Note From the Editor

Abstract

Welcome to the fall 2021 issue of World Affairs (WAJ)! Our first article this time continues debates in previous issues of the journal concerning the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on world affairs (see, e.g., Baris and Pelizzo 2020; Kavalski 2021; Klimkin and Umland 2020)-this time from the perspective of soft power and public diplomacy. In "A Critical Juncture? COVID-19 and the Fate of the U.S.-China Struggle for Supremacy," Thomas Ameyaw-Brobbey queries how global public perception in Europe and Africa of both countries' COVID-19 efforts have affected their competitive advantage for global leadership. The author contends that China will almost certainly win some admiration for its COVID-19 efforts, but not enough to gain a competitive edge over the United States. This insightful piece speaks directly to former WAJ articles on leadership in the post-pandemic world order by Ross Smith and Fallon (2020) and Struye de Swielande (2021).International cooperation was a key topic spanning several pieces in the last (June 2021) issue of WAJ (see Kopiński and Wróblewski 2021; Norman 2021; Struye de Swielande 2021), though, for the last year, debates have focused most on cooperation regarding shared solutions to the pandemic. International cooperation as it relates to security issues has taken a back seat for the last few issues, but is now returning to the forefront of current affairs discussions.At the turn of the millennium, WAJ published a strong article on "Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) between India and Pakistan" where CBMs were developed in an "attempt to replace conflict with cooperation" (Ahmar 2000, 34) in the strained relations between the two countries in the 1990s. Twenty-one years on, the second article in this fall issue updates readers on the same topic from a contemporary critical perspective. In "The Role of CBMs in the Evolution of Relations between Pakistan and India," Muhammad Waqas Haider and Tahir Mahmood Azad identify the main obstacles that have confounded bilateral conflict resolution in the past and add to the theoretical framework behind