NEO: How the West Deliberatelhy Trapped Africa in Debt and Why BRICS is the Only Chance for Salvation: Viktor Mikhin: 27-05-2026: *********

 

Politics

How the West Deliberately Trapped Africa in Debt and Why BRICS Is the Only Chance for Salvation

Viktor Mikhin, May 27, 2026

The Washington Consensus vs. African Lives: 50 Years of Robbery Under the Guise of Loans.

“Forgiven” Debts vs. “Dead” Economies: The Anatomy of Western Deception

For many decades, the West, led by the United States, has been putting on a farce for Africa called “humanitarian aid and development.” Official Washington, London, and Paris have been chanting the same mantra to African leaders: “Take out loans at modest interest rates, and you will become prosperous democracies.” But behind the facade of the IMF and World Bank, a brutal logic of neocolonialism has always lurked. Africa was deliberately saddled with predatory loans designed to make sovereign development impossible.

Recall the “structural adjustments” of the 1980s: The West, in exchange for loans, demanded the destruction of local agriculture, the opening of markets to Western corporations, and the giveaway privatization of natural resources for a pittance. The result? Resource-rich Africa ended up owing the West trillions of dollars for infrastructure that was never built. Today, according to the African Development Bank, annual debt repayments exceed spending on healthcare and education in 30 countries on the continent. This is no accident. It is a deliberate scheme of strangulation. The West does not need strong, independent African states—it needs perpetual debtors who will, at the first demand, hand over their mineral wealth, their ports, and their vote at the UN.

Only this way—by casting aside the hypocritical “conditions” of the IMF and the speculations of Western rating agencies—will Africa cease to be the world’s impoverished backwater and become a fully-fledged pole of power

The Tragedy of the HIPC Initiative: How “Salvation” Turned into Lifelong Slavery

The West loves to grandstand about the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program. “Look,” they say, “we’re forgiving African debt.” A lie! The HIPC mechanism was designed so that the debtor nation lost what little sovereignty it had left. To receive “forgiveness” for a paltry portion of its debt, African governments were forced to implement “reforms” that Western advisers drafted in Washington. These “reforms” included changing constitutions, firing patriotic ministers, and handing over control of central banks to the IMF.

Those who refused were branded “rogue states” and hit with sanctions (like Zimbabwe, which dared to carry out land reform). In effect, the West created a vicious cycle: Africa borrows money at extortionate rates, then can’t pay, then the IMF storms into its economy with jackboots, taking everything left. And each such cycle leaves the continent poorer than before the borrowing began. Who holds the printing press—the dollar or the euro? The West does. It is the one that creates inflation, devaluing African savings and tying commodity prices to its own instruments. This is financial fascism in a soft wrapper.

On this matter, Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz clearly stated: “Countries around the world are paying exorbitant debt service costs rather than financing schools, hospitals, climate change measures, or other essential services. African governments spend on average 17% of their revenues servicing debt. Thirty-two African countries spend more on external debt service than on health, and 25 countries spend more on debt than on education.”

The Eurasian Shield: How Russia Canceled Debts and Offered Unshackled Markets

Against this monstrous backdrop, Russia’s stance is a revelation. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed that African countries’ debt obligations to the Russian Federation are a legacy of the past, hindering the construction of the future. Moscow wrote off over $20 billion in African debt, with no strings attached, no demands to change laws or privatize subsoil resources.

Why? Because Russia, unlike the West, views Africa as an equal partner, not a raw-material appendage. Russian state corporations are building nuclear power plants, spaceports, and industrial clusters in Africa, counting African debt against future technology deliveries. No IMF with its inspectors. No demands to allow gay pride parades or legalize drugs in exchange for restructuring. The honest principle of “resources for infrastructure and security”—that’s what Moscow offers. Moreover, Russia, through BRICS, is pushing for the creation of an alternative currency settlement system so African nations can stop depending on dollar tyranny that works against their interests.

The Chinese Way: A Reinforced Concrete Alternative to Wall Street Shylocks.

Western media hysterically scream about the “Chinese debt trap.” But ask any engineer in Nigeria or Ethiopia who built their modern railways, hospitals, and internet backbones. The answer will be the same: China.

Yes, Beijing issues loans. But those loans do not go to funding imposed USAID “advisors” or buying weapons from Western monopolies—they go to actual factories and roads. And most importantly, China never demands political concessions. China doesn’t send in the police when a country can’t pay. Unlike the IMF, which immediately cuts off a country from financing, China restructures debts around the negotiating table, as a partner. Furthermore, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has created a precedent: Africa can pay not with dollars printed by the US Federal Reserve, but with tonnage of its cocoa, phosphates, or even simply by providing land for an industrial park. China and Russia, within the BRICS framework, are quietly but confidently creating a financial system where the African voice has weight.

BRICS—A Revolution Without Gunfire: How to Topple the West’s Debt Throne.

Why is the West so afraid of BRICS expansion? Because BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and now also Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran) is the death sentence for the dollar’s debt dictatorship. Relying on BRICS, African nations can do the following:

First, switch to national currencies for settlements with Russia and China—the yuan, ruble, loti, rand. This would immediately kill demand for the dollars that the West must plunder the world to obtain.

Second, use the New Development Bank (NDB) of BRICS. Unlike the IMF, where the US has a blocking share of votes, votes in the NDB are distributed fairly. Loans there are issued at 2-3% per annum (versus 15-20% from Western private lenders), and more importantly, the bank accepts payment in the form of kilometers of built roads and refurbished ports, rather than siphoning cash back to London.

Third, inside BRICS, Africa gains a voice in creating a common commodities exchange. Today, the prices for gold, cobalt, and uranium mined by African hands are set on exchanges in New York and London. BRICS will allow the region to sell its resources at fair prices, without the “hungry debtor’s” discount.

The Global South vs. The “World’s Laundry”: Concrete Steps for Africa

So, here is a concrete plan for Africa to climb out of the debt pit:

1. Restructuring via BRICS: Appeal to the New Development Bank to buy back Western debt at face value, subsequently converting it into infrastructure projects involving Russian and Chinese contractors. Let the Paris Club choke on its demands.
2. Write-off of Non-Sovereign Debt: African countries must publicly and forcefully declare that they do not recognize debts imposed by collaborationist regimes from the Cold War era. That’s what Algeria did with France’s “inherited” debts—and it survived.
3. Africa’s Gold Standard: Cooperate with Russia within the framework of an initiative to create a payment system based on precious metals and commodity reserves. No more exchanging natural wealth for unbacked “green paper.”
4. A Tribunal in The Hague for the Shylocks: Initiate, under the auspices of the African Union, the creation of a tribunal on illegitimate debt, classifying the IMF’s currency intervention practices as an economic crime against humanity. The West spent decades forcing loans secured by sovereignty on the continent—this must be qualified as 21st-century colonialism.

