Nicholas Ross Smith – författare

This edited volume examines how elite policymakers in key Indo-Pacific locations - Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand - view the European Union’s (EU) strategy in the region.Centred on gauging the opinions of key people involved in the foreign policy making process in each location, the expert international contributors find that while the EU has strong bilateral ties with all the locations, few conceive of it as being a credible and relevant Indo-Pacific actor. The results point to the EU’s potential relevancy in areas like ocean governance, green transition, and sustainable and inclusive prosperity, but show that there remains a mixture of caution and scepticism. Furthermore, there is diversity across the the countries of the Indo-Pacific as to how they understand the EU.A clear policy-focus offers feedback and recommendations for practitioners from the EU alongside rigorous research that provides food for thought and Indo-Pacific actors as well as scholars of International Relations and European and Asian studies.

This book examines the contention that current US-Russia relations have descended into a ‘New Cold War’. It examines four key dimensions of the original Cold War, the structural, the ideological, the psychological, and the technological, and argues that the current US-Russia relationship bears little resemblance to the Cold War. Presently, the international system is transitioning towards multipolarity, with Russia a declining power, while current ideological differences and threat perceptions are neither as rigid nor as bleak as they once were. Ultimately, when the four dimensions of analysis are weighed in unison, this work argues that the claim of a New Cold War is a hyperbolic assessment of US-Russia relations.