Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: October 11, 2015 Edition

One of China’s top officials arrived in North Koreatoday, where he will join the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party. The anniversary proper is October 10, but Liu Yunshan will spend four days in North Korea. Outside of anniversary events, Liu will hold official meetings with North Korean leaders.

Liu is the first Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) member to visit North Korea since Kim Jong-un assumed control of the country in 2011. China-North Korea ties have been icy since then, and particularly since Kim had his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, executed in 2013 (Jang was seen as China’s preferred interlocutor in the Kim regime). Beijing was also nonplussed by Pyongyang’s decision to go ahead with a nuclear test in February 2013, during China’s New Year holiday and just weeks before Xi Jinping officially assumed the presidency. Neither Xi nor Kim  have visited each other’s countries since coming to power.

The United States has launched an investigation to determine how the terror group ISIS was able to acquire a large number of Toyota pickup trucks and SUVs ABC News reported this week.

Japanese car manufacturer Toyota, the world’s second-largest auto maker, has pledged full cooperation with U.S. authorities and is “supporting” the inquiry led by the Terror Financing division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

As reported worldwide last week, Russia has started bombing a range of targets in Syria. The main purpose of this intervention is to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s flagging regime, which has been under siege by the Islamic State, western-backed rebels, and al-Qaeda- affiliated groups, such as the al-Nusra front. Looking at Bellingcat’s report and images of the Bassel al-Assad airbase at Latakia, we can discern that Moscow has deployed at least 12 fighter-bombers (SU-25 Frogfoot.) (TheBBC claims that at least 20 jets have been deployed to Syria.) Dave Majumdar at The National Interest also reports that Russia has deployed 10 SU-24M2 Fencer and four SU-34 Fullback.

According to the Russian government, these planes are supposed to provide close air support for Assad’s troops fighting IS. However, Washington has accused Moscow of also striking rebel groups affiliated with the western-backed Free Syrian Army. (The Russian Ministry of Defense has released drone videos showing airstrikes against IS; you can see them here.)

The United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries reached agreement Monday on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a mammoth free trade pact representing nearly 40 percent of GDP, capping more than five years of negotiations.

Negotiators spent a week of talks to find consensus on key issues in the TPP, which also includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Plans over the weekend to announce the deal were repeatedly delayed, with talks on some issues in the 29-chapter long draft deal extending into 5am Monday morning, negotiators said.

On September 28, 2015, an Italian aid worker was killed by unknown assailants in the nation’s capital, Dhaka. The victim, identified as Cesare Tavella, was followed by three men before he was shot three times and left for dead. The attack prompted widespread shock across the city, partly because the incident occurred in an affluent neighborhood and partly because foreign nationals are rarely attacked in Bangladesh. Five days later, on October 3, a Japanese national, Kunio Hoshi, was shot dead three times in Rangpur, a remote district in northern Bangladesh. The Islamic State (ISIS), the radical Islamist militant group operating primarily in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the murders.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was quick to refute reports of ISIS involvement, insisting that the group is not active in Bangladesh while simultaneously reaffirming the government’s commitment to cracking down on fundamental groups. Instead, the prime minister accused the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the current opposition party, and its ally the Jamaat-e-Islami, of orchestrating and abetting the killings of two foreign nationals, claiming they were attempting to undermine the current government.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), first founded by by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in 2001, is in the middle of a quiet identity crisis. As I wrote earlier this year, the prospect of both India and Pakistan joining the group will considerably change the nature and “like-mindedness” of the grouping. It appears that now Afghanistan is throwing its hat into the SCO ring for full membership. Dmitry Mezentsev, the general secretary of the SCO, confirmed on Friday that Afghanistan is seeking to become a full member of the organization, Afghanistan’s Pajhwok news agency reports.

“The Afghan authorities have recently applied to the president of the country chairing the SCO requesting for its full membership in the Organization,” Mezentsev noted. He added that Afghanistan has long been on the SCO’s agenda. For SCO member states–certainly China and Russia–the security situation in Afghanistan is of central importance to overall regional security. Though the SCO has a mostly muted political and economic agenda, it serves as a regional coordination forum for counter-terrorism. The SCO’s Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) oversees member state cooperation against what the organization describes as the “three evils”: separatism, extremism, and terrorism. “Cooperation with Afghanistan must be built not only on combating terrorism or drug trafficking but also in the economic, cultural and humanitarian spheres,” Mezentsev added.

Friday, during Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s official visit to Kazakhstan, he met with his counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev. In a joint statement, the two leaders committed to strengthening cooperation in trade, business, energy, agriculture, and other areas of mutual interest. Poroshenko also thanked Nazarbayev for his “firm and unwavering support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty within the internationally recognized borders.”

Nazarbayev has staked out a fairly neutral position between his country’s closest partner, Russia, and Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists battle the European-supported government forces in the country’s east. In February 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, an internationally-recognized piece of Ukraine. The move was interpreted by some to be not just a land-grab, but a warning to other former Soviet states. Combined with comments made by Russian President Vladimir Putin in August 2014 that before 1991, “Kazakhs had never had statehood,” the idea that Russia could do to Kazakhstan what it had done to Ukraine understandably caused concern.

“Between the rock and a hard place” is a cliché that seems entirely appropriate for describing the situation that the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, or the KMT) currently faces in Taiwan. The candidate that it nominated for the 2016 Presidential Election, Hung Hsiu-chu, has been polling around 13 percent, a far cry from the support for the frontrunner, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen, who has an approval rate that hovers around 45 percent. Hung, who is on the conservative end of the KMT’s ideological spectrum, has been stirring up controversies and causing no end of headaches for her own party on her stances. She once remarked that the “one China, different interpretations” principle that the KMT-led government operates under should be rectified to “one China, same interpretation.” The uproar that ensued, both among the general public and the members of the ruling party, prompted the KMT to force a reluctant Hung to walk back her statement. This was just one of the more divisive moments of Hung’s candidacy.

Among the changes that have taken place in the Australian government over the last two weeks ago, one appointment that has stayed somewhat under the radar is Steve Ciobo as minister for International Development and the Pacific.

He’s been promoted from parliamentary secretary and to what is a new position, one that is meant to send a serious message to the Pacific that Australia is serious about its engagement in that region. In a September 21interview on Pacific Beat, an ABC radio show about the region, the newly minted minister used the word “engagement” repeatedly. The new position, and his role, was all about engagement: in the region, with other nations, on varied issues (like climate change).

Earlier this summer, Kazakhstan lost out on claiming Central Asia’s first Olympics, coming up short against Beijing. Now, though, Kazakhstan can boast a new — and far more dubious — honor. According to Bloomberg, Astana now hosts the world’s “most volatile currency,” with fluctuations in Kazakhstan’s tenge outpacing those of Russia’s ruble and Ukraine’s hryvnia to take the dubious title.

While the ruble’s decline has proven steeper than the tenge’s over the past 12 months – a 41 percent drop against a 33 percent drop, respectively – Kazakhstan’s recent currency swings have whipsawed its citizens’ savings. The currency rested at 185 per dollar in August, but the tenge plummeted in the wake of China’s yuan devaluation, bottoming out at some 300 per dollar a few weeks ago before recovering to 273 per dollar. In moving to a free float, the currency has collapsed nearly 100 percent over the past 20 months.