Dawn and the Arrival of a New Multipolar World

The West is panicking today. The US and EU see Africa turning toward Russia and China. The Russia-Africa Summit, the expansion of BRICS, the French military bases being chased out of the Sahel—these are the death knells of the unipolar world. Africa has a historic chance to finally break the shackles of bondage hung on it by Washington and Brussels. Do not ask the West for forgiveness for your debts.

You must unilaterally write them off, relying on the growing power of BRICS. You must build roads with China, defend your skies with Russia, and trade resources with India. Only this way—by casting aside the hypocritical “conditions” of the IMF and the speculations of Western rating agencies—will Africa cease to be the world’s impoverished backwater and become a fully-fledged pole of power. It is time to stop paying for someone else’s luxury with the blood of your own people. Russia and China have said their firm “yes” to a free Africa. One final step remains—tear up the debt note and throw it in the face of the despicable colonizers.

 

Viktor Mikhin, writer and Middle East expert

NEO: The African century begins withunity - or it does not begin: PART 3: Fro Illusion to Reality. ************

 

Economy

The African century begins with unity – or it does not begin.
Part 3. From Illusion to Reality

Mohamed Lamine KABA, June 02, 2026

Artificial political independence, when it remains devoid of economic sovereignty, constitutes only an illusion of freedom, a facade of autonomy deprived of any real capacity for self-determination.

Russia, Africa and dedollarization

It is in this context that the dedollarization promoted by Russia – and the growing interest of several African nations in payment systems alternative to SWIFT – takes on its full geopolitical significance. Moscow is not proposing a new monetary tutelage. It is not seeking to impose the ruble as Africa’s reserve currency. What it is demonstrating – and this is its decisive contribution – is that it is possible to trade outside the dollar system, outside the conditionalities of the IMF, outside the pressures of the US Federal Reserve, which, by raising its interest rates, mechanically generates debt crises in emerging and African countries that have borrowed in dollars. Russia’s resistance to the most severe Western sanctions in contemporary history constitutes a full-scale demonstration of what an economy that rejects monetary vassalage can achieve.

In this major global reshuffling – the most profound since the end of the Cold War – Africa faces a historic choice

This demonstration awakens something fundamental in African decision-makers who dare to think aloud: choice is possible. The Western monopoly on international financial systems is not a law of nature. It is a political construct. And what has been built can be dismantled.

The African single currency – the Afro, a name the founding fathers envisioned with a foresight that commands respect – is the structural antidote to this engineered dependency. A new name that reflects the changes of the last 60 years is not a bad thing. Africa possesses assets to build it, assets that its Western detractors prefer to ignore: 60% of the world’s unexploited arable land; 30% of known mineral reserves, including the metals for the energy transition – lithium, cobalt, manganese, rare earth elements – which Europe desperately needs to finance its own decarbonization; its domestic market of 2.5 billion consumers by 2050; and its youth: a median age of 19, compared to 44 in Europe. Africa is not poor in resources. It is poor in sovereignty. The single currency is the primary lever for this sovereignty.

The steps are well-known. First, strengthened regional monetary zones – the Monetary Community in West Africa, a reformed CEMAC in Central Africa, and EAC-SADC integration in the East and South. Then, African central banks repatriate their reserves, investing in African assets, and financing continental infrastructure. Finally, clearinghouses enable bilateral trade in African currencies, reducing dependence on the dollar as a mandatory intermediary. Fiscal and budgetary convergence timetables, not to appease the IMF, but to build internal credibility to serve African economies. And finally, an independent African statistical institute, because monetary policy cannot be based on data produced by donors who have a vested interest in keeping you dependent.

All of this requires a complete shift in mental paradigm. We must stop thinking of African development as a problem of foreign aid and start thinking of it as a problem of regained sovereignty. Aid never develops. It perpetuates the dependence of the recipient and the domination of the donor. Only by controlling one’s own currency, one’s own sovereign credit, and one’s own economic policy can a people decide its own destiny without asking permission from Paris, Berlin, or Washington. What power does not have its own sovereign currency? None. Currency is therefore a fundamental pillar of power that must be controlled.

History waits for no one. The world is reorganizing itself before our very eyes at breakneck speed. China is building its roads, ports, and corridors to Africa with a strategic coherence that the West criticizes – while being unable to offer its own equivalent. Russia is forging alliances and demonstrating that an alternative to the Western system is viable. The Gulf powers – the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran – are investing massively in African agriculture, finance, and infrastructure with discreet yet remarkably effective efficiency. The West, meanwhile, wavers between moral condescension, geopolitical panic, and imperial nostalgia.

In this major global reshuffling – the most profound since the end of the Cold War – Africa faces a historic choice. It can continue to be a playground for the ambitions of others, a resource deposit whose added value evaporates abroad, a captive market for the subsidized exports of the powers that plundered it yesterday and now assist it. Or it can become what it should have been since 1960: a player.

A recurring theme in the assassination and poisoning of African leaders

Sékou Touré was right. Nkrumah was right. Sankara was right. Lumumba was right. They were assassinated, overthrown, liquidated – often by African hands, but always with sponsors, funding, and motives that came from elsewhere. You don’t eliminate what is harmless. You don’t assassinate insignificant ideas. The very fact that they were killed proves they were right. And it proves that those who killed them knew exactly what they were doing.

This is why the barbaric and cowardly assassination of Muammar Gaddafi can be interpreted, beyond its immediate insurrectionary dimension, as the culmination of a latent confrontation between a sovereigntist, pan-African vision – which he championed, financed, and attempted to institutionalize – and geopolitical balances unwilling to tolerate its strategic implications. This analytical framework, whose scope and foundations deserve to be examined in greater depth in the next article, is a case in point.

A passport. A currency. A voice. The African century cannot be decreed. It must be wrested from existence, just as Guinea wrested itself from De Gaulle’s Franco-African community under the leadership of Sékou Touré in 1958.

