Guest blogger: Andrew Selth, Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute

When Tropical Cyclone Nargis cut a swathe through Lower Burma last week, it left more than death and destruction in its wake. The military government’s slow response to the disaster, including its reluctance to accept international assistance, has further blackened its name. Yet it can be argued that the international community has also failed fully to appreciate the dire situation in Burma, and has unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved in the current circumstances. More...

Another surging wave has crashed into a vulnerable Southeast Asian country, killing tens of thousands and leaving over a million people homeless (most of the destruction of the typhoon that hit Myanmar this weekend came from the huge wave surges it triggered). Yet, while the pictures and the causes are eerily similar to the fateful Boxing Day of 2004, the differences in the reaction to the two crises are marked. More...

Guest blogger: Shiro Armstrong is a Research Scholar at the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research, Australian National University.

This week Hu Jintao is visiting Japan, the first such trip by a Chinese president in 10 years. It could produce a breakthrough in the important yet rocky relationship between the two neighbouring East Asian powers. More...

Today, there will be an important high-level meeting in Asia of great interest to Australia. No, it is not the meeting between Hu Jintao and Fukuda Yasuo but that between the new Malaysian Foreign Minister Rais Yatim and the Philippine Secretary for Foreign Affairs Alberto Romulo. This meeting is important because just as Australia is increasing its support for the peace process in Mindanao between Manila and the MILF, Malaysia may be giving up in frustration. More...

A quick glance at some of the reporting of the ASEAN + 3 Finance Ministers meeting in Madrid last weekend shows that the dream of an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) is still with us. Meanwhile, the original version – the IMF itself – is having a tough time of it, forced to implement an austerity package of its own. One source of the IMF’s problems has been the effective withdrawal of many East Asian economies from reliance on Fund support. But is East Asia now about to come up with a workable, regional alternative?  

The 1997-98 financial crisis in East Asia was referred to as the ‘IMF crisis’ in Korea, and the description has turned out to be as prophetic as it was caustic: the Asian meltdown has indeed turned into a crisis for the Fund. A major and lasting legacy has been a deep distrust of the IMF among many of the region’s politicians and officials, manifested partly in the form of a policy self-insurance through the accumulation of huge stocks of foreign exchange reserves intended to ensure that regional economies will never again find themselves at the mercy of the Fund in the way they were just over a decade ago. The IMF’s influence and reputation in the world’s most economically dynamic region has never fully recovered from the 1997-98 meltdown, and this has been an important contributory factor to the current malaise. More...

Rowan Callick, China Correspondent for The Australian, has unearthed an unedifying interview given by Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission President John von Doussa to Chinese state television. Judging by the quotes, von Doussa is too accommodating to China on human rights and Tibet, though as Andrew Bolt notes, the interview may have been edited that way on purpose. Still, even based just on those quotes, von Doussa deserves some defending. More...

In the Weekend Australian, Greg Sheridan wrote:

The China obsession of the Rudd Government, and especially of the PM himself, has alarmed leaders in India, Japan and Southeast Asia, who fear Australia is reorienting its foreign policy to an unbalanced stress on China.

There has been a lot of this sort of talk since the Western world’s first Mandarin-speaking PM was elected. While Rudd may be well placed to build Australia’s relationship with China, before getting too carried away, consider three recent Chinese actions which must have driven the PM mad. More...

This Jane's Intelligence Review exclusive featuring satellite images of a new Chinese underground submarine base is behind a firewall, so I haven't been able to read the whole thing yet. But given the kind of expertise Jane's boasts, I assume their analysis is more sober than that offered by the UK Telegraph. This claim is particularly laughable:

Military analysts believe that China’s substantial build up of its forces is gaining pace but has remained hidden from the world in the build-up to the Olympics.

Keep in mind, this comes in a piece describing the discovery of a new submarine base using open-source satellite imagery. More...

Guest blogger: Raoul Heinrichs, the 2007 Lowy Institute Thawley Scholar, is on a research placement at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

The New America Foundation recently hosted an event here in Washington, moderated by the Arms Control Wonk himself, Jeffrey Lewis, on the nuclear dimension of Sino-US relations. The presenters, Darryl Press and Keir Lieber, have published a number of provocative articles on the topic (see here, here and here). Boiled down, their observations are predicated on the idea that the US has either achieved or is fast approaching nuclear primacy, a condition in which Washington could be very confident in its ability to destroy China’s intercontinental range strategic nuclear forces in a pre-emptive first strike. According to Press and Lieber, the strategic implications of American nuclear supremacy are a double-edged sword. More...

