This led to Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s and its role in World War II, as it and other countries competed to control land, the seas, and later the sky. President Boris Yeltsin is eager to settle the territorial dispute between Russia and Japan by the year 2000. But officials in Russia's Foreign Ministry are inclined to go slow, recognizing the strong domestic resistance to making any territorial concessions. And while the Japanese media enthuses about the favorable developments in Russo-Japanese relations, Russians show practically no interest in the matter. Just because Japan and Russia are neighbors, that is no guarantee that they can build a friendly relationship.
Proximity acts as a catalyst that can promote either cooperation or conflict.
The crisis that struck Asian economies last year revealed that the politico-economic setups in a number of countries, such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia had reached an impasse. But the underlying causes and subsequent responses differ from country to country. In Thailand, the problem was a system of coalition government based on the parceling out of pork. Mayalsia was less severely hit, but the crisis challenges the government's ability to maintain development and racial harmony. The gravest situation is in Indonesia, where the basic problem is not the failure of some mechanism to overcome the crisis but the absence of any mechanism at all.