African unity is not a romantic fantasy reserved for commemorative speeches. It is an existential threat to those who need disunity to maintain their comfort, access, and domination. A continent of 2.5 billion people, united geographically and economically, speaking with one voice in international forums, controlling its resources and its currency – this continent overturns all power dynamics. It will no longer beg for its trade rights. It will demand them. Furthermore, it will no longer negotiate from a position of structural weakness. It will negotiate as an equal.

It is for this reason – this precise reason and no other – that for sixty years, the same powers that preach African democracy have been sabotaging African integration. Because fragmented democracy can be managed. Because unified sovereignty, on the other hand, cannot be managed. It is a battleground.

The African century begins now. It begins with unity. It begins with the categorical rejection of subjugation. It begins with a passport that says, This land is mine. It begins with a currency that says: this wealth is mine.

Or it doesn’t start.

 

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University

NEO: The Day the World Moved On: Phil Butler: 29-06-2026: ***********

Economy The Day the World Moved On Phil Butler, June 29, 2026 While the West argues over yesterday’s world, much of the Global South is quietly building tomorrow’s. The Day the World Moved On HERAKLION, Crete — The cafe owner here doesn’t watch CNN anymore. He checks Al Jazeera for regional news, follows Chinese state media for economic developments, and laughs when he reads Western predictions about Russia’s collapse. “They’ve been predicting this for three years,” he tells me, as he hands me a cappuccino and a cheese pie. “Maybe they should accept that Russia is not collapsing and move on.” He’s not pro-Putin. He’s not anti-West. He’s just tired of being lectured about democracy by countries that freeze assets, impose unilateral sanctions, and express shock when everyone stops playing along. If Vice President J.D. Vance wonders why everyone seems unimpressed, well, this is the new reality that Washington and Brussels still refuse to acknowledge. The world didn’t end when the unipolar moment died. It just got more interesting. The Sanctions That Backfired For the architects of the postwar order, the rise of a multipolar world represents more than a geopolitical adjustment; it is a profound psychological shock As for Kremlin policy, the narrative was simple: Cripple the Russian economy, force regime change, restore the proper order of things. Three years later, the ruble has stabilized, Russian oil sells at a profit, and Moscow has pivoted east so completely that Western analysts are running out of ways to explain why their predictions keep failing. “I used to buy German cars,” says Evgeny, a TV producer who became a friend over a decade ago. “Now I buy Chinese. The German ones were better, but they’re not available anymore. And you know what? The Chinese ones are fine.” This is the story of sanctions in microcosm. They hurt, yes. But they also force adaptation. And Russia has adapted by becoming more self-sufficient, more integrated with Asia, and less dependent on Western markets that were already closing anyway. The West expected Russia to collapse. Instead, Russia diversified. Expected Moscow to beg for relief. Instead, the Russians built new trade routes, new financial systems, and new partnerships that don’t require SWIFT approval. “The genius of Western strategy,” a Russian economist tells me with a straight face, “is that it taught us we don’t need you.” The Dragon in the Room The leadership in BEIJING, while Washington debates whether China is a “strategic competitor” or an “existential threat,” made moves to quietly become the trading partner of choice for most of the developing world. The numbers tell the story: China is Africa’s largest trading partner. The Belt and Road Initiative has built ports, railways, and highways across three continents. The yuan is being used for more international transactions. Chinese universities are attracting students from the Global South. But it’s not just about economics. It’s about respect. “They don’t lecture us,” says a Kenyan businessman I know who deals with both Chinese and Western companies. The Germans, the Americans, the British — they always have conditions. Human rights this, democracy that, governance standards the other thing. The Chinese just ask, “What do you want to build?” This is the appeal of the Chinese model: No moralizing. No preconditions. Just business. Is it perfect? No. Does it come with its own problems? Absolutely. Debt traps are real. Environmental standards are often lower. Labor practices are questionable sometimes. But for countries tired of being told they must reform before they can develop, China offers an alternative: Develop first, reform later. Or don’t reform at all. Your choice. It’s your country. The Persian Paradox The maximum pressure campaign against Iran has been running for over four decades: sanctions, isolation, covert operations, threats of military action. Every tool in the Western arsenal has been deployed to change the Islamic Republic’s behavior. Result: Iran still exists. More ironic than that: Iran has become more self-sufficient, more integrated with Russia and China, and more capable of projecting power regionally despite the restrictions. “Iranian engineers have learned to build everything ourselves,” says a Tehran University professor. “When you can’t import it, you invent it. When you can’t buy it, you make it.” This is the paradox of maximum pressure. Rather than forcing capitulation, it often accelerates innovation and self-reliance. Iran has built sophisticated drone and missile capabilities, alternative financial mechanisms, and deeper partnerships with Russia and China despite decades of sanctions. Once again, the expectation in Washington was collapse. The reality was adaptation. The African Awakening Focus now on Addis Ababa. The African Union’s admission to the G20 wasn’t just a diplomatic victory; it was a recognition of reality: Africa is no longer a continent to be managed. It’s a continent to be reckoned with. With a population of 1.4 billion and growing, immense critical minerals and an able workforce, and an expanding middle class, African nations were shackled by the West. For decades, Africa was told to wait its turn. Implement structural adjustment programs. Fight corruption. Improve governance. Then, maybe, development would come. China didn’t wait. Russia didn’t wait. Now Africa isn’t waiting either. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has been unapologetically blunt on this front, telling Western diplomats that Africa will not be coerced into adopting Europe’s geopolitical enemies as its own. “We are not going to be dictated to,” Kagame has made clear, pointing out the glaring hypocrisy of a West that demands African alignment on Ukraine while ignoring African priorities on trade, security, and development. For Kagame and a growing chorus of African heads of state, the calculus is brutally simple: the West offers lectures and conditional aid, while Beijing builds railways and Moscow provides security without asking for a lesson in democracy. The Dollar’s Slow Decline The US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, but look at current trends. There are more countries trading in local currencies, more central banks buying gold, and more nations are diversifying away from dollar-denominated assets. Everyone questions whether it’s safe to keep wealth in an asset that can be frozen with a phone call from Washington. The weaponization of the global financial system has triggered a massive, quiet exodus. Sovereign wealth funds and central banks, particularly in the Global South, are no longer just diversifying their portfolios; they are actively de-risking from the West. They are accelerating their shift toward tangible, politically independent stores of value. Why? Because the freezing of Russian assets proved that holding US Treasuries isn’t a neutral investment; it’s a conditional one. The emerging markets are building a financial lifeboat, hedging against the ultimate risk: a phone call from the US Treasury Department that turns their national savings into digital dust. What the West Missed While Washington obsessed over great-power competition and Brussels lectured the developing world about values, Beijing quietly built ports, railways, power plants, and commercial relationships. While London imposed sanctions, Moscow cultivated new markets across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The West assumed the rest of the world would wait for permission to develop. Instead, it simply built another system. The numbers don’t lie. The BRICS+ now represents a larger share of global GDP (PPP) than the G7, China trades more with the Global South than the US does, and African nations receive more infrastructure investment from China than from Western sources. This isn’t anti-Western ideology. It’s pragmatic diversification. Western democracies claim to uphold sovereignty, and the rules-based order. But when countries exercise their freedom by choosing different partners, the West calls it “authoritarian influence.” When nations follow different rules, the West calls it “undermining the order.” When democracies make independent choices, Washington, Brussels, and London imposes sanctions. The message is clear: You’re free to choose, as long as you choose us. This is why the Global South isn’t buying what the West is selling. Not because they love authoritarianism. Not because they hate democracy. But because they remember what the West did when it had unchecked power. They remember the coups. The invasions. The sanctions that killed civilians. The promises of development that never materialized. The lectures about governance from countries whose own systems are deeply dysfunctional. The Future Rome didn’t fall in a day. It declined over generations, with each generation insisting the empire remained indispensable. America increasingly finds itself in that familiar position: still expecting the world to follow its lead, still surprised when countries politely decline. For the architects of the postwar order, the rise of a multipolar world represents more than a geopolitical adjustment; it is a profound psychological shock. Institutions once assumed to be permanent now face viable alternatives. The monopoly over finance, trade, diplomacy, and even the rules themselves is slowly eroding. Stripped of uncontested dominance, Western governments increasingly rely on sanctions, financial coercion, and geopolitical pressure to preserve an order that much of the world has already begun to outgrow. Yet every new sanction, every frozen reserve, every attempt to weaponize the existing system encourages countries to build another one. The unipolar moment did not simply fade away. It was dismantled by nations that discovered they no longer needed permission to prosper. The West can choose to compete in that new world as one influential power among many, or it can continue insisting that history stopped sometime around 1995. History, however, rarely waits for anyone. Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books

