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The distribution of power and influence among the world’s major nations has been disturbed ever since February 24, 2022.  Russia, China, the United States and Europe are in state of disequilibrium that makes it difficult to foresee the consequences of ordinary, previously established strategies of foreign policy as practiced by the major nations. 

To state the case in its most simple form, statesmen cannot predict what will follow from even simple and ordinary policy actions that in the past were enacted in the ordinary course of international relations. Just as in finance, uncertainty results in mistakes and losses of a kind that are costly and obscure to even the most sophisticated practitioner-policymaker.

The causes have been several. First was the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Second was the partial mutiny in Russia led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who controls the private army called the Wagner Group.

While some members of that military group are now in Belarus, since 2017 as many as 5,000 of then have been used as an active foreign-policy instrument for Russia, operating and earning “protection money” in a half-dozen nations in Africa, where they have been active mercenaries. 

Third is the tilt toward, if not support for, at least an absence of criticism of, Russia on the part of China.

Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the European Union, says China’s support for both Europe and Russia is “endless.” Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, stated that countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union may not be fully independent because “there is no international agreement to materialize their status as a sovereign country.” 

An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, said China is not a “major political player” so long as it supports Russia’s explanation of the invasion.

The events listed above have altered the effectiveness of a number of foreign-policy practices on the parts of various players. Several other students of policy have noted major changes. I will here list some effects noted by others, and then make my own contribution by drawing attention to what might be a small, but still potentially significant, event along with its possible consequences.  

I suggest this apparently small factor might be exploited by one or another daring and imaginative national leader in a way that could bring about a universally celebrated breakthrough in the general state of worldwide foreign-policy affairs.

I will write about the Wagner Group’s temptation to interfere with the smooth functioning and future profitability of China’s investments in Africa, and how the US could unwisely use the ensuing situation to restore to itself some of its former influence on the “Dark Continent.”

Other strategic thinkers have noted that the collection of events under discussion have caused Russian President Vladimir Putin to lose some of his previous reputation as an astute military leader who, for example, was able to restore Russia’s Sebastopol seaport (it was made the Black Sea home port for the Russian fleet in 1804 after Alexander I fortified the town), recapture Georgia, and cause the Baltic nations to worry about their sovereignty.

Moreover, when the Wagner forces began their march toward the Kremlin, there was no outpouring of domestic support for Putin’s cause. 

China’s ability to create a certain amount of trade and investment antagonism and jealousy between the US and Europe, and soften the impact the American anti-China strategies, was much diminished as the Europeans “rallied around” Ukraine and showed their disapproval of China’s solidarity with the Russian invaders.

That seems to have taken away some of President Xi Jinping’s reputation as an astute player, able to offset American sanctions by playing off the Western nations against one another. 

These points have been made by others.

An unnoticed subtle problem is raised by noting that the Wagner Group has a foothold in Africa. Wagner is almost certainly cut off from its line of financial support previously supplied by Russian entities controlled by Putin. But Africa is full of economic opportunities available to players who are tough enough to demand payoffs for “good behavior.”

Unfortunately for China, money, gold, diamonds, valuable tradable commodities, raw materials and political influence extracted from African entities that are connected to China by way of investments, military agreements, trade contracts and other forms of the New Brand of tightly focused neocolonialism invented by China’s international players, will require payments to Wagner out of sources that until recently have been totally devoted to serving the interests of their Asian investors.

Enter the USA 

American policy toward China has become bipartisan and aggressive to the point of near-hostility. US policymakers may very well see the Wagner forces as friendly insofar as they may become a tactical policy tool able to irritate, perhaps to frustrate China’s need for commodity inputs essential for future economic progress inside China’s industrial infrastructure. 

Moreover, since 2009 China has superseded the US as Africa’s main investor, de facto mentor if not neocolonial influencer.

The radical but naive American “experts” for whom President Joe Biden is a kind of hand puppet, made out of old socks and faded ribbons, do not think in sophisticated, long-run terms. 

They are likely to press ahead with existing anti-China policies, and eschew any idea that suggests that offering some easing of the cross-Pacific state of tension might induce China to pressure Russia, pushing it toward something like a ceasefire in Ukraine.

