At the two-day New Silk Road international forum in Beijing, President Xi Jinping set out to establish China as the flagship of a new, benign trade-focussed world order. This was, said Xi, a “new model of win-win and cooperation” that will prevail over gunboat diplomacy. At the start of the conference, China’s state broadcaster Xinhua…
History will record the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing marked the juncture where the 21st century New Silk Roads assumed their full character of Globalization 2.0, or “inclusive globalization,” as defined by President Xi Jinping in Davos earlier this year. I have dealt with the monumental stakes here and here. Terminology, of course, remains a minor…
In contrast to sending positive messages toward Russia during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump never minced words when it came to China, threatening to label it a “currency manipulator”, accusing it of “stealing” American jobs, and talking to Taiwan’s president which seemed to put into doubt the long-standing “One China” policy pursued by the United…
China’s Belt and Road summit has begun—and its outcome will put another nail in the petrodollar’s coffin Marcellus’ famous one-liner to Horatio—“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”—could be updated in 2017 as “something is rotten in the state of the Union”. Does anyone else find it odd that one of the broadest geo-economic projects in recent…
Let’s cut to the chase. China’s new ‘Silk Road’ initiative is the only large-scale, multilateral development project that the 21st century has seen so far. There is no counter-offer from the West. Which is why the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, starting this Sunday in Beijing, is being set up as a…
Pakistan’s decision to participate in the Saudi-led Islamic Military Alliance (IMA) certainly has attracted criticism from Iran, and it was perhaps the reason why Tehran initially reacted harshly to the border attack from Balochistan, Pakistan’s western province, which killed at least 10 Iranian border guards in April. However, the fallout from the attack appears to…