NEO: The US War on Iran Continues: Brian Berledtic: 03-07-2026: *************

 

The US War on Iran Continues

Brian Berletic, July 03, 2026

The US continues to playact diplomacy with Iran regarding the latest “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) signed, then immediately violated by the US, renegotiated, and supposedly agreed upon again — using the pause in all-out war to carefully shape the battlefield ahead of what will inevitably be another round of large-scale aggression.

In the interim, the US continues striking at Iran and its allies across the region at will.

This process takes place within the context of US policy papers for years, admitting that diplomacy in and of itself would be used against Iran to create a pretext for war rather than be used as a means of preventing it.

The US has implemented precisely this policy through multiple instances of the US deliberately betraying diplomatic processes, including the violation of the so-called “Nuclear Deal” (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) and two back-to-back US decapitation strikes carried out in the middle of US-Iranian “negotiations” between 2025 and 2026.

These most recent chapters of US duplicity follow decades of war aimed at West Asia, imposing US domination over the region and slowly encircling and isolating Iran — both through interference, terrorism, and military aggression aimed at Iran itself, as well as at Iran’s network of allies.

US policy papers have long noted Iran’s regional network of allies as key to its national security policy, even specifically describing it in terms of defensive and retaliatory capabilities.

Only time will tell if the rest of the world is prepared for the effort and energy required for this transition, or if complacency and short-sightedness prevail, allowing the US to persist in its pursuit of power and profit at the cost of not only the world abroad, but also the vast majority of Americans at home

One such paper, the RAND Corporation’s 2009 “Dangerous But Not Omnipotent: Exploring the Reach and Limitations of Iranian Power in the Middle East,” under a section titled “Iran Pursues a Multifaceted Regional Strategy Marked by Strengths and Limitations,” explains:

“Iran fields a weak conventional force. Iranian leaders have long trumpeted their shift to an asymmetric strategy of homeland defense that would exact intolerable costs from an invader. Much of this rests on notions of “mosaic defense,” partisan warfare, and popular mobilization of Basiji auxiliaries.”

And that:

“Iran has limited leverage over so-called proxy groups. To compensate for its conventional inferiority, Iran has long provided financial and military support to a variety of non-state Islamist groups. According to Revolutionary Guard doctrine, this “peripheral strategy” is intended to give strategic depth to Iran’s homeland defense, taking the fight deep into the enemy’s camp. In the cases of Hamas and Hezbollah, this strategy also buys Iran legitimacy among Arab publics who are frustrated with their regimes’ seemingly status quo approach. In effect, Tehran is being “more Arab than the Arabs” on issues such as Palestine.

In supporting major Shi’ite militant groups in Iraq and Lebanon, Tehran may expect a degree of reciprocity. This is particularly the case in the event of a U.S. strike, in which Iran might expect these groups to act unflinchingly as retaliatory agents.”

Thus, US policymakers are fully aware that Iranian support for organizations like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, or the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq is defensive in nature rather than an irrational, aggressive, expansionist policy of coercion or even “terrorism” as US political theater depicts it amid the process of selling US wars of aggression against Iran to the American and wider global public.

This also means that US policymakers are keenly aware that in order to isolate and undermine Iran itself, it needs to undermine or completely eliminate this strategic depth Iran has created across the region first.

And this is precisely what has driven US policy in the region regarding Iran for at least the past 26 years, including US war, occupation, and proxy war in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, as well as Syria.

It is also at the heart of continued aggression against Iran—mistaken by many as a “failed regime change” war, is instead the continued chipping away of Iran and its network of alliances in the region, all while advancing US policies far beyond the region.

Throughout the 21st century, the US has either attacked these Iranian allies directly or through its network of proxies in the region, including Israel and extremist groups, via Washington’s Persian Gulf and Turkish proxies. The US-backed war of aggression by Israel against Lebanon in 2006 and the renewed invasion this year bookend the war waged against Yemen with mixed results and the final toppling of Iran’s close ally, Syria, in 2024.

A look at a map of the region from 2000 to 2026 shows the US slowly enveloping and eliminating Iran’s alliance network and now waging direct war against Iran itself.

