Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held “substantive and constructive” talks on Beijing-Washington relations and major international and regional issues of common interest, on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
“Western universities need to understand that Chinese military scientists have only one client, and that is the People’s Liberation Army.” — Meia Nouwens, researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Politiken, May 19, 2022.
The US military could potentially be at a tactical disadvantage should a conflict arise in the South China Sea over Taiwan. This is what National Defense magazine noted regarding the edge of China in terms of developing energetic materials commonly used in pyrotechnics, propellants, and explosives.
In the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, a great deal of attention has been given to the causes and consequences of the failed intra-Afghan peace process, the factors leading to the collapse of the Afghan military and the role played by pervasive corruption at the highest levels of the country’s internationally backed government.
Not long after the commencement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that for China, binding itself tightly to Moscow would do harm to Beijing’s long-term interests.
That is because, I wrote, an alliance between a superpower like China and a far less dynamic country like Russia, whose economy is a small fraction of the former’s size, is not much of an alliance. This would especially hold true if Beijing’s support for Russian President Vladimir Putin deepened European wariness of China and caused Europe and the United States to grow even closer, both of which now seem almost certain.
As the war and resulting sanctions redraw trade maps in Asia, Iran stands to be the primary beneficiary.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set off a series of sanctions from Western states and many others that will have broad implications for some time to come, even in the unlikely scenario of a relatively quick end to the fighting. The impact on the global economy and supply chains from both the war and the escalating sanctions regime has already been significant but will have long-term consequences on the geoeconomics of Asia and East-West trade that require closer examination.
Over the past decade, global economic prospects have been penalized by the fall of world trade, investment and migration, coupled with the unwarranted suffering of over 100 million globally displaced. It’s a prologue to an untenable future.
While Europe becomes increasingly dependent on the US in its own backyard, the alliance puts Beijing on notice.
Russia and Ukraine are at war, Europe’s failure to take its defense seriously is evident to all, and the allies finally feel pressure to spend and do more militarily. Why, then, did they treat China as an adversary and invite several Asia-Pacific governments to last week’s NATO summit?
At the G7 Summit in Germany, on June 26, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden made a pledge to raise $200 billion within the United States for global infrastructure spending. It was made clear that this new G7 project—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII)—was intended to counter the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Given Biden’s failure to pass the Build Back Better bill (with its scope being almost halved from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion), it is unlikely that he will get the U.S. Congress to go along with this new endeavor.
In May 2022, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed a law making any attempt to commit a terrorist attack punishable by death — and terrorism is exactly the charge being brought against a number of Belarusians who stand accused of damaging the country’s railroads. Belarus’s “railroad war” began before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when the Russian and Belarusian armies began conducting joint exercises; since then, there have been dozens of attacks. At Meduza’s request, Belarusian journalist Anya Perova reports on Belarus’s railroad guerrilla fighters.