartus. Before reaching an agreement with Washington last October, South Korean missiles were limited to a range of under 300 km when carrying a payload of 500 kilo-gram payload.

The exact costs and numbers of missiles in the deal have not been announced, but some reports cited South Korean media outlets as saying that the ROK military would be purchasing 170 missiles for about US$300 million. Back in April Reuters reported that South Korea was interested in 200 missiles.

Acquiring the Tartus missiles will strengthen the ROK’s new, more robust military doctrine. During the height of the Korean crisis earlier this year, Defense Minister Kim unveiled a new doctrine he called “active deterrence” but which would conventionally be referred to as traditional preemption. Under the plan Kim said the military would acquire greater surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to identify when an attack was imminent, and the means to neutralize that threat.

Towards that end, Defense Minister Kim announced last week that the military was working to have in place a pre-emptive missile destruction system by 2020. Earlier this month South Korea also announced that it would be equipping its Aegis destroyers with the surface-to-air Standard Missile 6 (SM-6) by 2016. Seoul has repeatedly refused to join the U.S.-led regional missile defense system.

South Korea is also expected to soon announce which aircraft it has selected as its next advanced stealth fighter. The three competitors are Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, Boeing’s F-15SE Silent Eagle, and the Eurofighter Typhoon. The deal, which will be for 60 units, is reportedly worth US$7.35 billion. 

In an important speech today at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, U.S. President Barack Obama called for further reductions to the U.S. and Russian nuclear arms stockpiles.

In the relevant part of the speech, President Obama declared:

“After a comprehensive review, I’ve determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies, and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent, while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third.  And I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear posture. At the same time, we’ll work with our NATO allies to seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe.”

Under the New START agreement signed by Russia and the U.S. during Obama’s first term, Russia and the U.S. pledged to cut their deployed strategic nuclear forces down to 1,550 warheads by 2018 (although the actual number might be slightly higher because bombers are counted as one warhead even if they carry more than that.) The treaty did not address tactical nuclear weapons, which the U.S. and Russia deploy in Europe.

Assuming Obama was talking about reducing strategic stockpiles by one-third from the New START Treaty, this would leave the U.S. and Russia with roughly a 1,000-1,100 deployed strategic forces.   

Most experts in the arms control community agree that the U.S. could maintain a credible deterrent at this level or lower. Indeed, before becoming Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel signed his name onto a report that suggested looking into reducing America’s strategic forces down to 450 warheads.

Proponents of further nuclear weapon reductions often point to a number of strategic and security benefits that would supposedly come from reducing nuclear stockpiles, including lowering the chance of an accidental nuclear launch or nuclear terrorist attack, and reducing the incentive non-nuclear weapon states have to pursue their own nuclear forces.

Whatever the merits of these arguments, the most compelling argument for why Russia and the U.S. should further reduce the size of their nuclear arsenal is economic in nature. Indeed, economic-based arguments for further arms reductions would almost certainly be the most effective means of persuading the principal opponents of a new nuclear agreement—Republicans in Congress and the Russians.

As I’ve argued before, the enormous costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal are too often neglected in nuclear debates. Calculating the total costs of a nation’s arsenal is an immense task, but one notable effort calculated that America's nuclear weapons program cost US$5.8 trillion from 1940 to 1996. According to the Arms Control Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing nuclear weapon stockpiles, the U.S. currently spends about US$31 billion annually on simply maintaining its existing nuclear weapons arsenal.

Modernizing U.S. nuclear forces and delivery systems will be immensely expensive as well, and threaten to erode America’s conventional military capabilities in a time of greater austerity.  According to a September 2012 report by Ploughshares Fund, when modernization efforts are included, the U.S. nuclear arsenal will cost US$640 billion over the next decade, more than doubling the current annual price tag. It’s worth noting that actual costs of nuclear and other defense programs often far exceed anticipated costs.

