Countries such as China, Iran, Russia, and the United States are heavily investing in their cyberwar capabilities and are accumulating not just single cyber weapons but entire cyber weapon arsenals for use in wartime. Small and medium powers will need to start a public debate about how to tackle the growing threats from cyberspace sooner rather than later.

China’s alleged militarization of the South China Sea isn’t supported by the facts, and the US definition of ‘militarization’ defies both common sense and international practice.

In 1985, historian Walter McDougall wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Space Race. Therein, he argued that the space race wasn’t simply a competition between two nations to get into space, but rather a competition between two different systems and worldviews. The U.S. and China may be experiencing a similar phenomenon in cyberspace today.

The joint operations provide Chinese forces valuable opportunities to test their skills and tactics. But if the West is really concerned with China and Russia’s intentions behind these drills, it needs some soul-searching to ask what “common threats’ have driven the two countries to get closer faster than anticipated.

In the face of risks and disagreements, the two sides should restart negotiations, and sincerely embark on the road of resolving both the unsettled state of war from the 1950s and the current stalemate over the THAAD deployment in South Korea.

In the wake of the recent embassy attack in Kyrgyzstan, China should not only continue strengthening anti-terror and stability-preservation efforts at home, but also pay greater attention to overseas terrorist threats, and improve its overseas anti-terror capacities.

Constructive mediation rather than military intervention is urgently needed, but first all parties must be realistic about the situation on the ground, and open to a political transition through negotiation.

The US government recently announced it would transfer governance of the Internet to the “global multi-stakeholder community” on Oct 1. This is a major step forward in global Internet governance reform since in March 2014, when the US National Communications and Information Administration formally declared it would surrender control over ICANN.

At this stage, it will be premature to immediately associate the blast at the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek with the larger context of ethnic separatism in China or Islamic radicalism in Central Asia, despite the high likelihood that Uighur separatist groups will be blamed for the attack in Kyrgyzstan. In general, this blast comes as an unpleasant and unexpected surprise both for Kyrgyzstan and China.

Security assistance is a tangible means of bolstering partner nations’ ability to fend off Chinese maritime coercion. If the U.S. truly seeks to shift its strategic weight to the Asia-Pacific, it must consider ways to rebalance its security assistance programs to enable its maritime Southeast Asian partners, as they defend the front lines.