Turkey-Japan: Dialogue on Global Affairs

Year 2016, Volume: 21 Issue: 1, 1 - 10, 01.04.2016

Bahadır Pehlivantürk

Abstract

Cold War conflicts will not revisit this region. Taiwan remains as one of the potential conflict zones, and most important, now a nuclear North Korea continues its provocative policies with renewed missile and nuclear tests. A peaceful solution scenario for the division of the Korean peninsula is still hard to conceive. To this list one can also add the financial crisis of the late 2000s that engulfed the USA and the EU and coincided with an era of relative strengthening of emerging market economies, which has led to the questioning of the West’s leadership ability. By the 2010s the recovery still seems to be slow and fragile, and this has been coupled with a worrying slowdown in the Chinese economy. If a new economic crisis emerges, the concern is that this time it might also engulf East Asian economies, including Japan, which were spared from the last economic collapse. Thus, even being far from the Middle East does not assure a secure and stable future. All of this is happening at a time when the continuity of the US’s commitment to the East Asia region is being questioned, as the US seems to be preoccupied with problems in other world regions as well as with internal social and political problems

References

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• For an analysis of deepening Turkey-Japan bilateral political relations see, Bahadır Pehlivantürk, “Turkish-Japanese Relations: Turning Romanticism into Rationality”, International Journal, Vol. 67, No.1 (2011), pp.101-117.
• An interesting approach is that of Amitav Acharya, who claims that even though the US is not itself declining, the US-based “American world order” is weakening. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order, Cambridge, Polity, 2014.
• The symposium website can be accessed at http://www.turkeyjapan.org/ (last visited 17 September 2016).
• Bahadır Pehlivantürk, Japan and Turkey in the International Community: Cooperation and Potential, Ankara, ORSAM Report No: 193, at http://www.orsam.org.tr/files/Raporlar/ rapor193/193eng.pdf (last visited 8 October 2016).
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