Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: September 4, 2016 Edition

The 11th G20 summit is scheduled to be held on September 4-5, in the picturesque city of Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, in China.

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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is requesting another record budget for 2017. This week, Japan’s defense ministry put in a request for 5.168 trillion yen (approximately $50 billion) to go toward the development of a new anti-ship missile, protecting against threats from North Korea, and bolstering island defense in the East China Sea, where Japan and China have a territorial dispute. The budget, if approved by the Japanese Diet, would represent a 2.3 increase in defense spending.

The 2017 budget will allow Tokyo to address the primary themes discussed in its annual defense white paper, the latest iteration of which was released in August 2016. Like in 2015, the Japanese Defense Ministry highlighted ongoing challenges from China in the East China Sea and discussed Beijing’s land reclamation activities in the South China Sea. This summer, in particular, has seen an acute uptick in tensions in the East China Sea as Beijing looks to draw attention away from the South China Sea after an unfavorable international legal verdict in a case filed by the Philippines in 2013.

Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar met his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, on Monday in Washington, D.C. The visit is Parrikar’s second to the United States as India’s defense minister and resulted in the conclusion of a long-anticipated bilateral deal on military logistics exchange, known as the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), that was first mooted in the early 2000s. Parrikar and Carter additionally addressed the gamut of defense and security issues on the U.S.-India agenda, including defense technology collaboration, expanding military-to-military exchanges, and the U.S. designation of India as a “Major Defense Partner” (MDP) earlier this year.

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This week will see a dispute between Australia and Timor-Leste over maritime boundaries begin in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. At the center of the disputed territory lie the Greater Sunrise oil and gas fields. These fields are estimated to contain around US$40 billion worth of oil and gas deposits.

The conciliation proceedings fall under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This is a convention that Australia has signed, and Canberra has urged China adhere to UNCLOS with regard to Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea. However, Australia has a preference for bilateral negotiations for maritime boundaries, rather than international conventions. This is an acceptable practice within international law, but in this case remains a process between two vastly unequal partners.

On Friday, Reuters, citing U.S. government data, notes that “American civilian and military aid to Pakistan … is expected to total less than $1 billion in 2016.” If this pans out, 2016 would become the first year since 2007 when the United States gave less than $1 billion in foreign assistance to Islamabad. It would moreover represent a difference over more than $2.5 billion from the all-time-high in 2011 of $3.5 billion in U.S. foreign assistance.

The decline in U.S. assistance isn’t too surprising given recent trends in not only U.S. relations with Pakistan, but Washington’s thinking about the South Asian regional more broadly. Pakistan, though nominally an ally in the U.S. war on terror since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, has frustrated Washington with its refusal to pull back support for the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups in the area. As I discussed earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Defense decided to withhold a $300 million tranche of military reimbursement payments, citing Pakistan’s inadequate attention against the deadly Haqqani network terror group.

Recent weeks have seen speculation regarding the specifics of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s first visit abroad later this month.

Initial chatter centered on which other ASEAN capitals Duterte would hit, in addition to Vientiane where he was expected to attend the next round of ASEAN summitry. He is now set to also visit Brunei and Indonesia (See: “Duterte’s First ASEAN Tour: What’s On the Agenda?”).

At the closing ceremony for the 2016 Rio Olympics, Brazil passed on all the glory and the responsibility of hosting the mega sports games to Japan – host of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

After Koike Yuriko, Tokyo’s newly-elected governor, accepted the Olympic flag from the head of the International Olympic Committee, a two-minute promotional video introduced Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dressed as Super Mario from the hit Nintendo franchise.