And so I come to my suggested way to use the African situation as a hidden way for America to help China with an irksome problem. In recognition of that help, the Chinese might see some kind of payoff for them in the case where they, at a minimum, cease their implicit support for the Russian invasion. 

China could push for a Korea-style armistice in Ukraine, overseen or at least promoted by Beijing, as a way to restore some of its influence over Europe, and put an end to the self-inflicted exile from international events that currently limits China’s scope for action in trade relations. 

Perhaps it is an idea too classically geopolitical, too Machiavellian, for President Xi and his cohort. But it has the potential to change today’s loss of international presence for China, while it also makes it possible for Xi to establish himself as very much the senior partner in respect of influence along his 4,250-kilometer-long border with his demoted neighbor.

A China-managed Ukranian armistice will produce its own set of uncertainties, and a changed international order. Perhaps it is only a 19th-century small-l liberal idea (that diplomacy is better than war), but after all, as measured by the mortality stats, the 19th century looks peaceable compared with numbers for the 20th, and its advocate, illiberal hardliner Friedrich Nietzsche.

Tom Velk is a libertarian-leaning American economist who writes and lives in Montreal, Canada. He has served as visiting professor at the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve system, at the US Congress and as the chairman of the North American Studies program at McGill University and a professor in that university’s Economics Department.

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The cracks, long expected, are beginning to show. At the NATO summit in Vilnius, frictions between members and Ukraine boiled over. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, angered that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization refused to set a timeline for Kiev to join the alliance, called the situation “absurd.”

That rare public criticism drew an immediate response from the two countries that have offered the most support. First Britain’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, pointed out that “people want to see a bit of gratitude,” and noted that Ukrainian politicians had a habit of asking for one type of weapon, being given it, and immediately starting to ask for another type.

Speaking later, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan echoed Wallace’s message, saying he felt “the American people do deserve a degree of gratitude.”

Zelensky, clearly chastened and surprised at the response, told reporters later that day that Ukraine was grateful.

A rare spat, then, after more than a year of a bloody and bruising war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has taken an enormous toll on Ukraine, first and foremost, but also on hundreds of millions of people around the world. For those NATO countries that have provided the most money and weapons, the war has resulted in a considerable cost in inflation and the daily cost of living.

That fracturing of the alliance was long predicted and exactly what Russia was counting on in a prolonged war. But these cracks are not what Moscow predicted. Far from being a sign of a fracturing among NATO allies, the cracks are actually a result of the alliance expanding – and taking on a new, more confrontational shape.

The idea that a prolonged war in Ukraine favors Moscow has been around since the start of the invasion; it must have provided some of the baseline calculation for going in. Western countries, no matter how supportive they were initially, would eventually tire, so the theory went, and find it harder to justify the toll the war was taking to their populations.

Broadly, that has happened. The Ukraine war has exacerbated inflation and a concurrent economic crisis across many parts of the West. (In the Global South, the effect has been much more pronounced.) Polls show that European publics are tiring of the war and its effect on the economy – but not by as much as expected.

The unexpected factor has been the political response and the unifying effect the war had, particularly in NATO, an alliance that had been adrift for years. This summit was the moment the change became real.

For the first time in years, members agreed a new comprehensive plan for its future security. The plans, which run to thousands of pages of classified text, are naturally secret, but reports indicate that they cover deployments, new equipment and investment.

In other words, NATO is finally telling its members how much to spend and what to spend it on – something that countries with bigger militaries, such as France and Turkey, have long chafed at.

This realignment of NATO is real, and irreversible in the medium term. Even as late as last autumn it was probably reversible. Had the war ended then, even in an imperfect truce, it’s possible the inertia that has gripped NATO members for two decades could have reasserted itself.

NATO in for the long haul

But now the alliance is committed, with a new military doctrine that emphasizes preparation for a prolonged, grinding, land and air war, conducted across the entirety of the European continent, as opposed to the bounded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

All of that means a new posture on the continent.

The positive side of that posture – from the perspective of the NATO members that will have to carry it out – is that the task is clear.

