On Jan. 13, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed alarm that millions of Afghans are on the “verge of death” thanks to a lethal brew of “freezing temperatures and frozen assets.” This was no idle warning. Notwithstanding the decline in fighting following the Taliban’s victory in August 2021, Afghanistan’s economy is in a deepening spiral of impoverishment and destitution.
Many in the West believe China’s economic ascendancy indicates that Beijing is covertly working to usher in a new world order in which the balance of power has shifted.
History shows that changes in the world order are inevitable, but they are not happening as quickly as some analysts think. For example, the rise of the US to the world’s primary geopolitical position took nearly half a century, from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. France’s rise to domination over western Europe in the 17th century was also a long and arduous process.
While Tehran is proceeding slowly when it comes to establishing official ties with the Taliban government, recent talks highlight Iran’s interest in expanding its role in Afghanistan.
On his first official visit to Iran, the Taliban government’s acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi arrived in Tehran Jan. 9 for talks with his counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. Having held a preliminary meeting with Iranian officials in Kabul, the high-level Taliban delegation had already finalized the agenda.
President Joe Biden took office with what was, in many ways, a soft-power vision of foreign policy. But China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have been busy reminding the United States that today’s world is one of big-power competition.
Regional experts say one key objective of Mr. Putin’s recent actions regarding Ukraine is to convince the U.S. to deal with Russia as the great power he sees it to be. At the end of a week of inconclusive diplomacy addressing Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that if nothing else, “they are taking us seriously now.”
The same inaction by Western leaders to hold China accountable for the global pandemic that infuriates Western citizens only emboldens the Communist Party leadership, which sees inaction as a license to do more.
China will be constantly assessing the political strength of its adversaries. European political leaders have never demonstrated the stomach to confront military threats. During my tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, I observed Europeans always believed dialogue was more important than confrontation. Bad agreements were better than no agreements and being party to agreements that did not work was better than withdrawing.
High oil prices are a victory for Saudi Arabia, but a blow to the United States and China.
Oil prices reached their highest point since 2014 today.
The price of Brent crude opened above $87 a barrel. Brent crude is widely considered the benchmark for global oil prices.
The NATO alliance is ill suited to twenty-first-century Europe. This is not because Russian President Vladimir Putin says it is or because Putin is trying to use the threat of a wider war in Ukraine to force neutrality on that country and to halt the alliance’s expansion. Rather, it is because NATO suffers from a severe design flaw: extending deep into the cauldron of eastern European geopolitics, it is too large, too poorly defined, and too provocative for its own good.
The US and its allies are countering the re-emergence of China with a Sinophobic confection of new alliances, military threats, jingoism and false propaganda about a falsely claimed Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang. However excellent health, infant mortality, maternal mortality, population growth and education outcomes in Xinjiang reported by China and confirmed by respected NGOs contradict Sinophobic US, UK and Australian claims of a Uyghur Genocide.
A staggering 40% out of 650 Chinese investments in Europe in the years 2010-2020, according to Datenna [a Dutch company that monitors Chinese investments in Europe], had “high or moderate involvement by state-owned or state-controlled companies.”
When the Chairman of the UK parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat, wrote that Chinese ownership of the British microchip plant, Newport Wafer Fab, “represents a significant economic and national security concern”, UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng responded that the deal had been “considered thoroughly”. Only after considerable pressure did British Prime Minister Boris Johnson agree to a national security review of the sale.
The unintended consequences of analytical doctrine may make us more vulnerable to surprises.
Two recent events, the surprise Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the massing of Russian troops on Ukrainian borders, have brought to the surface the debate about the role of assessment and analysis in informing policy decisions. In the case of the former, we ask: how could this event not have been foreseen (i.e., why did the analysis not clearly predict it)? In the case of the latter, we are provided with varying estimates of the likelihood of President Vladimir Putin’s malign intentions and his probable timescales for action. Will he invade, or won’t he? By spring or after?