Although cost estimates are harder to come by for Russia’s nuclear forces, Moscow is also planning on modernizing its forces. Furthermore, it is likely to be as constrained or more constrained fiscally than the United States.

By pledging to reduce stockpiles down to 1,000 deployed strategic forces, the U.S. and Russia could lighten the burden their nuclear forces will have on government budgets. In fact, in the March 2013 Arms Control Association report cited above, the organization estimated that bringing nuclear forces down to this level would save American taxpayers around US$58 billion. This figure could be increased if the U.S. decided to remove its 150-180 tactical nuclear weapons from Europe.

Given the growing conventional challenges both countries face from China’s military, this could be money well saved.

Although Chinese leaders have studied the Soviet Union’s collapse obsessively, their Russian counterparts don’t appear to have the same interest in modern history. Indeed, even as Vladimir Putin seeks to reestablish Russia as a great power, , Moscow is increasingly falling into the same traps that brought down the Soviet Union.

First among them is a complete neglect of the economic foundations of power. While military power may be the ultimate currency in world politics, the strength of a nation’s military is little more than an extension of its economic might (at least over the long-term.) Thus, sea-faring, trading nations like Britain in the 19^th and 20^th century and the U.S. since the 20^th century have enjoyed long reigns as global powers. By contrast, as Paul Kennedy famously argued, military powers that don’t keep their fiscal house in order don’t remain military powers for very long.

The Soviet Union is a case in point. Although the brutal policies of Joseph Stalin made the USSR into an industrialized country, and the economy grew at fast or respectable rates through the 1960s, the inefficiencies of the system meant that, among other things, the Kremlin went from being the world’s largest grain exporter to its largest importer. This required the Soviet Union to acquire hard currency to feed its population, which—owing to the poor quality of the Soviet economy—could only be obtained by exporting natural resources. This was sustainable during the record-high oil prices of the 1970s and early 1980s, but once oil prices began bottoming out in the late 1980s due to greater Saudi production, the Kremlin was forced to borrow heavily from abroad to feed its populace. This proved unsustainable in the long-term.

Not much has changed since the Soviet days in Russia.

Indeed, far from diversifying away from natural resource exports, Russia under Putin has grown more dependent on them (relative to the 1990s). As a December 2012 report from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development noted gloomily, “Not only are Russian exports highly concentrated in natural resources, this concentration has increased over time: the shares of oil, gas and other minerals in Russia’s exports are higher today than they were 15 years ago.”

The report went on to point out:

“In 2012 Russia remains highly dependent on its natural resources. Oil and gas now account for nearly 70 percent of total goods exports…. Oil and gas revenues also contribute around half of the federal budget. The non-oil fiscal deficit has averaged more than 11 per cent of GDP since 2009, while the oil price consistent with a balanced budget is now in the region of US$115 per barrel and rising.”

Thus, Russian power since the Cold War has corresponded directly with the price of oil. When energy prices were low in the 1990s, Moscow’s economy was in a state of shambles and the West trampled all over Moscow. Since energy prices began rising last decade Russia has seen its power and presence on the world stage increase as well.

The crux of the issue for Putin and Russian leaders, however, is that energy prices won’t remain high forever. Indeed, there is good reason to believe they will drop in the years of ahead.

To begin with, many of the leading energy consumers are investing in greater energy efficiency, which will eventually reduce the growth in demand. Supply will also expand considerably as more North American unconventional sources come to market and Iraq’s full potential is tapped. Other events could potentially cause a further drop in energy prices; for example, a resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Russia is dutifully unprepared for this eventuality. As the EBRD report cited above noted, the business environment and level of competition in Russia have not improved despite token top-down efforts to do so. As a result, far from attracting foreign direct investment as other BRIC countries have, capital flight out of the country totaled more than US$80 billion in 2011. The report further observes that although Russian leaders have touted the importance of high-technology sectors in the information age, they have failed to invest in the education and training necessary to bring about innovations.

