South East Asia

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.

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.