Spare a thought for our trade negotiators – high pain threshold, high boredom threshold, and an extraordinary ability to do meetings. This week marks the first birthday of the free trade negotiations with Japan, but the celebrations are muted because the tough part of this process gets under way in Canberra today. 

This week will see the tabling by both sides of their initial offers on services and investment – the start of the detailed bargaining about market access. The offers on goods have already been made and – surprise, surprise – Australian officials describe Japan’s proposal on agriculture as 'disappointing.' Tokyo has said it intends to make no concessions in negotiations on access for Australian beef, dairy, wheat, barley and sugar. More...

The US media is reporting that the CIA will later today release video evidence of North Koreans helping to build a Syrian nuclear reactor. Israel bombed the site last year. This Washington Post report has a summary of what's actually in the video, while the New York Times piece focuses more on the political implications, including some anonymous quotes that suggest the State Department's chief negotiator with North Korea, Christopher Hill, is on the nose with his bosses, Secretary Rice and President Bush.

Although this video will add new drama to the issue, the US has believed for some time that Pyongyang was assisting Damascus in the nuclear field, so the video may not add anything substantially new. Still, the power of a 'caught red handed' video might just tip the Washington balance in favour of those who say North Korea is not to be trusted and that the Six-Party Talks are a fools errand.

But that's just the Washington view. Goodness knows how Pyongyang will react.

UPDATE: Useful background in this CFR interview with Clinton Administration arms control official Gary Samore.

Guest Blogger: Associate Professor Satish Chand (pictured), from the Crawford School of Economics and Government at ANU.

There is considerable debate about whether Commodore Frank Bainimarama, the interim Prime Minister of Fiji and the coup-maker who overthrew the elected government of his predecessor on 6 December 2006, will (as repeatedly promised) return Fiji to the polls next March. Considerable international pressure is already being put on the Commodore to ensure he keeps his word. PMs Sevele (Tonga) and Somare (PNG) met the Commodore last week — no doubt with the blessing of regional leaders from the Pacific Forum — only to get a reaffirmation of this commitment.

The elections taking place next March are the least of my concerns. If history is any guide, the Commodore will deliver on his promised electoral timetable. The real issues for Fiji are whether the elections will be ‘fair and free’ and if it will enable Fiji to escape its cycle of coups. I'm not sure of either. And another election, at the urging of the international community, could just make matters worse. More...

Alison Broinowski writes (my thoughts follow):

Many thanks Graeme Dobell for showing the rest of us the big picture before it got smaller. But even 13 headings are too many to address the question that underlies all of this. It comes down to a basic inconsistency in Labor’s tripartite foreign policy: the US alliance, the UN, and Asia Pacific. If Australia continues to accede to American demands in our unequal alliance with the US, we cannot behave as a good global citizen in the UN, and we cannot demonstrate independent foreign policy in the Asia Pacific region. We can do well on the second and third, as long as we don’t accede to the first. By 2020, we should be prepared for a world in which the US is not the global hegemon, and those who continue to base their security plans will be seriously out of touch. More...

• Japanese PM Fukuda announces he will cut short his upcoming overseas trip, leaving Russia on his itinerary but cancelling Germany, Britain and France. I await a confected political controversy, with the opposition demanding Fukuda visit Berlin, London and Paris immediately, if not sooner.
• Bad news for American declinists: The IMF has measured world GDP in a different way, cutting China's share by a third.
• Beijing's 'Bird's nest' Olympic stadium is finished. Photos here.
• Did you know Afghanistan has a Sikh community? You do now.

Edwin Lowe writes (my response follows): 

In reference to Malcolm Cook's post on 'Cross Strait Calming': the recent meeting of Hu Jintao and Vincent Siew at the Baoao Forum is significant, in that Siew is the Vice-President elect of the ROC. However, this meeting is not the highest meeting of the KMT with the Chinese mainland leadership since 1949, as stated in the Business Week reference Malcolm cites. In 2005, the Honorary Chairman of the KMT, Lien Chan, travelled to the Chinese mainland to meet Hu Jintao in his capacity as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, for the first meeting between the two political parties since the end of WWII. More...

Hans van Leeuwen writes in with this comment on our Korea thread started here and here.

While it's true that the Australian media largely ignores Korea and the government seems to follow suit, on an interpersonal level, I would argue the relationship appears to be thriving. Anyone living around Bondi Beach may find this hard to believe, but for the past two years, the number of young Koreans in Australia on working-holiday visas has exceeded the number of Britons. Having said that, it's unfortunately still a bit of a one-way street; Australians don't seem to share the rest of the Asian region's enthusiasm for Korean culture or visiting that country.