While China’s many contested border areas may appear to have become more inflamed coincident with its rising global ambitions, the reality is that Beijing has long stoked and sustained borderland disputes as a tactic to win concessions on wider issues with its neighbours.
Read Here | Asia Times
Tensions persist among today’s great powers—above all the United States and China—and any number of flash points could trigger a conflict between them. These two countries are on a collision course fuelled by the dynamics of a power transition and their competition for status and prestige, and without a change in direction, war between them in the coming decades is not only possible but probable.
Read Here | Foreign Affairs
The U.S. military is already strapped for resources trying to police the Indo-Pacific, and this is peacetime. If the United States lost a sizable fraction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated joint forces in a contest in the Taiwan Strait—even a triumphant one—its capacity to retain its superpower standing and preside over the liberal maritime order would be diminished. It could win locally but lose globally.
Read Here | The National Interest
A war begun to oust the Taliban is ending with a whimper almost two decades later, with those same Taliban poised for some sort of power-sharing agreement with Kabul. After decades of war and heartbreak and broken promises and shattered lives, so little seems to have changed in Afghanistan.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
The absence of a credible guarantor of peace in Afghanistan is a big problem for everyone involved. For its part, the West has long believed that Pakistan could play that role but is not quite fully exercising its power. In turn, the United States frequently tried to ramp up the pressure on its erstwhile partner.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
Observers of US-China relations increasingly talk of a new cold war. On top of a long-running trade war, the two countries now find themselves in a destructive cycle of mutual sanctions, consulate closings, and increasingly bellicose official speeches. Efforts to decouple the US economy from China’s are underway as tensions mount in both the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
An armed conflict will do little to resolve India’s security dilemma along the Himalayan border with China. The coronavirus and the economic downturn caused by currency demonetisation, when coupled with an expensive war, however, limited the latter might be, could lead to a serious downturn in an economy that is already bleeding.
Increasingly, governments that are involved in military conflicts are turning not to their own countrymen, but are instead relying on foreigners who they pay as mercenaries. Countries like Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Iran are ignoring other countries’ borders and sovereignty, sending hired guns into foreign countries because they don’t like the regime in charge, because they want access to natural resources – or because mercenaries belonging to their enemies are there.
Aiming small begins with the size of the “land grab” — typically no more than one province and often much less. The strategy is to seize territory while minimising the risks and consequences of doing so. By aiming small, conquest without war is very possible. Avoiding inhabited areas — taking land but not people — further reduces the probability of provoking violence. China stuck to the script of modern conquest, doing both in Ladakh.
One of the most important lessons Russian policymakers have learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is to refrain from forging local allies in their own image and to instead seek to galvanise partners wherever mutual interests intersect. A case in point is the nexus with the Taliban.