But the flip side is that NATO members are now starting to think seriously about their future and whether they can defend their countries.

Ukraine is using up vast quantities of weaponry, which, as Wallace pointed out in Vilnius, in essence means Kiev is “persuading countries to give up their own stocks” of weapons.

The most commonly cited example of this is the 155mm howitzer artillery shells that the US gives Ukraine.

Kiev is burning through these at an unsustainable rate – how unsustainable is a military secret, but Ukraine appears to be using more shells in two days, or perhaps 10 days, it hardly matters, as the US can produce in a month. In the long term, that presents a problem, for both Kiev and Washington.

The amount of weaponry given is getting to the point of either/or – either NATO countries have enough for their own defense, or they give Ukraine what it wants. Hence the jitters and irritation that seeped out at the summit.

None of this is good news for Russia, however social media tried to spin the spat. An invasion of Ukraine would have only worked for Russia if it could have been swift – which it turned out not to be – or swiftly forgotten, like the 2014 occupation of Crimea.

It may, however, be good news for Vladimir Putin. An invasion that provoked a complete realignment on the continent would cast Russia into the permanent role of outsider – a role in which Putin is comfortable and which he can sell rather too easily to the Russian public when elections next roll around.

The most consequential NATO summit in decades has seen the alliance take on a new role, one rather too similar to the role it played years ago.

This article was provided by Syndication Bureau, which holds copyright.

Faisal Al Yafai is currently writing a book on the Middle East and is a frequent commentator on international TV news networks. He has worked for news outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC, and reported on the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Follow him on Twitter @FaisalAlYafai.

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Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of the solar system to date. The grand question is whether any of these planets are home to life. To find the answer, astronomers will likely need more powerful telescopes than exist today.

I am an astronomer who studies astrobiology and planets around distant stars. For the last seven years, I have been co-leading a team that is developing a new kind of space telescope that could collect a hundred times more light than the James Webb Space Telescope, the biggest space telescope ever built.

Almost all space telescopes, including Hubble and Webb, collect light using mirrors. Our proposed telescope, the Nautilus Space Observatory, would replace large, heavy mirrors with a novel, thin lens that is much lighter, cheaper and easier to produce than mirrored telescopes.

Because of these differences, it would be possible to launch many individual units into orbit and create a powerful network of telescopes.

The need for larger telescopes

Exoplanets – planets that orbit stars other than the Sun – are prime targets in the search for life. Astronomers need to use giant space telescopes that collect huge amounts of light to study these faint and faraway objects.

Existing telescopes can detect exoplanets as small as Earth. However, it takes a lot more sensitivity to begin to learn about the chemical composition of these planets. Even Webb is just barely powerful enough to search certain exoplanets for clues of life – namely gases in the atmosphere.

The James Webb Space Telescope cost more than US$8 billion and took over 20 years to build. The next flagship telescope is not expected to fly before 2045 and is estimated to cost $11 billion. These ambitious telescope projects are always expensive, laborious and produce a single powerful – but very specialized – observatory.

A new kind of telescope

In 2016, aerospace giant Northrop Grumman invited me and 14 other professors and NASA scientists – all experts on exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life – to Los Angeles to answer one question: What will exoplanet space telescopes look like in 50 years?

In our discussions, we realized that a major bottleneck preventing the construction of more powerful telescopes is the challenge of making larger mirrors and getting them into orbit. To bypass this bottleneck, a few of us came up with the idea of revisiting an old technology called diffractive lenses.

Conventional lenses use refraction to focus light. Refraction is when light changes direction as it passes from one medium to another – it is the reason light bends when it enters water. In contrast, diffraction is when light bends around corners and obstacles. A cleverly arranged pattern of steps and angles on a glass surface can form a diffractive lens.

The first such lenses were invented by the French scientist Augustin-Jean Fresnel in 1819 to provide lightweight lenses for lighthouses. Today, similar diffractive lenses can be found in many small-sized consumer optics – from camera lenses to virtual reality headsets.

