If you had believed the best minds of our times, this was not supposed to happen. But for two decades, China had been winning without fighting, while the US was fighting without winning. Something had to give and it did, in the 2016 American presidential election.
Pakistan’s move to unveil a new political map reasserting its claim to all of Indian-administered Kashmir – minus the parts claimed by China – is fuelling New Delhi’s fears of a two-front conflict with its neighbours, despite a lack of evidence that such a move is in the works. But the release of the map is the latest in a series of conflicts born from cartography which have broken out in the Himalayas since May – from a deadly scuffle between Indian and Chinese soldiers in mid-June to a war of words that began earlier in the summer when New Delhi opened a road through territory claimed by Nepal.
Reports of a massive twenty-five-year investment and security partnership between China and Iran have caused a stir in Washington, suggesting that Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to isolate Tehran has failed. But the United States is not the only country concerned about the prospect of a Sino-Iranian grand alliance. India has various investments in Iran that could be threatened by the Chinese economic juggernaut.
There no longer seems any doubt that the United States and China have embarked on a period of aggressive confrontation. A brisk war of words has quickly escalated to tit-for-tat consulate closures, and now Chinese sources say a US warplane has flown close to Shanghai: these are initial skirmishes in a much more serious conflict that is likely to worsen at least until the US elections in November, and probably beyond. The question is, how will this confrontation play out in the rest of Asia?
Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s team of informal foreign-policy and national security advisors has expanded to over 2,000 people, including 20 working groups spanning issues from diversity in national security to arms control, defense, intelligence, and homeland security.
The answer is different for the United States than for some other democracies. Europe has a real problem because they actually did try, because of their history, to push nationalism aside, to push national identity aside, and to subsume it in a European identity. This was represented by the idea that the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels were making decisions about everything from what Italy’s budget deficit could be to what constitutes cheese.
This year, amid a raging pandemic, a looming global economic crisis and devastating floods and landslides, the Himalayan nation of Nepal has been in political and diplomatic turmoil over its disputed border with its much larger neighbour, India. The dispute has deepened strains within the current government and reignited debate over the future of Nepal’s relations with India and China.
The strategy of “infrastructure-led growth” (growth, not economic and social development) seems to be showing its limits in Africa, where China has largely been instrumental in promoting it. This strategy is based on the Keynesian multiplier theory whereby any increase in aggregate demand would result in a more than proportional increase in GDP.
To date, there is little reason to think that global demand for dollars is drying up. But there is another way the United States could lose its status as issuer of the world’s dominant reserve currency: it could voluntarily abandon dollar hegemony because the domestic economic and political costs have grown too high.
Xi Jinping intends to be the Leader of the “Second Hundred” just as Mao Zedong is regarded as the Leader of the “First Hundred”. This means the world will be dealing with President Xi Jinping for some time. It is, therefore, important to get a proper measure of the person.
