China would probably have never entertained using IMEC had it not been for the Red Sea crisis, but its decision to rely on this route serves the interests of all responsible stakeholders in the global economy, which should prompt members of the Alt-Media Community to radically reconsider their worldview.
Latest Developments
The Houthis in Yemen announced on January 19 that they would permit Chinese and Russian vessels to safely transit the Red Sea. The same day, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce called on the Houthis to cease “harassment” of commercial shipping and announced unspecified future efforts to protect regional seaborne commerce. Nevertheless, the price of shipping a 40-foot container between Europe and China increased by 260 percent within the past month, pressuring countries that rely on shipping through the Red Sea.
Interview with Hai Phong
Haifog: I’m glad to have you here because there’s a lot of economic novelties. But your specialty is to highlight, and this channel is trying to highlight, the relationship between geopolitics and the economy, such as Radhika [Desai, and Ben Norton, and other great journalists have tried to do so.
The defeat in Ukraine
Can we stop things falling apart? 2024 begins with wars burning in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine and peacemaking in crisis. Worldwide, diplomatic efforts to end fighting are failing. More leaders are pursuing their ends militarily. More believe they can get away with it.
In an article in the respected British journal, The Economist Pakistan’s ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan has expressed doubt about the fairness of the forthcoming General Elections scheduled to be held in January 2024. In his words, Imran Khan is now in jail on charges of exposing state secrets by reading out in the Pakistan National Assembly a secret telegram sent by the Pakistani ambassador to Washington which accused the US government of conspiring with the Pakistani military authority to oust Imran Khan from his post as Prime Minister.
Observers might expect that the exacerbation of long-running Iranian-Pakistani tensions would be against Islamabad’s interests, just like they might think the same about closer Indian-Iranian relations in the aftermath of this unprecedented tit-for-tat against designated terrorists in Balochistan. In reality, the Pakistani Establishment – which refers to the country’s powerful military-intelligence structures that call the shots behind the scenes – stands to benefit from this crisis.
On Tuesday, Iran used missiles and drones to strike western Pakistan near Koh-e-Sabz. On Thursday, Pakistan conducted airstrikes in southeastern Iran near Saravan, then released a statement claiming that “Iran is a brotherly country.”
More than a sibling squabble is going on here. Iran and Pakistan were apparently targeting hideouts of armed non-state actors—Jaish al-Adl in Pakistan, and the Balochistan Liberation Army and the Balochistan Liberation Front in Iran—that each country accuses the other of harboring. Will the tit-for-tat strikes escalate? How does this flashpoint fit in with ongoing conflicts involving Iranian proxies in Yemen and Gaza? Below, experts from our Atlantic Council family share their insights.
UK defense minister Grant Shapps has predicted a global conflict between the West and Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, within five years. Shapps has called on Britain’s allies to increase their military spending in response to this so-called “existential threat.”
The challenge ahead is a formidable one that will require the military-intelligence services to fully focus on this newly metastasized terrorist threat in order to emerge victorious, which in turn necessitates their top brass giving them the order to abandon the all-out nationwide crackdown against the opposition. Pakistan’s prior large-scale anti-terrorist operations succeeded precisely because those carrying them out weren’t distracted by political witch hunts, which COAS Munir would do well not to forget.
The impression that Iran regards Pakistan as a serious security threat on par with the Israeli spy base in Iraq and ISIS ones in Syria that it also struck in sequence. With all three taking place as the latest Israeli-Hamas war escalates into a regional proxy war between Israel-US and Iran, the innuendo is that Pakistan is aligned with them against Tehran, which could turn the whole Global South against Islamabad.