Another well-known deficiency of the Soviet model was its excessively high defense spending, which some estimate at times consumed as much as 40 percent of the Soviet budget and 15-20 percent of its GDP. This excessive defense spending was driven, at least in part, by the Kremlin’s overly-militarized identity as a great power.

Since reassuming office, Putin has seemed determined to replicate this failure. Before Putin even returned, Moscow increased its military spending by 16 percent in 2012, even as other countries cut back. The US$90 billion it spent on defense in 2012 was more than it invested in education. Meanwhile, Putin has pledged to spend an additional US$755 billion over the next decade on modernizing the Russian armed forces. Even before this announcement, however, Russian military spending was expected to increase from about 2.3 trillion rubles (US$78.8 billion) in 2011 to just under 4 trillion rubles (appx.US$125 billion) in 2015.

Demographics are one key area where the Soviet Union and Russia differ. Whereas the Soviet Union was burdened by a growing population (particularly increasingly urban one), Russia has been beset by population decline since 1992. In its Global Trends 2030 report released in December of last year, the U.S. National Intelligence Council forecasted that Russia’s population would decline by 10 million people by 2030, more than any other country during that time span. The UN similarly expects that by 2050, Russia’s population will have dropped 30 million people below 2000 levels. Although vowing to reverse current trends—which there are some signs is occurring to a point—Putin himself warned last year that Russia’s population could drop to just 107 million by 2050, from about 143 million at the time of the speech.

In all these ways, then, Russia hardly appears to be resurging. 

Japan is using the occasion of the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland to mount an aggressive charm offensive across the European continent.

Although the fruits of this effort are primarily economic, it is taking place in the context of Japan's seeking to hedge against China by expanding diplomatic ties across the world. Conveniently, relations between China and much of the EU have become increasingly strained in recent months.

Japanese diplomacy with Europe under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe started in April when Japan and the European Union began negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It continued later that same month when Prime Minister Abe became the first Japanese leader to visit Moscow in over a decade. During the trip, Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to work towards a resolution of their sovereignty dispute over the Kuril Islands, as well as expand defense, foreign policy, economic, and cultural ties between the two countries.

Then, in May, Japan and France held their Third Foreign Ministers' Strategic Dialogue in Japan. Following closely on the heels of this dialogue, French President François Hollande and his wife spent three days in Japan earlier this month. During their meetings during the visit, Hollande and Abe agreed to expand bilateral cooperation on civilian nuclear matters and defense issues. Notably, Abe sought to use the visit to dissuade the French leader from resuming exports of dual-use technology to China and encouraged France to use its influence in the South Pacific against Beijing. Abe first encouraged France to use its naval fleet in the South Pacific to “punch above its weight” in an op-ed he published immediately after taking office.

On his way to the G-8 Summit this weekend, Abe stopped off in Central Europe to hold Japan’s first ever summit with the Visegrad Group, consisting of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia (V4). At the summit on Sunday, Abe forcefully made the case that Japan could serve as a nuclear exporter to the Central European countries, an effort that was partially frustrated by Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas’s sudden resignation. After the talks ended, some of the V4 leaders made the case for concluding the Japanese-EU FTA talks quickly.

In a Joint Statement the two sides also emphasized their shared commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, and announced a “Partnership Based on Common Values for the 21st Century” The emphasis on Western political values was undoubtedly intended for policymakers in Moscow and Beijing.

This fact did not prevent Abe from meeting with Russian President Putin on Monday after arriving in Northern Ireland for the G-8 Summit. Following up on their April meeting, the two leaders announced they were setting up a new subcabinet-level dialogue to resolve the Kuril Islands dispute and work towards signing a peace treaty officially ending WWII. While failing to agree to a date for those talks to begin, the two leaders said they expected them to be conducted at a “quick-tempo” and announced Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit Tokyo in the fall. At the meeting, Abe and Putin also discussed North Korea and the expansion of energy cooperation.

