Arhitectura intereselor Chinei în regiune – cauze și efecte. Pătrunderea Chinei în Balcanii de Vest este unul dintre primele 2-3 fenomene care compun matricea geopolitică europenă din ultimii 10-15 ani, ca de altfel și extinderea prezenței economice a Beijingului în vestul continentului nostru.
For decades, the Pakistani establishment has termed the Baloch insurgency a low-intensity conflict confined mostly to Balochistan, the country’s largest province by territory. But that seems to have changed, as a spate of attacks this year clearly demonstrates that the insurgency has entered into a new phase.
U.S. forces are equipped to handle multiple conflicts abroad simultaneously, though positioning troops and weapons throughout the Indo-Pacific to challenge threats from China poses logistical issues because it is such a vast region, Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost said Monday.
The Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of territory in the Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan, is situated at the crossroads of four countries: China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Wakhan Corridor is about 350 km long with 16 to 64 km wide at its eastern end, the corridor forks into two prongs that wrap around a salient of Chinese territory, forming the 92 km boundary between the two countries.
On October 6, former US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy joined the Atlantic Council to discuss, ahead of China’s Twentieth Communist Party Congress, how the United States should invest in military capabilities in the short term to deter China in the 2020s. Below, edited for length and clarity, is her conversation with Clementine Starling, the deputy director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Forward Defense practice.
On the eve of the opening of a key Chinese Communist Party congress, party leader, head of state and commander of the armed forces Xi Jinping seems more in charge than ever, having given no indication of stepping away from power or anointing a successor.
As concerns grow of a possible nuclear conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine, there are hopes China could defuse the crisis.
But Russia’s most influential ally may not have the desire or the ability to help, according to analysts.
“If any power has influence over Putin, it is China,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS University of London’s China Institute.
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shocked Japan, its seriousness was multiplied by China’s support for Russia. Facing this new reality, Japan’s national security policy is now undergoing a historic change at an unprecedentedly fast pace.
Many countries expand their military strength as they acquire wealth. However, there are at least two important exceptions, the most important of which was the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was only after the start of the Cold War that the United States became a standing military superpower.
How Putin’s War Has Hurt Russia in Central Asia and the Caucasus
The Kremlin has struggled to contain the fallout of its invasion of Ukraine. It did not imagine that its war would inspire sustained unity among Western countries, nor that the Ukrainian army would resist so well, nor that it would need to partly mobilize the Russian population, a drastic measure with potentially disastrous domestic consequences. A war intended to restore Russian strength has instead left the country weaker.
Threats, Assurances, and Effective Deterrence
As tension rises between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, strategists on all sides seem to have forgotten what the American game theorist Thomas Schelling taught years ago: deterring an adversary from taking a proscribed action requires a combination of credible threats and credible assurances. Instead of heeding that lesson, a growing number of U.S. analysts and officials have called for the United States to treat Taiwan as if it were an independent state and to abandon the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” in favor of “strategic clarity,” defined as an unconditional commitment to use military force to defend the island in the event of a mainland Chinese attack. These calls have intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators even advocating for formal recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign country. Still others have called for a permanent (and significant) deployment of U.S. forces to Taiwan to lend credibility to the U.S. threat of a military response to a mainland attack. In testimony before the U.S. Senate last year, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, implied that the United States could never allow Beijing to control Taiwan because such an outcome would make it impossible to defend other U.S. allies in Asia.