This reality is likely why Iran insisted any ceasefire between the US and Iran must also include ceasefires against Iran’s network of allies in the region — specifically Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is also likely why when the US, through Israel, continued waging a war of aggression against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran suspended elements of the MOU.

Anything less would equate to providing the US with a frozen front against Iran — allowing the US to rearm and reorganize its forces and strategies — while continuing to erode Iran’s regional asymmetric defense strategy, ultimately giving the US an additional advantage ahead of what is inevitable, larger-scale hostilities provoked by the US against Iran in the near to intermediate future.

Playacting for Peace While Managing Malicious War

At face value, the notion of the US making demands of Iran in the first place runs contrary to international law. The US — located in North America in the Northern/Western hemispheres — thousands of kilometers from Iran and West Asia (also referred to as the Middle East) — has no legitimate interests or “national security” concerns in West Asia or regarding Iran.

Boasts that the US is “energy independent” only further undermine any claim by the US that West Asia’s affairs somehow translate into legitimate US interests.

Claims that Iran has targeted and killed Americans for “47 years” omit the fact that those Americans were US military forces operating closer to Iran than the US’ own shores amid serial illegal invasions, occupations, and other unprovoked, indefensible military interventions in the region.

As with all US pretexts for launching illegal wars of aggression, the actual “evidence” Iran was responsible for these attacks is threadbare.

Similarly, claims that “Iran” was behind a supposed assassination attempt on US President Donald Trump himself are likewise baseless — predicated on claims by the supposed suspect that Iran directed him to carry out the attempt — but no actual evidence exists suggesting these claims are true.

Mirroring the US sanctioning, undermining, subversion, and eventual invasion and occupation of Iraq, likewise predicated on now admittedly and deliberately false pretexts, the US seeks to expand its unwarranted illegal occupation and control of West Asia — half a world away from America’s own shores — with little effort to mask the true purpose for doing so.

While US politicians and policymakers repeat claims of Iran “killing” Americans and pursuing “nuclear weapons,” there have been increasing public admissions that subordinating or toppling Iran directly serves the US goal of encircling and containing China as well as dismantling the multipolar world order China and its allies propose as an alternative to the current US-dominated unipolar world order.

Beyond Iran and West Asia: Energy Dominance Over Asia

Control of West Asia would allow the US to throttle energy exports to both China and the rest of Asia, placing pressure on China to scramble to replace up to half of its total energy imports and place the rest of Asia under increased energy dependence on the US itself.

Under the teetering MOU, the US has lifted its own blockade of Iranian ports and is supposedly lifting sanctions on Iranian energy exports. While it is tempting to interpret this as a “retreat” from blockading China and the rest of Asia, it should be pointed out that between 18-20% of all energy production in the Persian Gulf has been disrupted or destroyed by the US war of aggression on Iran, requiring weeks, months, and in some cases a year or more to bring back online.

This alone will continue to feed the growing energy crisis precipitated by the February 2026 US war even if all aspects of the current MOU are upheld. At any moment of Washington’s choosing, it itself or through its Israeli proxies can reignite hostilities, striking at and undo any progress made in bringing that 18-20% disrupted or destroyed energy production back online, or incur even greater region-wide disruptions or destruction.

The US — while announcing a drawdown of its own blockade on Iranian ports — continues to disrupt maritime shipping elsewhere around the globe through a blockade on Cuba and continued interdiction operations targeting Russian energy exports via European naval operations as well as maritime drone strikes on Russian ships attributed to Ukraine but admitted by the New York Times to be organized and overseen by the US intelligence community and military.

Again — at any time of Washington’s choosing — Iranian maritime shipping can be targeted and disrupted again, either at similar levels as before or at an even more aggressive level than previously this year.

The US demonstrated the ability to not only seize ships anywhere between the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Malacca in the Asia-Pacific, but also the ability to target and disable ships using anti-shipping missiles fired by US warships and missiles fired by US warplanes operating across the region, but just beyond the reach of Iran’s anti-air and anti-ship capabilities. Should the US desire to do so, it could simply expand the number of ships it targets and disables even if it lacks the ability to expand the number of ships it seizes with boarding parties.

Managing the level at which the US disrupted or destroyed energy production across the region or maritime shipping of energy out of the region was pivotal in managing market prices and the emerging economic crisis the US deliberately precipitated with its war of aggression. The US created enough disruption to force nations across Asia to sign long-term contracts for US LNG exports otherwise inexplicably built up over recent years for demand that didn’t yet exist.

Some of these projects even cited “contested waterways” as a selling point as recently as 2025, despite the Strait of Hormuz only being threatened and closed as of 2026.

But the US stopped short of creating a catastrophic collapse or crisis that would prompt nations into taking emergency measures that might enable them to protect themselves not only against the disruption of energy exports from West Asia, but also America’s attempts to exploit them.

Thus, the US is conducting a “controlled demolition” of both West Asia’s capacity to supply Asia with energy and the economies of Asia depending on this energy, causing enough damage to gradually shift dependency away from West Asia and toward the US, without triggering a unified front against the US itself and its upending of global stability.

If the US Can’t Rise to Meet the Multipolar World, It will Drag it Down to Its Level

While many analysts point out correctly the US has nowhere near enough energy production capacity to replace West Asia’s energy exports — just as it has nowhere near enough energy to meet all of Europe’s needs — reducing overall access to energy for both Europe and Asia and the subsequent deindustrialization that is following fulfills Washington’s most immediate challenge: how to maintain primacy over a world rapidly outpacing the US in terms of industry, innovation, and military power.

By throttling access to energy for Europe, Asia, and other regions of the world, the US is hoping to create artificial energy scarcity, triggering an inevitable process of economic reversal, deindustrialization, and overall geopolitical anemia worldwide.

The US is incapable of competing with just China alone head-to-head fairly and in open markets, falling behind in virtually all metrics despite aggressive tariffs, sanctions, bans, and information operations all aimed at giving the US an advantage over China. Its ability to compete and maintain dominance over the entire world — all factors being equal — is a fantasy.

Thus, more aggressive means are being pursued — means by which past empires have likewise maintained hegemony over vastly larger geographical regions and populations — through dividing and weakening others, thus avoiding the necessity of competition altogether.

As long as the rising multipolar world continues allowing the US to target and undermine nations one-by-one without creating a unified front against the disruptive, predatory geopolitics of the US, the US will continue to successfully manage the size and power of the multipolar world and eventually isolate and contain the core nations driving its nascent emergence in the first place.