Abe is also expected to meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron on the sidelines of the G-8. Last year, the UK and Japan announced plans to begin jointly developing weapon systems after Cameron traveled to Tokyo to meet with Abe’s predecessor, Yoshihiko Noda. Since then, the UK’s relations with China have cooled considerably after Beijing began snubbing Cameron and his administration over the British leader’s decision to meet with the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. This has mirrored the deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations following Tokyo’s decision to nationalize the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands last September.

In this context, Japan’s Kyodo News reported last week that Japan and the UK would announce a defense intelligence-sharing agreement during the Abe-Cameron G-8 meeting. The two leaders are also expected to discuss the establishment of a high-level bilateral dialogue with the eventual goal of setting up a “two-plus-two” dialogue between their defense and foreign ministers. North Korea, Iran, Syria, and the EU-Japan FTA talks were also expected to be on the meeting’s agenda.

Germany proved to be one European country that was immune to Abe’s charm offensive this week. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been a harsh critic of Abenomics, essentially equating Japan’s quantitative easing monetary policy with currency manipulation at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. Merkel reportedly continued to trumpet this theme in a bilateral meeting with Abe on Monday, where she also asked Abe to explain how he intended to deal with Japan’s vast debt problem. When she emerged from the multilateral G-8 meeting, Merkel also told reporters that Abe promised the seven other countries he would focus on undertaking structural reforms.

This criticism dovetail sharply with that of Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who asked Abe to visit Italy later this year to give a lecture on Abenomics, which Letta said Italy was looking to imitate in an effort to salvage its own declining economic fortunes. The differences in Merkel and Letta’s response to Abe’s charm offensive reflect broader differences between Germany and many of its EU partners, which are increasingly spilling over into Europe’s relations with Asian countries as was on display during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s recent visit to Berlin.

Japan’s European diplomacy will continue in the weeks and months ahead. The two sides will meet in Tokyo next week to begin the second round of their FTA negotiations. The third round is expected in October and, following Abe’s meeting with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy on Monday, a Japan-EU summit in November. The two sides had initially intended to hold a summit in March but this had to be postponed because of the crisis of Cyprus.

The EU is Japan’s third largest trading partner behind China and the United States. Japan is the EU’s seventh largest trading partner and second largest one in Asia behind China. Together they account for one-third of global GDP and 40 percent of world trade. The EU said in a press release on Monday that a FTA would increase its exports to Japan by 32.7 percent, while Japan’s exports to EU countries would rise by 23.5 percent.

Japan and the EU will meet again in Belgium in the first week of July to hold the second round of negotiations over their parallel Strategic Partnership Agreement. 

Hassan Rouhani’s election as Iran’s president has mainly been analyzed through the perspective of his pragmatic past and the reformist tone he struck during his campaign. These are indeed important and likely account for why most of the electorate voted for him. But they hardly matter for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who, besides his long-standing personal relationship with Rowhani, had another reason to support his candidacy; namely, that he was the only cleric running in the race.

Although it’s far too early to tell, Rouhani’s election could see the clergy regain some of the power they’ve lost over successive decades.

The beginning of the clergy’s decline in Iran’s political life can really be traced back to the split between the Islamic Republic’s founder, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri. Although Montazeri was initially Khomeini’s chosen successor, ties between the two became strained over the treatment of the Islamic Republic’s suspected domestic opponents. The two men finally broke over Montazeri’s outspoken opposition to the widespread executions of political prisoners that Khomeini ordered in 1988.

Without a different Grand Ayatollah or Marja (source of emulation) ready to replace Khomeini as Supreme Leader, the qualifications for holding the position were lowered from Majra to simply regular Ayatollah. The theological basis of the supreme leader’s power was further weakened with the selection of then-President Ali Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor in 1989, as Khamenei hadn’t yet achieved Ayatollah-status in the eyes of his religious peers, so the title was artificially bestowed upon him for political purposes. Still, clerics who support the Islamic Republic have continued to dominate some of the most powerful non-elected bodies like the Assembly of Experts.