Thin, simple diffractive lenses are notorious for their blurry images, so they have never been used in astronomical observatories. But if you could improve their clarity, using diffractive lenses instead of mirrors or refractive lenses would allow a space telescope to be much cheaper, lighter and larger.

A thin, high-resolution lens

After the meeting, I returned to the University of Arizona and decided to explore whether modern technology could produce diffractive lenses with better image quality. Lucky for me, Thomas Milster – one of the world’s leading experts on diffractive lens design – works in the building next to mine. We formed a team and got to work.

Over the following two years, our team invented a new type of diffractive lens that required new manufacturing technologies to etch a complex pattern of tiny grooves onto a piece of clear glass or plastic. The specific pattern and shape of the cuts focuses incoming light to a single point behind the lens.

The new design produces a near-perfect quality image, far better than previous diffractive lenses.

Because it is the surface texture of the lens that does the focusing, not the thickness, you can easily make the lens bigger while keeping it very thin and lightweight. Bigger lenses collect more light, and low weight means cheaper launches to orbit – both great traits for a space telescope.

In August 2018, our team produced the first prototype, a 2-inch (5-centimeter) diameter lens. Over the next five years, we further improved the image quality and increased the size. We are now completing a 10-inch (24-cm) diameter lens that will be more than 10 times lighter than a conventional refractive lens would be.

The power of diffraction

This new lens design makes it possible to rethink how a space telescope might be built. In 2019, our team published a concept called the Nautilus Space Observatory.

Using the new technology, our team thinks it is possible to build a 29.5-foot (8.5-meter) diameter lens that would be only about 0.2 inches (0.5 cm) thick. The lens and support structure of our new telescope could weigh around 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms).

This is more than three times lighter than a Webb-style mirror of a similar size and would be bigger than Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter) diameter mirror.

The lenses have other benefits, too.

First, they are much easier and quicker to fabricate than mirrors and can be made en masse. Second, lens-based telescopes work well even when not aligned perfectly, making these telescopes easier to assemble and fly in space than mirror-based telescopes, which require extremely precise alignment.

Finally, since a single Nautilus unit would be light and relatively cheap to produce, it would be possible to put dozens of them into orbit. Our current design is in fact not a single telescope, but a constellation of 35 individual telescope units.

Each individual telescope would be an independent, highly sensitive observatory able to collect more light than Webb. But the real power of Nautilus would come from turning all the individual telescopes toward a single target.

By combining data from all the units, Nautilus’ light-collecting power would equal a telescope nearly 10 times larger than Webb. With this powerful telescope, astronomers could search hundreds of exoplanets for atmospheric gases that may indicate extraterrestrial life.

Although the Nautilus Space Observatory is still a long way from launch, our team has made a lot of progress. We have shown that all aspects of the technology work in small-scale prototypes and are now focusing on building a 3.3-foot (1-meter) diameter lens.

Our next steps are to send a small version of the telescope to the edge of space on a high-altitude balloon. With that, we will be ready to propose a revolutionary new space telescope to NASA and, hopefully, be on the way to exploring hundreds of worlds for signatures of life.

Daniel Apai, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona

Disclosure: Daniel Apai receives funding from NASA, NSF, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He works for The University of Arizona.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Since the Lowy Institute’s first “Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities” survey was published in 2021, Australia’s relations with China have undergone significant upheaval. 

The Covid-19 pandemic, the rupture in Australia–China relations, the election of a Labor government and the turbulence in both countries accompanying their re-openings after their Covid-19 lockdowns have placed Chinese-Australian communities in the public spotlight.

Chinese-Australians and their association with Beijing have come under the microscope from the Australian government, media and the public — often in intensely political circumstances.

While the Labor government has eschewed megaphone diplomacy with China — an approach favored by the former Coalition government — certain parameters have been set for the way Australia views and engages with China.

Still, Chinese-Australians have welcomed the political re-engagement between Australia and China.

The “Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities” survey report released in April 2023 shows that 37% of Chinese-Australians think Australia-China relations will be a “critical threat” to Australia’s vital interests in the next 10 years – a 14% drop since 2021.