The US depends on the fact that no single nation — except perhaps China — can challenge the US.

As long as the US maintains its subversion, coercion, and aggression just below the threshold of posing a global threat – focusing on individual states while carefully avoiding escalation with others — the nations of the world will fall short of the unified effort required to fully and finally neutralize the threat US pursuit of primacy poses to the world collectively.

It is possible that — just as with empires in previous centuries — the ruling interests of the world’s nations are too short-sighted and self-serving to cooperate sufficiently to displace US dominance — short of the US creating an obvious and omnipresent threat to all of these nations simultaneously.

The result is a US that will continue to enjoy dominance simply because of insufficient action by the collective world.

Only time will tell if the rest of the world is prepared for the effort and energy required for this transition, or if complacency and short-sightedness prevail, allowing the US to persist in its pursuit of power and profit at the cost of not only the world abroad, but also the vast majority of Americans at home. Iran is only one of several metrics indicating the vector sum of this overall struggle — with Iran’s ability to weather US aggression and confound US ambitions in West Asia signalling multipolarism’s expanse — or the persistence of US primacy in West Asia and its ability to disrupt the rest of the world because of it, signalling multipolarism’s current limits.

 

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

NEO: The end of the American century: Mohamed Lamine Kaba: June 27, 2026

 

Politics

The end of the American century

Mohamed Lamine KABA, June 27, 2026

From Rome to Washington, history is but the graveyard of empires condemned by their own excess; today, the Pax Americana falters under the lucid gaze of a global South ready to rewrite the terms of a new world.

Indeed, from Rome to London, by way of Byzantium and Vienna, all superpowers have shared the same illusion of permanence. Endowed with hegemonic power at a given moment in world history, each believed it held the world for eternity. Each also carried within it, from its zenith, the seeds of its downfall: military hubris, the economic predation of the peripheries, and the inability to reformulate an acceptable global contract. The Pax Romana collapsed under the weight of its overextended legions. The Pax Britannica expired at Suez in 1956, humiliated by its own American creation. The Pax Americana is not exempt from this iron law of history, culminating in Tehran seizing power and burying the illusion of the Pax Judaica. It is dying today under the lucid gaze of a global South that, at last, dares to name the empire.

The American empire carried within itself its own termites, or rather, the seeds of its own destruction: jurisdictional arrogance, the logic of economic predation, and the reflex of proxy wars

The Middle Kingdom… Western

We must call things by their proper names. Pax Americana was not peace. It was an order. An imposed order, codified, sanctified by the victory of 1918, then consolidated on the smoldering ruins of 1945. One hundred and eight years of hegemony. A century in which Washington believed itself to be the center of gravity of the world. This center has now definitively shifted, capsized in the tumultuous waters of the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, forcing Washington to accept an agreement of capitulation towards Tehran.

The collapse did not stem solely from military defeat (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Iran, etc.). It stemmed from the silent accumulation of contradictions. The American empire carried within itself its own termites, or rather, the seeds of its own destruction: jurisdictional arrogance, the logic of economic predation, and the reflex of proxy wars. These three pillars, once sources of power, became accelerators of decay.

Extraterritoriality, or the law as a weapon of war

American law does not stop at American borders. This is the great anomaly of the system. Since the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, reinforced by post-9/11 legislation, Washington has methodically transformed its legal system into an instrument of global domination. The extraterritoriality of American law – this self-proclaimed right to sanction, freeze assets, prosecute, and convict foreign sovereign entities – constitutes the most advanced form of contemporary colonialism.

Companies and banks – BNP Paribas, Alstom, Airbus, Huawei, and Deutsche Bank – the list of non-American companies subjected to Washington’s legal inquisition is long. Fines run into billions. Forced buyouts follow. The technique is well-established: destabilize a strategic foreign company, bleed it dry financially, then buy it back at a bargain price. It’s predation disguised as legal procedure. It’s plunder in black robes.

This mechanism was tolerated as long as no one dared name it. Today, it is named, denounced, and systematically circumvented. Economic sovereignty is being reclaimed.

Proxy wars: the Ukrainian model as a revealing example

Ukraine has revealed everything. Not just the brutality of the Russo-Western military clash. It has revealed the inner workings of American power: transforming entire populations into geopolitical cannon fodder. Kyiv has become the ultimate laboratory for this logic. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian deaths to weaken Moscow. Billions were spent on armaments to prolong a conflict that Washington could have ended with the Istanbul Accords in March 2022, and which it deliberately sabotaged. These billions have not produced the desired effect, but the opposite: Russia is stronger than before, and its alliances are just as solid as ever.

This isn’t a theory. It’s a timeline. Boris Johnson arrives in Kyiv on April 9, 2022. Negotiations collapse. Fighting resumes. The United Kingdom bears the mark of Washington’s hand here. Ukraine was not meant to make peace. Ukraine was meant to bleed Russia dry. Zelensky, a willing hostage of a strategy beyond his control, sacrificed his people on the altar of a geostrategic vision forged in the corridors of Langley and the Pentagon.

The result? Russia, though certainly wounded to some extent, held firm. Its economy is holding up. Its army has grown stronger. And the non-Western world watched. It understood.

The Global South is waking up

What Washington did not foresee was the political maturity of the Global South. Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world: these regions have absorbed a hundred years of condescension, sponsored coups, structural debt, and structural adjustment programs – these shock therapies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, the financial armed wings of Pax Americana.

The mechanism was relentless: indebted states, conditional aid, imposed privatizations, and extracted resources. Françafrique was merely the Francophone version of a universal model. Eurafrica, the European counterpart to this model. Everywhere, the same recipes. Everywhere, the same results: corrupt elites, strangled middle classes, young people condemned to exile.

But something has changed. The BRICS+ countries now represent more than 45% of global GDP in purchasing power parity. Dedollarization is progressing. Trade in yuan, rubles, and local currencies is increasing. China has built roads, ports, and hospitals without imposing democratic conditions. Iran, under sanctions for more than forty years, survives and exports. Russia sells its oil to India, China, Africa, and Latin America at reduced prices, and everyone benefits, except Washington.

The surge of solidarity from the Global South is not ideological. It is pragmatic. And Washington doesn’t know how to respond to pragmatism.

Time for a review

The American century ends in 2026 not with a bang, but with a gradual fading away. The symptoms are everywhere. The dollar is losing its status as the undisputed universal reserve currency. NATO is exhausting itself in a war it cannot win. American influence in the Sahel and elsewhere on the continent has evaporated in three years. In the Middle East, Riyadh is negotiating with Tehran under Chinese mediation, unthinkable ten years ago.

