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The Northeast Asian security landscape is fast evolving amid intensifying China-U.S. strategic competition and a still raging coronavirus pandemic. Frequent summit meetings among regional leaders, including the historic meetings between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, have not translated into broader security dialogues and joint efforts to build a robust and durable regional security architecture. Divergent security perceptions, America’s dominant security role, and a mosaic pattern of regional security arrangements and mechanisms are the major factors shaping Northeast Asian security dynamics. Beijing remains committed to the declared path of peaceful development amid growing suspicion and concern over its strategic intention and capabilities; with strategic patience and perseverance, it is determined to play a larger role in forging consensus, building institutions, advancing cooperation, and coordinating relations in regional security matters.

The international arms control regime has arrived at a crossroads as the United States pulls out of a number of international treaties and launches a new round of defense and military buildup in pursuit of absolute strategic and technological superiority. Under the Trump administration’s “America First” doctrine, Washington is leading the global arms control cause astray. The article traces the international arms control regime’s liberal institutionalist roots and situates the positions of the world’s largest nuclear powers in it. It analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the regime and put forward a number of policy measures to improve it. It argues that the officially recognized nuclear powers, especially the United States and Russia, should assume the lion’s share of maintaining global strategic stability. The author highlights the most urgent challenges in the current arms control regime and outlines China’s role and responsibilities as a rising military power in the evolution of the arms control cause.

The United States, EU members, and Russia share extensive and important interests in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in terms of geo-security, energy, and values. The US–EU–Russia trilateral interaction in this region features three characteristics: intensifying security competition between Washington and Moscow; closer transatlantic coordination against Russia; and growing wariness about China’s larger economic footprint. New changes have taken place in the regional distribution of power amid continued China–US competition, increasingly diverging values among the United States, Germany, and CEE countries like Poland and Hungary, and heightening geopolitical tensions between Washington and Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other. China–CEEC (CEE countries) cooperation is also coming under mounting geopolitical pressure, owing to Washington’s containment policy toward China, the EU’s weakening control over the CEE countries, Russia’s shift from a defensive to an offensive posture in response to Western sanctions, the new German government’s values-based diplomacy, and the European Commission’s new China policy. However, the transatlantic world is not a monolith. The EU’s weakening control over CEE countries and Washington’s deteriorating relations with Poland and Hungary are bringing potential opportunities for furthering China–CEEC cooperation. The aforementioned factors merit closer attention as important variables in CEE countries’ China policies.

The rise of China has become a central debate in the academic field of international relations. In the Western world, the scholars within this debate can roughly be divided into the ‘pessimists’ and the ‘optimists’. The pessimists see in the rise of China an inevitable hegemonic war, or at least prolonged and intense zero-sum competition, with the US as it will seek to replace the latter and overturn the existing liberal international order. The optimists, on the other hand, see an opportunity for sustained Western dominance through selective accommodation of China in exchange for China’s acceptance of the existing norms and values of the liberal international order and continued US dominance. In this paper, we maintain that both perspectives in the debate are misleading. We argue that China seeks to push for a multipolarized world rather than replacing the US, and that Beijing prefers the relations between the great powers within a multipolar order to be based on the conception of a ‘community of common destiny for humankind’. We also argue that China is unlikely to accept the existing norms and values of the liberal international order as they reflect and reinforce Western dominance. Rather, China has become an ‘order-shaper’ seeking to reform the existing institutions to better reflect the interests of the ‘Rest’, and establish new networks and institutions that will complement and augment the existing arrangements of the liberal international order, instead of challenging it.