The greater sense of optimism about Australia-China relations coincides with more positive feelings towards Australia in general. For example, 92% of Chinese-Australians say Australia is a “good” or “very good” place to live in the 2023 survey.

Chinese-Australians trust Australia most to act responsibly in the world, reinforcing their growing connections to Australia. Meanwhile, their sense of belonging to China and the Chinese people has declined, dovetailing with a drop in trust in China. Now less than half of the Chinese-Australian population has confidence in China’s President Xi Jinping.

Intense debates about China are now mainstream in Australian politics and this has placed Chinese-Australians in an uncomfortable position.

News headlines warning about the prospect of war do not align neatly with Chinese-Australians’ threat perception. Six out of ten Chinese-Australians say China is unlikely to be a military threat to Australia in the next 20 years.

Seven in ten Chinese-Australians believe Australia should remain neutral in the event of a military conflict between China and the United States – a view shared by only half of the Australian population. 

Yet there are differences within the Chinese-Australian communities. Of those born in mainland China, 73% say Australia should remain neutral compared to 65% of those born in Australia and 61% of those born in Hong Kong.

But the headlines and aggressive political rhetoric about China homogenizes and reinforces public perceptions about China and inadvertently, Chinese-Australians.

The political rhetoric about China has changed under the Labor government. But more work needs to be done to create a cohesive Australian society in the face of persistent discrimination and negative portrayals of China and ethnic Chinese in the media.

The evolution of the Australia-China debate and its impact on Chinese-Australian communities show that foreign and defense policies and national security should not be treated as separable from domestic politics. Public discussions about such policies have a quantifiable impact on a large proportion of Australia’s population.

How Australia should navigate the intersection of national security and social cohesion with China is uncertain. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity among Australia’s national security and intelligence community could help.

Australia’s Chinese diaspora and their bicultural skills should be channeled as an asset into helping navigate the Australia-China relationship.

Workforce diversification is not a new argument and some will contend that it will not change Australia’s basic orientation when it comes to national security. But from a technical expertise perspective, Australia’s intelligence community is lacking cultural and linguistic diversity. 

Government departments involved in managing Australia-China relations appear to be ill-equipped for the strategic moment when only 1.2% and 1.7% of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade staff and the defense workforce respectively are proficient in Mandarin.

Diversity in key intelligence institutions creates “a synergy of different perspectives” to address complex issues that can increase the array of policy options available to governments. Australia could start seeing Chinese politics in a more nuanced way rather than as a pyramid where President Xi sits on top. 

There is a lot of policy entrepreneurialism at the local level in Chinese politics and local officials often conduct government affairs that subvert the complete control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Perhaps those who make calculations about China’s role in Australia’s region will see that a myriad of interests shape China – and that a one-size-fits-all policy does not suffice when managing Australia-China relations – if they accept that China is more complex than Xi and the Chinese Communist Party. 

Greater cultural and linguistic diversity in government will ultimately shape how Australia sees Chinese-Australian communities too. They are pluralistic and diverse with skills that can benefit the nation.

The lack of diversity across key Australian public and international facing institutions presents huge obstacles when addressing the complex nature of Australia’s relationship with China, let alone with the world.

Jennifer Hsu is Visiting Senior Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW and is the author of Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities and was previously the Project Director of the Multiculturalism, Identity and Influence Project at the Lowy Institute.

This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.

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At last week’s NATO summit, the members issued a final statement criticizing China’s coercive policies, which they said challenge the interests, security and values of the bloc.

The NATO members did, however, commit to “constructive engagement” with the rapidly rising superpower.

Beijing reacted strongly to the statement nonetheless. It accused the alliance of “smearing and lying” about China and warned against NATO’s outreach efforts in the Asia-Pacific.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in blunt terms:

NATO must abandon the outdated Cold War mentality and zero-sum mindset, renounce its blind faith in military might and misguided practice of seeking absolute security, halt the dangerous attempt to destabilize Europe and the Asia-Pacific and stop finding pretext for its continuous expansion.

