South East Asia

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.

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.