The same has not been true for Iran’s elected institutions and civil service, where the clergy have become increasingly absent. The clergy’s decline in public life is perhaps most striking in the Majles (Parliament), where clerics went from holding 50 percent or more of the total seats in the 1^st and 2^nd Majles in the 1980s, to about 14 percent today. Even among the remaining clerical MPs, the overwhelming majority of them today come from political backgrounds like Rouhani, and only about 5 percent were formerly religious teachers.

The clergy’s presence has shrunk dramatically in Iran’s larger administrative structure as well. To begin with, the first post-Khomeini president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, filled his cabinet with technocrats. After assuming office, Reformist President Mohammad Khatami and his appointees in the Ministry of the Interior went further by replacing almost all the provincial governors and city administrators—who at the time were usually clergy— with bureaucrats usually from the Ministry of Education.

Then, in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the first non-cleric to hold the presidency in the Islamic Republic since before Khamenei took office in 1981. He quickly proceeded to carry out one of the widest purges in decades. According to William Polk, during his first term alone, Ahmadinejad “replaced the governors of all 30 provinces and sacked dozens of deputy ministers, many administrators of state organizations, several ambassadors and about 10,000 other government employees.” His nominees were usually close allies chosen from the intelligence and security services—notably, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Basij—and even during these initial years Ahmadinejad often won the rebuke of clerics in Iran.

Partly because of his weak religious credentials, and partly because most his political rivals— like former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—are clerics, Supreme Leader Khamenei has generally supported the rise of hardliners and the non-clerical political establishment. Indeed, many senior religious authorities like Montazeri, Khomeini’s initial successor who passed away in late 2009, have been harshly critical of the supreme leader, including when Montazeri publicly condemned Khamenei by stating, “You are not the rank and statue of a Majra.... The Shi'ite marja'iyyat is an independent spiritual authority. Do not try to break the independence of the marja'iyyat and turn the seminary circles into government employees.”

But Khamenei’s strategy to strengthen the non-clergy elements of the Iranian political elite has its limitations. For one thing, clergy has been a potent force in every major social and political movement in modern Iran. Thus, alienating too large a sway of the clergy could have dangerous political implications for the supreme leader, and indeed there has been increasingly frequent signs that the clerics in Iran are becoming more and more alienated from Khamenei’s rule.

Moreover, Khamenei’s authority as supreme leader is rooted in Khomeini’s version of Shi’a Islam, which strongly favors the clergy (at least those who support Khomeinism.) While most of the non-clergy principlists have remained staunchly supportive of the supreme leader and the founding principles of the Islamic Republic, ultimately their power under the current system is limited. If they became too powerful in the current system, they could very conceivably seek to overturn the current rules in favor of ones that did not give religious figures such an exalted status. Indeed, this is what Ahmadinejad and the so-called “deviant” faction appeared to have as their goal.

Having eliminated or strongly curtailed the influence of most of his major political rivals since the 2009 disputed presidential election, Khamenei risked empowering the principlists to such a degree that they could have challenged his authority, or that of successor. While strongly apprehensive about Rafsanjani (or Khatami, for that matter) re-entering elected office, Khamenei was also likely worried about a candidate like former Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s potential ability to rally the non-clergy elite against the supreme leader.

Therefore, a candidate like Rouhani who is a cleric, a long-time supporter of Khamenei personally, and someone who the pragmatists and reformists can get behind, provided a happy medium for Khamenei. Whether Rouhani will move to empower the clergy through his appointees will be something to monitor closely in the coming weeks and months ahead.  

Notorious for dragging its feet on defense modernization, the Philippine government may finally be putting its money where its mouth is thanks to a territorial dispute with China and the belief that the U.S. is unwilling to come to its defense.

According to media reports, the Philippine military intends to procure surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) from two Israeli defense contractors. And this time, it seems to mean it.

An unnamed source told the Manila Standard, late last week that Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin could head for Israel this week to sign agreements with the two firms, which have been identified as Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. and Israel Military Industries Ltd. (IMI).