How the US is challenging China

China’s strong reaction reflects its serious concerns over the global challenges it faces. These include:

• the growing networks of US-led alliances and security partnerships, such as the Quad and AUKUS, which aim to constrain if not contain China
• US and European Union policies of de-risking and diversifying their supply chains to reduce their reliance on China
• and more restrictive export control regulations the US has enacted on high-tech transfers or exchanges. These are meant to prevent China from gaining the ability to manufacture semiconductors and slow its progress in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

Even as it becomes more concerned over these challenges, Beijing is hopeful these US-led networks of alliances and partnerships will remain patchwork given their diversity of interests, priorities and commitments.

China also retains significant advantages given its close economic ties with America’s allies and partners. This will influence whether the US can successfully achieve what Beijing believes is its goal of containing China.

China’s strategy in response

Analysts have questioned whether Beijing is smart and patient enough to be able to apply a wedge strategy to divide the US and its allies, or if its misjudgment and hubris could cause it to become overconfident and even arrogant.

Indeed, Beijing’s wolf-warrior diplomacy and assertive policies in recent years have only served to help the US and its allies grow closer to counter these actions.

Beijing may have learned its lessons. It’s now adopting a more proactive and confident diplomacy to counter US encirclement. I’ve observed at least four tactics when it comes to this shifting foreign policy.

1) China is focusing on the region and leaning into its strengths

Beijing recognises it must focus its diplomatic energies on Asia given its importance to China’s security and economic interests.

It is deepening its economic ties with ASEAN, the 10-nation regional bloc, while also supporting ASEAN centrality in the region’s security structures. The Southeast Asian group is wary of being drawn into a US-China conflict and forced to choose sides. It is also concerned US-led initiatives such as the Quad could diminish its role in the region.

At the same time, China has been active in promoting the ASEAN-sponsored Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. It believes this group offers a more inclusive and cooperative approach to regional economic cooperation. The group includes the ASEAN members, China and several US allies, such as South Korea, Japan and Australia.

Beijing is billing it as an attractive alternative to the US-sponsored Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. This group, which includes 14 countries in the region, last month signed an agreement on making their supply chains more resilient.

2) Beijing is boosting its diplomatic efforts with Europe

Since lifting its Covid border restrictions, Beijing has welcomed world leaders, hosted business groups and promoted trade and investment opportunities in China.

Europe, in particular, has been the focus of Beijing’s recent diplomacy. Premier Li Qiang’s first major international trip since taking office was to Germany and France last month, where he emphasized economic opportunities over geopolitical differences, partnership over rivalry.

European leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have also become regular features in Beijing.

These efforts are allowing China to deepen its economic ties with Europe. In so doing, Beijing is hoping to undermine US efforts to develop a transatlantic approach toward China, including policies of de-risking or de-coupling their economies from China.

3) China is standing with Russia – for now

Beijing is likely annoyed, if not dismayed, by the fiasco Russia’s war in Ukraine has become. However, it is determined now is not the time to desert Russian President Vladimir Putin.

From energy supplies to military technology cooperation, Russia remains a vital strategic partner for China. The last thing China wants is a decimated Russia, leaving it to face the US and its networks of alliances and security groups alone. China also would not want to deal with any potential threats from Russia, given their long shared border.

Beijing has carefully, if not convincingly, presented itself as a neutral bystander in the conflict, interested in bringing it to an end. China is also taking advantage of Russia’s precarious position by expanding and consolidating its influence in Central Asia, while remaining respectful of Russia’s traditional ties to the region.

4) China is promoting itself as a global leader

Finally, China has become more confident and active in promoting its models of global governance in security, development and community building.

Some efforts are still in the development stages, such as its Global Security Initiative, while others are more concrete. For example, Beijing sees itself as a global mediator after its success in brokering a truce between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March.

Beijing is also continuing to promote its preferred multilateral institutions, from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to the BRICS group, which currently includes China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa and India. Beijing has welcomed expanding the group.

Together with its ambitious and controversial Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing believes it can offer an alternative to the US-led groupings such as the Quad. By relying on institutions in this way, Beijing can promote its interests globally while avoiding direct confrontation with the US.

Jingdong Yuan is Associate Professor, Asia-Pacific security, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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