The empire was not defeated militarily. It exhausted itself. Through a series of unjustified wars: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, and so on. Through institutionalized lies. Through a double standard erected into a permanent and accepted doctrine.

History is not cruel. It is simply honest. Every hegemony carries within it the seed of its successor. The Pax Britannica collapsed at Suez in 1956. The Pax Americana is fading away in Kyiv, Gaza, Bamako, Caracas, Tehran – everywhere the lie of the “international community” has shown its true face.

Westerners, fearful of the world’s multipolarity, are already claiming that what comes next is not necessarily better or just. But for the Global South, what was leaving was unbearable.

The American century is dead. It doesn’t know it yet. Or rather, it knows it, and that is precisely why it remains so profoundly dangerous.

 

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University

NEO: Putin's Beijing Stopover and the Alliance Trump Couldnt Crack> Salman Rafi Sheikh: 21-05-2026: ********************

 

Politics

Putin’s Beijing Stopover and the Alliance Trump Couldn’t Crack

Salman Rafi Sheikh, May 21, 2026

The back-to-back summits in Beijing revealed not only China’s growing diplomatic confidence but also the emergence of a deeper Sino-Russian axis that increasingly challenges the foundations of the US-led global order.

Donald Trump flew home from Beijing with Boeing orders and a framework label. Forty-eight hours later, Vladimir Putin touched down at the same airport, was greeted by children waving Russian and Chinese flags, and walked into the Great Hall of the People to sign 40 documents and a 47-page joint statement with Xi Jinping. The contrast was not accidental. It was choreographed, and it told the world precisely where Beijing’s deeper loyalties lie.

The Partnership That Pressure Could Not Break

The Russia-China “no limits” partnership was proclaimed in Beijing in February 2022. The declaration was sweeping: friendship with “no forbidden areas” and cooperation unconstrained by changes in the international environment. It has been codified in a language that appeared, in retrospect, to have anticipated Western backlash and preemptively dismissed it.

The “unlimited friendship” Putin reinforced in Beijing this week is not static; it is a platform, and it is being built out mutually and proactively.

What followed was four years of sustained Western pressure exerted via sanctions, export controls, efforts to impose diplomatic isolation, and persistent demands that Beijing choose sides. Beijing selected, quietly and consistently, to deepen the relationship instead. Bilateral trade between Russia and China reached approximately $228 billion in 2025. Russia’s oil exports to China grew by 35% in the first quarter of 2026 alone, cementing Moscow’s position as one of Beijing’s largest energy suppliers. China became Russia’s top trading partner after Russia began its military operation in Ukraine to push back NATO’s expansionism — a lifeline that Western sanctions tried and failed to sever. Xi has described energy trade as a “stabilizing pillar”of the relationship, and this week pledged to accelerate cooperation in artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and advanced technology. The 2001 Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation — the legal backbone of Sino-Russian relations — was also formally extended during Putin’s visit, signaling that the institutional architecture of the partnership is being deliberately renewed for the decades ahead, not merely maintained.

What Putin Achieved in Beijing

Putin’s two-day visit was substantive in ways that distinguish it sharply from the more ceremonial Trump summit that preceded it. The two leaders signed 20 agreements covering trade, infrastructure, scientific research, technology cooperation, cultural industries, and talent development. The Kremlin’s own count, which includes interdepartmental and interagency documents, puts the total closer to 40 documents. A joint statement on military cooperation was also concluded — notably, at a moment when Western governments have been pressing Beijing to distance itself from Russia’s military machine.

Alongside the agreements, Putin and Xi issued a joint declaration on a “new type of international relations” and the construction of a multipolar world order — language with obvious implications for the US-led system both countries have spent years contesting. Xi declared China-Russia ties were at a “historic high,” adding that the two countries should work together to build a “more equitable system of global governance.” Putin, for his part, invited Xi to visit Russia in 2027 and committed to attending China’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit later this year, ensuring the rhythm of high-level contact remains unbroken.

Perhaps most pointed was Xi’s framing of the broader moment. “The international landscape is undergoing profound changes, and the world faces the danger of sliding back into the law of the jungle,” he said during bilateral talks, presenting the China-Russia partnership as a stabilizing counterforce to precisely the kind of unilateral, transactional politics that Washington now embodies. This was not diplomatic boilerplate. It was a direct indictment — delivered the week after Trump’s visit — of an American foreign policy that China holds responsible for pushing the international order towards the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ and away from rules.

The World Taking Shape in Beijing’s Image

The events of this week are less a diplomatic episode than a structural signal. It would not be wrong to say that these events come with long consequences on a global scale. Beijing has now, within the span of a single week, hosted the leaders of the two most powerful rival blocs on earth, welcomed each with equivalent ceremony, and emerged from both summits with its strategic position enhanced. But these events have also shown, unmistakably, that a key pillar of this enhanced position is Moscow, not Washington.

The Sino-Russian axis is no longer merely a partnership of convenience; rather, it is becoming an institutionalized alternative architecture. Its density is growing: financial, technological, military, and diplomatic. The more that architecture expands, the less leverage any single Western visit or sanction regime can exercise over either Beijing or Moscow. There is little denying that, as far as China is concerned, it has consolidated its position to a status where it is increasingly evident that Great Power politics must now go through Beijing — a mega-shift from the post-Cold War era in which Washington set the terms.

Where this leads is the defining geopolitical question of the coming decade. A Sino-Russian axis deepening its technological cooperation, expanding its energy interdependence, increasing military coordination, and jointly advocating for a multipolar order will exert gravitational pull on states across the Global South already skeptical of American reliability. The “unlimited friendship” Putin reinforced in Beijing this week is not static; it is a platform, and it is being built out mutually and proactively. It is a platform that is not exclusive. It offers seats to those willing to support a new world order. The world that emerges from it will be less legible, and less hospitable to the so-called rules-based order Washington claimed to have been ruling since the end of the Second World War. While hardly any “rules” were followed, e.g., when the US invaded Iraq, that order has still vanished. Israel’s US-backed genocide of the Palestinians and Washington’s war on Iran are its two most recent—and most powerful—examples.

