Protests against fuel price rises have spiralled amid wider political and economic grievances.
As the city hall in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, stood in flames and protesters pulled down the statue of the country’s first President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the image of the post-Soviet country as a beacon of stability in the volatile region disintegrated.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this past August brought an end to a 20-year war. But as a series of recent investigations by The New York Times has underscored, it also marked the beginning of postmortems about what the United States did right and, in some cases, did wrong.
Washington should take more aggressive “grey-zone” strategies – warfare just short of armed conflict – to tackle China and Russia, according to a group of US military strategists including former defence chief Chuck Hagel.
In recommendations published by US think tank the Atlantic Council last month, the strategists said China and Russia had conducted unconventional offensives against the US, including online cyberattacks, and misinformation and disinformation campaigns.
An article by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times last July is a prime example of western intelligentsia’s limited understanding of China’s unhindered rise as a superpower. “Becoming a superpower is a complicated business. It poses a series of connected questions about capabilities, intentions and will,” Rachman wrote.
The United States has recently been talking seriously about starting a new Cold War with China. In Cold War with the former Soviet Union which mostly revolved ideological and security spheres, the two sides reached a strategic agreement to replace political threats with military ones. Thus, the former Cold War between the Kremlin and the White House began with an agreement, not a threat.
In the new Cold War; however, there is no such agreement between US and China and due to Beijing‘s economic rise as well as the profound geopolitical changes that have taken place in the Indo-Pacific region in recent years the political and economic threats are turning into military ones.
Beijing Isn’t Just Building Roads—It’s Making Friends
When U.S. policymakers consider China’s influence in Africa, they often think of big-ticket infrastructure development programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over the past two decades, Beijing has spent billions building dams, highways, railways, and ports in countries from Egypt to South Africa.
But those sorts of projects are only part of the story. China’s evolving presence in Africa, including the BRI, is based as much on investment in building social and human capital as it is on giant infrastructure projects. Since the beginning of this century, Beijing has invested heavily in cultivating political,
Gazprom, Russia’s giant state-owned energy company, is slated to finalize an agreement in 2022 for a second huge natural gas pipeline running from Siberia to China, marking yet another stage in what energy analysts and Western diplomats say is a fast-evolving gas pivot to Asia by Moscow.
They see the pivot as a geopolitical project and one that could mean trouble for Europe.
Known as Power of Siberia 2, the mega-pipeline traversing Mongolia will be able to deliver 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China annually. It was given the go-ahead in March by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and when finished it will complement another massive pipeline, Power of Siberia 1, that transports gas from Russia’s Chayandinskoye field to northern China.
The ‘phase one’ trade deal between the United States and China entered into force on 14 February 2020. As part of this agreement, China agreed to make structural reforms, open up its financial services and strengthen intellectual property. China also pledged to buy at least US$200 billion in additional US goods and services over 2020 and 2021.
Al Qaeda Changed the World—but Not in the Way It Expected
On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda carried out the deadliest foreign terrorist attack the United States had ever experienced. To Osama bin Laden and the other men who planned it, however, the assault was no mere act of terrorism. To them, it represented something far grander: the opening salvo of a campaign of revolutionary violence that would usher in a new historical era. Although bin Laden was inspired by religion, his aims were geopolitical. Al Qaeda’s mission was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together by a common political authority. Bin Laden believed that he could achieve that goal by delivering what he described as a “decisive blow” that would force the United States to withdraw its military forces from Muslim-majority states, thus allowing jihadis to fight autocratic regimes in those places on a level playing field.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had been isolated on Ukraine in a series of major summits throughout December, but that changed significantly on Wednesday when his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping offered his strong support, strengthening an emerging Moscow-Beijing axis.
The Chinese premier’s alliance with Putin — one of the key factors emboldening Russian foreign policy in recent years — has significant implications not only for geopolitics but also the global economy. With both men potentially in power until well into the 2030s, they may well be seen by future historians as the two dominant figures in international relations in the first three to four decades of the 21st century.