Once an agreement is signed, the systems could be shipped to the Philippines within three to six months, the report said. It added that the acquisition would constitute the country’s first-ever air defense capability. The systems would be deployed in the West Philippine Sea, but the report did not elaborate on any other details.

Undersecretary Abigail Valte, a spokesperson for the Presidential Palace, has refused to confirm or deny the planned acquisition. However, Communications Secretary, Ricky Carandang, confirmed on June 15 that the proposal had reached the Palace.

As part of its air defense products, Rafael is known for its Spyder short- and medium-range defense system, the Iron Dome, as well as the Stunner (a.k.a. “David’s Sling”). For its part, IMI is the maker of the Lynx MLRS, among others.

As of the publication of this article, e-mail queries to Rafael and IMI have gone unanswered.

Another source told the Standard that while the procurement plans had been floated for some time, no progress had been made for lack of willingness on Manila’s part to make the necessary capital investments. However, the territorial dispute in the resource-rich South China Sea — or the West Philippine Sea, as Philippine media refer to it — appears to have focused minds in Manila.

Another factor appears to be Manila’s displeasure with Washington’s “neutral stance” on the Philippines’ dispute with China, with some voices within the Philippine defense community accusing the U.S. of failing to abide by the Mutual Defense Treaty. If Manila cannot count on its longstanding ally to come to its rescue when the going gets rough with its much larger neighbor, then alternative options might be the way ahead, some are saying.

China claims almost the entirety of the South China Sea and has become more assertive in recent years. In 2012, vessels from the Philippines and the People’s Liberation Army Navy faced off for nearly two months over the Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal, which is located approximately 220 km west of Luzon. China has also been building or expanding military air strips in the South China Sea, including a reported project at Subi Reef near Pag-Asa Island in the Spratlys, about 20 km from the Philippines’ administrative headquarters for the area of the archipelago that it claims as part of its territory. China also has an airstrip on Yongxing Island, or Woody Island, in the Paracels, which can accommodate transport and fighter aircraft, including the Sukhoi Su-27 and Su-30MKK.

Aside from China, Taiwan also has territorial disputes with the Philippines, particularly over islets in the Spratlys, where Taiwan has built a 1,150 meter airstrip on Itu Aba (Taiping Island) and which it plans to extend. Tensions also escalated between Taipei and Manila following the killing of a Taiwanese fisherman on May 9 by Philippine coast guards in disputed waters between the two countries. The incident prompted a series of exercises by the Taiwanese Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force in the area, maneuvers that immediately highlighted the shortcomings of the Philippine armed forces.

Both China and Taiwan have the ability to conduct airborne maritime surveillance of disputed areas in the South China Sea using manned and unmanned aircraft, and to quickly establish air superiority during hostilities. Absent a credible air deterrent, the acquisition of air defense systems seems both appealing and logical for Manila, though some critics have argued that the Philippines should dedicate more energy to developing its naval forces.

President Benigno Aquino III released P75 billion (US$1.74 billion) to fund a military upgrade program — mostly for the procurement of ships and aircraft — during his first year in office. It remains to be seen if his administration will move ahead with the Israel deal. But the circumstances, from fears of abandonment by its ally to Beijing’s intransigence in its territorial disputes, could force Manila to finally make the jump.

Just days after ministerial-level talks with South Korea fell through, North Korea has today proposed high-level talks with the United States.

The call seems to be the latest step in what has been a significant reversal of Pyongyang’s diplomacy from just weeks ago, when it threatened to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. Those threats followed a nuclear test conducted earlier this year and a rocket test a couple of months before that.

Over the last several weeks, North Korea has dispatched a high-level envoy to Beijing, indicated that it might be prepared to rejoin the six-party talks, and offered to speak with South Korea about reopening the Kaesong Industrial Region. Last weekend, it held working-level talks with Seoul officials, which were to lead to high-level talks later in the week. Those talks were scuttled when the two sides could not agree on who would be attending. Pyongyang blamed Seoul for its “arrogant obstruction.”