 

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs

NEO: Taiwan as the Central issue of Trump's visit to China: Vladimir Terehov: 29-05-2026: ***************

 

Politics

Taiwan as the Central Issue of Donald Trump’s Visit to the People’s Republic of China

Vladimir Terehov, May 29, 2026

The visit of US President Donald Trump to the People’s Republic of China on 13–15 May, together with his talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, constituted a single landmark event in contemporary world politics.

Among its various accompanying aspects, the central one was determined by the Taiwan issue. It should once again be reiterated that this issue represents the principal challenge in relations between the world’s two leading global powers and, consequently, to the prospects for positive developments in the international situation as a whole. The issue is also becoming a source of an increasingly multifaceted split within the American establishment itself, which is likewise acquiring global significance given the current role of the United States on the world stage.

On Fundamentally Different Approaches to the Taiwan Issue in the United States

This particular split first manifested itself at the turn of the 2000s and 2010s during ostensibly academic debates between “neoconservatives” and “neo-isolationists” on US foreign policy. Today, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, whose divergences are particularly noticeable in their rhetoric regarding Taiwan, could be considered as the public representatives of these two ideologies, albeit in a very rough way.

In US–Chinese relations, the principal — though certainly not the one and only — reason for its renewed relevance is precisely the Taiwan issue

It should be noted that during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, the interests of the “neocons” were represented by Mike Pompeo, Rubio’s predecessor as Secretary of State. Also belonging to the same camp was National Security Adviser John Bolton, although the 45th President of the United States dismissed him before the end of his tenure. Bolton openly advocated abandoning the nearly half-century-long policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding Taiwan and replacing it with “strategic clarity,” that is, giving relations with the island the character of ordinary interstate relations.

In such a case, there would be no need for informational tightrope walking during visits by American officials to Taiwan, as it was the case during Nancy Pelosi’s notorious trip, nor for constructing “workarounds” for Taiwanese leaders travelling abroad. Nor would there be any need to justify to Beijing the sale of another batch of weapons to Taiwan: “An independent state requested them, and we sold them. What exactly is the issue?”

Such a hypothetical approach by Washington to the Taiwan question would inevitably further aggravate relations with Beijing, which are already of a high degree of tension. This is beyond the realms of the interests of Donald Trump and his supporters. A key role among these “supporters” is played by American business circles, whose position resides in the following: “We want your political disagreements not to interfere with our profitable business dealings in China.” Beijing, as it seems, shares these views, speaking of “managed and stable competition” between the two powers.

Whereas Mike Pompeo previously and Marco Rubio today, while avoiding Bolton-style public statements on Taiwan, clearly favour preserving the island’s de facto independence for the foreseeable future, with the prospect of eventually consolidating it de jure. At the same time, they rule out the very possibility of any negotiations with Beijing on the matter.

Taiwan as the Main Issue in the “Trump–Xi” Talks

What is worth paying attention to is that American and Chinese experts converged in their assessments of the principal outcomes of the “Trump–Xi” summit, particularly in highlighting its economic component. This could be explained by the stereotypical image of the American president as a “businessman interested in nothing but money.” Allegedly, this is one of the main reasons for the core of his entourage consisting of American business leaders, who indeed held specific negotiations with respective representatives of the Chinese leadership. It would also be reasonable to recall Donald Trump’s principal achievement in relations with China during his first presidency — the conclusion of the so-called “Phase One Agreement”, aimed at launching the process of gradually cutting down on the enormous US trade deficit with China.

However, further development and implementation of the initiative were put paid to by political obstacles, and neither side has ever had any illusions about their existence and the extent of the difficulty in resolving them. The issue resides in the mere necessity to find out a format for relations between the two global powers in which inevitable competition does not provoke either side into resorting to the ultima ratio regum of the Thirty Years’ War era. This time, with catastrophic consequences for the entire world.

This, as it comes across, became the central topic of the “Trump–Xi” negotiations. The Chinese leader referred to it through remarks about the danger of the emerging “Thucydides Trap” in bilateral relations. Notably, this was not the first time he had done so, and he emphasised not only that falling into such a trap is not inevitable, but also that both sides must make efforts to avoid it.

It should be noted that the very revival in 2017 of the “Thucydides Trap” as a concept has been subject to serious criticism due to the reliance on historical analogies, which are often highly questionable and at times somewhat forced. The concept is by no means a law of historical development, yet it frequently reflects certain dangerous realities of contemporary international politics. In US–Chinese relations, the principal — though certainly not the one and only — reason for its renewed relevance is precisely the Taiwan issue.

Taiwan’s Reaction to the US–China Summit: Nervousness and Hope

Even prior to the long-planned and repeatedly postponed visit of the US president to China, the very prospect of becoming an object of bargaining between the world’s two leading powers caused considerable nervousness within Taiwan’s ruling group. And there were, and still are, substantial reasons for this. These reasons lie not only in the rhetoric of those American advocates of a “grand bargain” with Washington’s principal foreign policy rival, within the framework of which Taiwan could potentially be sacrificed as an insignificant detail.

Thus, the so-called “Trump faction” continues, to varying degrees, to delay the implementation of two American arms packages for Taiwan with a total value of 25 billion dollars. Immediately after returning from China, President Trump, in an interview with Fox News, while giving a positive assessment of the results of the visit, spoke quite clearly against any form of provoking China.

Taipei’s official reaction to this, as expected, was somewhat submissive and nervous. However, the principal support for Taiwanese separatists once again came from the United States Congress, and on a bipartisan basis. Amidst the zeal displayed by outspoken supporters of Taiwanese independence in the United States, it is reasonable to pinpoint another unsuccessful attempt by Taipei to connect to the Starlink system. It should be recalled that the owner of the system, Elon Musk, was part of the delegation accompanying Donald Trump during his visit to China.

As for Chairman Xi’s position on Taiwan, as voiced during his talks with President Trump, it contained a clear message to the island’s current leadership: “Keep quiet and refrain from making any sudden moves; we shall see what to do with you later.” The response from Taiwan was no less nervous, accompanied by remarks from President Lai Ching-te that Taiwan is not part of the People’s Republic of China.

In conclusion, commenting on the recent US–China summit, it should be noted that its outcomes were received in a generally restrained yet positive manner. Given the current situation on the global stage, which increasingly resembles a “madhouse”, this is already no small matter. Such an assessment is driven less by certainty than by hopes for a non-catastrophic way out of the current situation – the outcome that the author of the article pins his own hopes on as well.

 

Vladimir Terekhov, expert on Asia-Pacific issues