The September issue of Diplomaatia mainly deals with the topics listed in the heading above. The world is like a mosaic, where now and again important topics land in the foreground. Diplomaatia searches for answers to how Estonia should cope in the cyber field and what stance it should take towards the Chinese market and loans.
Merle Maigre and Kadri Kaska write about cyber defence. “In order to develop more effective deterrence and be able to react to cyber-attacks, we need to guarantee that countries with similar values have a coherent and unified understanding of the situation in cyber defence, be able to protect the digital services provided to their citizens more efficiently and have working crisis management procedures that involve civil-military cooperation,” they say.
Mikhail Lotman discusses the nature of the papacy in the context of Pope Francis’s imminent visit to Estonia. “The Pope is the only person on Earth who turns to the whole of humankind in his messages. Encyclicals are addressed to Urbi et orbi (i.e. Rome and the world) and indeed, it is not only Catholics who read them,” he writes.
Alan Riley warns about China’s “gifts” and expectations of entering the Chinese market. “Sadly, the reality is that there are unlikely to be any significant market opportunities any time soon, and much of the touted investment is likely to prove non-existent or only available under conditions that raise significant economic or security concerns,” he says.
Richard Weitz looks at why the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement and how the other parties reacted to this.
Wolfgang Drechsler writes about how the digital world affects foreign policy and diplomacy. “In diplomacy, what we observe is a quantitative change that is almost qualitative in nature: negotiations at the national level are today almost completely unimportant; key questions are discussed by heads of state or relevant ministers face-to-face or at least phone-to-phone,” he says.
Andres Mäe reviews a new book on the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and Marko Mihkelson pens a eulogy to the late US senator, John McCain.
This article was published in ICDS Diplomaatia magazine.