And now North Korea has upped the ante with a call for talks with the U.S., to discuss a “wide range of issues of mutual interest”, including denuclearization and a peace treaty that would finally bring the Korean War to an official end.

The U.S. State Department has not yet responded to the proposal, and it is uncertain if it will accept the offer. Pyongyang has insisted that the talks proceed without preconditions, although it has left the time and venue up to Washington.

North Korea has a well-documented history of ratcheting up tensions with threats and provocations, only to step back with policies of rapprochement. Analysts have long explained that the process is a calculated policy used by the regime to retain power. In the latest round of tensions, the rhetoric was unusually heated, although the actions were limited to the closure of Kaesong, the routine launch of short-range missiles, and the jailing of a Korean-American missionary.

This was considerably more muted that the provocations of 2010, when Pyongyang allegedly sank a South Korean submarine and then, late in the year, shelled a South Korean island, killing civilians.

What has also been more noticeable this year is the extent to which China has been willing to express its impatience with its troublesome ally. Beijing agreed to two rounds of UN sanctions, but perhaps more intriguingly closed the Foreign Trade Bank’s account at the Bank of China. The Foreign Trade Bank is North Korea’s most important bank, handling overseas transactions and foreign currency. That closure was followed closely by the trip to China of North Korean envoy Choe Ryong-hae.

The extent to which the latest offers of talks – and the sustainability of the current outreach – is unclear at present. Still, given that Japan was deploying a Patriot  antimissile battery in central Tokyo just a month or two ago, the de-escalation will come as a relief to many in the region.

Japan’s Defense Ministry is considering creating a special island assault unit to help it deal with Tokyo’s ongoing standoff with China over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

In a meeting of the ruling-Liberal Democracy Party (LDP) this week, defense officials said the new unit would be trained to fortify islands and, if necessary, recapture ones that were lost, a number of Japanese media outlets reported. The new special assault unit would supplement the Self-Defense Force Western Army Infantry Regiment, which is made up of Special Forces modeled off the U.S. Marine Corps who are located in Nagasaki Prefecture and responsible for protecting remote islands like the Senkakus.

The proposed special assault unit was part of a larger LDP effort to strengthen Japan’s Self Defense Force’s (SDF) capabilities for dealing with challenges to remote islands. Tokyo previously announced plans to expand the size of the Western Army Infantry Regiment during the current fiscal year ending in March, the Japan Times reported.

This week the LDP also announced it was considering equipping the SDF with commercial vessels and aircraft to more quickly respond to intrusions by China on Japanese waters surrounding the islands. Chinese maritime and occasional military assets regularly patrol near the disputed islands.

There have also been discussions about equipping Japanese troops with U.S.-built MV-22 Osprey transport aircraft, despite concerns about the aircraft’s safety among some Japanese. U.S. Marines currently operate Ospreys from bases in Okinawa, Japan.

Perhaps most controversial, earlier this week Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, announced that his government would “need to study” the possibility of giving the SDF the authority to mount offensive attacks on enemy bases. Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera refuted suggestions that this type of operation would violate the SDF’s constitutionally-mandated pacifist mission.

“It will not pose any legal problems if Japan has the capability to attack an enemy base,” Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said.

He added that “various discussions” will need to take place before the mission is approved in an apparent reference to talking with allies and partners about the proposed changes.

Japanese military personnel are current participating in Dawn Blitz 2013, a U.S.-led multinational military exercise in California that will also include New Zealand and Canada this year. This is the first time Japan’s military forces are participating in Dawn Blitz, which began on Tuesday and lasts through June 26. One USMC officer called this year’s drill “historic.”

China opposed the decision to include Japan in the Dawn Blitz 2013 exercises, owing to drills where the U.S. Marines and the SDF will practice amphibious assaults like the ones that would be used to invade islands.

Japan was expected to send about a 1,000 military personnel from the Air, Maritime, and Ground Forces to participate in the exercise, along with three warships including two amphibious assault ships.

