Play The Diplomat‘s Quiz: August 2, 2015 Edition

China is celebrating today – after an International Olympic Committee vote on July 31, Beijing was awarded the right to host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. The decision will make Beijing the first city in history to host both the summer and winter games. It was a close vote, with Beijing getting 44 votes and its only competition, Almaty, Kazakhstan, getting 40 (there was one abstention). Beijing will co-host the games with Zhangjiakou, roughly 220 km away from downtown Beijing, where skiing and snowboarding events will be held.

Xinhua covered the news in detail, providing an overview of the victory and providing quotes from Party leaders(including Xi Jinping) hailing the announcement. “To present a fantastic, extraordinary and excellent Winter Olympics is the aspiration of over 1.3 billion Chinese people,” Xi told the IOC in a letter.

The dust appears to finally be settling after the July 27 attack in Gurdaspur district in Punjab, India, where three gunmen in Indian Army uniforms, whose identities and origins remain uncertain, shot up a bus and proceeded to attack a local police station. The attack resulted in 8 deaths and 15 injuries, and resulted in a prolonged 12-hour shootout between the attackers and Indian security forces. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, reports, particularly in non-Indian press, attributed the origin of the attack to Punjabi separatists associated with the now largely moribund Khalistan movement. Indian analysts, however, have almost unanimously attributed this attack to the same sort of Pakistan-backed militancy that regularly flares up in Kashmir.

The Tianjin meetings, formally the Ninth Senior Officials’ Meeting on the Implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, had little to offer in the way of deliverables. Leaders did walk away with a new mechanism that could help prevent military escalation in the South China Sea: they agreed to implement a foreign ministers’ hotline specifically to handle any emergencies in the South China Sea. According to Reuters, which reported on the hotline, the mechanism will be formally announced in a joint statement after next week’s meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers.

Satellite imagery of Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands taken July 18, 2015 shows intensive preparation of terrain for a likely airstrip. A straight segment of reef that China has filled in with sand can easily accommodate a runway more than three kilometers long. At a width of approximately 250 meters, this straight segment also could accommodate a runway accompanied by a parallel taxiway like that recently constructed by China at Fiery Cross Reef; the total width of the Fiery Cross runway plus taxiway is approximately 125 meters, with a runway width of 54 meters. (For comparison, the primary runway at the B-52-hosting Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is 3,414 meters long and 61 meters wide.)

Having conducted joint naval exercises recently in the Mediterranean, China and Russia will look to increase their naval cooperation in Asia. Next month, the two countries will conduct a joint naval exercise in the Peter the Great Gulf, the largest gulf of the Sea of Japan, along the coast of Russia’s Primorski Krai. The exercise will take place from August 20 to 28, and focus primarily on improving the interoperability of the two navies and bolstering strategic coordination. The exercise, which is code-named “Joint-Sea 2015-II,” will take place as tensions remain high between China and Japan, who dispute the extent of the exclusive economic zones in the East China Sea, and between Russia and Japan. Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev recently announced that Russia would accelerate the construction of civilian and military features on the Kuril Islands, which remain disputed between Russia and Japan.

Australia’s “competitive evaluation process” is pitting Japanese, German, and French submarine builders against each other in a bid to secure a A$50 billion ($38.84 billion) contract to build six to 12 submarines for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). But the competitors – Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS), and France’s state-controlled DCNS – are not competing solely on the basis of their design’s superiority, but also on the basis of how far they are willing to go to accommodate South Australian voters’ demands for jobs, and assuage the Liberal party’s concerns about their electoral viability.

With the Afghan government confirming the death of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, the suspense over the whereabouts of the fugitive leader is over. It has now become clear that Omar died two years ago, in April 2013, and for the last two years, command of the dreaded organization has been in other hands. Omar’s death raises questions about the future of the Taliban, its leadership, and the destiny of the ongoing peace talks in Afghanistan.

Teams from 17 countries, including Belarus, China, Egypt, India, Nicaragua and Tajikistan, are currently gathering at the Alabino firing range in the suburbs of Moscow to compete in this year’s World Tank Biathlon Championship RT reports.

The opening ceremony of the military games, organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is set to take place on August 1 with the competition scheduled to last 15 days.

Recently, Rizal Sukma, a noted Indonesian expert and foreign policy advisor to the current government led by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, proposed the idea of an Asian Fulcrum of Four. According to Rizal, four Asian powers – China, India, Indonesia and Japan – would seek to build and shape a pan Indo-Pacific (or Pacindo).

This is very similar to the idea of an Asian coalition of five put forth fifteen years ago by Indonesia’s then-president, Abdurrahman Wahid. Wahid had suggested a coalition comprised of China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The group would not be a security pact, but an arrangement to facilitate political, economic and cultural cooperation that would allow three big countries to rise with the assistance of Japan and Singapore.

It took nearly 20 years, but this week the World Trade Organization (WTO) formally approved Kazakhstan’s membership. Uniquely, Kazakhstan’s commitments will also bind Eurasian Economic Union members. They Kazakh parliament has until the end of October to ratify the agreement and there’s no indication it won’t do so. Kazakhstan has long been Central Asia’s dominant economy—with a GDP of over $230 billion—its membership in the global organization that regulates international trade makes sense.