It’s unclear how the U.S. will respond to Prime Minister Abe’s desire to authorize the SDF’s to attack adversary’s bases. Although Washington insists it doesn’t take sides in sovereignty issues, it has repeatedly stated that the Japanese-administered Senkakus fall under the U.S.-Japan Defense Treaty, obliging the U.S. to respond to any attack on the islands.

On the other hand, the Obama administration is reportedly frustrated by Prime Minister Abe and LDP officials’ comments about Japan’s conduct during WWII, especially suggestions that Tokyo’s past apologies for its WWII behavior would be “reviewed.”

On Wednesday, Jeffrey Bader, who formerly served in the Obama administration as Director of Asian Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council, said the U.S. could become “vocal” should the LDP follow through on its threats to review Japan’s past apologies.

“The handling of historical issues in the last couple of months by Japanese leaders has not been adroit, to put it mildly,” Bader said at the Center for a New American Security’s (CNAS) annual conference in Washington. 

An old parable about miscommunication runs as follows; two men sit on a train, facing one another.  A second train passes by, spewing black smoke through the window of the first. One man’s face is left dirty, the other’s clean. The clean man gets up to wash his face, while the dirty man remains in his seat.  Why?  Because the clean man sees the dirty, and assumes that his face is also dirty; the dirty man sees the clean, and assumes that he is also clean.

The parable suggests the dangers of assumption and “mirror-imaging.” But of course the story only makes sense if the two men don’t talk, and don’t develop a sense of community around their mutual misfortune.  This is an altogether odd assumption; why wouldn’t the one commiserate with the other, if only briefly? 

Yet interrogating this assumption might help us understand the differences between the recent Obama-Xi summit and the great Cold War summit meetings of yore. The United States and the USSR were, in many ways, not unlike the two men on the train who could barely speak with one another. By comparison, China and the United States are engaged in what amounts to constant chatter, alternatively pleasant or hostile but at all times communicative. This accounts not only for different expectations about what the summits might accomplish, but also for the different ways in which the summits are perceived.

Early indications suggest that last week’s Sunnylands summit will have few lasting impacts on US-China relations; beyond a couple of minor embarrassments, the summit appears to have neither created any breakthroughs nor been marred by any significant gaffes. In the United States, national security leaks largely overwhelmed interest in the summit, overshadowing genuine concerns about cyber-conflict between China and the U.S.

This is a far cry from the great summit meetings of the 1980s, when every interaction between the U.S. president and the Soviet premier was covered in exhaustive detail. Of the many differences between the China-U.S. and U.S.-Soviet relationships, perhaps the greatest is that the former involves nearly constant interaction across a great variety of commercial, social, and political fields, while in the latter the moments of confrontation and dialogue were concentrated, sharp, and newsworthy.

One implication of this difference is that the summits between the U.S. and the USSR represented critical opportunities for shaping the superpower relationship in consequential ways, if only within the confines dictated by ideology and power. These were the only moments in which, so to speak, the two men on the train could communicate clearly. By contrast, the Obama-Xi summit was a more managerial affair, in which the two leaders essentially shared information on the performance of their respective outreach teams.

A related implication, as many others have suggested, is that a final answer to how the Washington-Beijing relationship will develop over the next decade is beyond the scope of any summit meeting.  The Sunnylands summit can’t stop U.S.-China rivalry, or create enduring “trust,” however one might define that term. What the summit can do is create reasonable expectations, for a time, on the margins, and point the way to managing some of the most dangerous manifestations of disputes.  Management, of course, is a process. If we redefine trust as “reasonable expectations about the behavior of others,” and perhaps “reasonable confidence in the decision-making procedures of the partner,” then some degree of trust is surely achievable in the Sino-US relationship, just as it was in the Sino-Soviet and US-Soviet relationships. Moreover, with states as large and powerful as the United States and China, the margins matter.  Perhaps more to the point, no one lives forever.