Zelensky miscalculates disastrously in picking fight with Trump – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

Friday’s (February 28) spectacle at the Oval Office will forever be remembered as one of the most epic failures that any foreign leader has ever made.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delusionally thought that he could disrespect US Vice President JD Vance on live television in front of President Donald Trump without any consequences while being an official guest of the US.

Readers can watch the full recording here, which shows Zelensky aggressively reacting to Vance’s benign comment about prioritizing diplomacy with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the previous Biden administration’s failed tough talk.

Everything then spiraled out of control after Zelensky accused Vance of speaking loudly to him, which prompted Trump to contradict Zelensky and tell him to keep quiet since he had already talked too much, all while brutally berating him in a scene that had never been witnessed before in America’s highest office.

Trump and Vance also accused Zelensky of being ungrateful for American aid after he lied about Ukraine being left alone since the start of the conflict and reminded him of how disrespectfully he was behaving.

Trump wrapped everything up by warning that the US might completely end its support for Ukraine if Zelensky doesn’t agree to make peace with Putin before unprecedentedly kicking Zelensky out of the White House.

To add insult to injury, White House staffers then ate the lunch that was already prepared for Zelensky and his team with the expectation that they would sign the minerals deal that was the reason behind his visit. Trump also posted on social media about how Zelensky disrespected the US.

For as clear-cut as the sequence of events was for any objective observer who watched the roughly 10-minute footage, namely that Zelensky provoked his two hosts by disrespecting Vance, the Financial Times’ Ben Hall had a totally different view.

According to him, “it is not hard to imagine that Vance and Trump were spoiling for a fight with the Ukrainian leader…Arguably, the stage was set for an ambush” when Zelensky arrived in the Oval Office.

While it’s true that Zelensky and Trump were just embroiled in a vicious spat prior to the Ukrainian leader’s arrival to the US, his American counterpart invited him to visit because he wanted to patch up their problems by signing the minerals deal and then discuss a path to peace with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump treated Zelensky benevolently prior to his trying to disrespect Vance, as did Vance, who didn’t say anything personal or insulting before Zelensky suddenly decided to harangue him.

It seems like Zelensky was triggered after realizing that the Trump administration wants to coerce him into peace with Putin and won’t be manipulated into prolonging, let alone escalating, the conflict after signing their minerals deal like he somehow expected that they would.

For that reason, he then decided to sabotage the talks by creating a spectacle, possibly hoping that it would justify abruptly refusing to sign the aforesaid deal if they were going to use it afterwards to pressure him into peace.

Zelensky isn’t apparently being advised by anyone with even basic insight into how Trump operates, otherwise he would have known that public pressure on Trump always backfires.

Zelensky would also never have thought that the US needs Ukraine for anything more than Ukraine needs the US. Trump is already considering a more important minerals deal with Putin so he doesn’t even need Ukraine’s resources whereas Ukraine has no alternative to American arms and is thus fully dependent on it.

This observation brings the analysis to the penultimate point about how Trump ominously left unanswered a question about whether he’ll suspend military aid to Ukraine, as he threatened at the end of his and Vance’s heated exchange with Zelensky.

If that’s what he ends up doing, and it’s too early to say for sure, then it would represent the worst-case scenario for the Europeans since Russia could then carry on as far westward as it wants if the front lines collapse without fear of the US intervening.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already confirmed a few weeks ago that the US won’t extend Article 5 guarantees to any NATO country’s troops in Ukraine. So the UK, France, and whoever else might have considered dispatching troops there in that event will now be forced to think twice.

In other words, Russia could hypothetically carry on as far as Ukraine’s border with NATO if it desires, though Putin might stop far short of that if a breakthrough coerces Kiev into complying with his demands.

What happened at the Oval Office on Friday was truly a black swan in the sense that nobody could have expected that Zelensky would ruin his relations with Trump right at the moment when they were supposed to sign a minerals deal that would then pave the way to peace.

Trump even exclaimed during the height of their drama how the US was giving Ukraine cards to play for helping it end the conflict on much better terms than if he didn’t get diplomatically involved.

The “New Détente” that Trump wants to broker with Putin, which readers can learn more about from the five analyses hyperlinked in the middle of this one here, is largely predicated on forcing Zelensky into peace.

Zelensky’s last-minute decision to sabotage the peace process by creating a global spectacle caught Trump off guard, but he wasn’t going to let Zelensky disrespect Vance with impunity, let alone after Zelensky’s disrespect extended into disrespect for the US.

That’s not to say that the “New Detente” is now necessarily derailed since Trump and Putin still have the will to enter into a series of mutual compromises aimed at establishing strategic ties but just that it might now proceed independently of Ukraine.

Accordingly, it was actually Zelensky who ruined everything, not Trump and Vance. They could never have expected that he’d burn Ukraine’s bridges with the US knowing that it’s impossible for Ukraine to replace US military aid. Perhaps Zelensky didn’t realize what he was getting into until it was too late, by which time he let his emotions get the best of him, but who knows.

In any case, it’s very difficult to imagine there being any rapprochement between Zelensky and Trump or Ukraine and the US in general without Zelensky leaving office or fully capitulating to Trump’s demands.

If he defiantly perpetuates the conflict and the US cuts him off, then Russia will pretty much be given free rein by Washington to do whatever it wants with Ukraine, though it’s unknown how the EU would react. Everything will become clearer by next week, though, once it’s known exactly what Zelensky plans to do next.

This article was first published on Andrew Korybko’s Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become an Andrew Korybko Newsletter subscriber here.

Continue Reading

Dissecting the China ‘lab leak’ Covid origin theory – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

In a January 24 interview with the far-right-wing outlet Breitbart News, newly appointed CIA director John Ratcliffe stated that assessing intelligence on a potential Wuhan lab leak was a top priority.

The following day, The New York Times reported that the agency had shifted from an undecided stance to favoring a possible Chinese lab leak, albeit with a “low confidence” rating – the lowest on a three-tier scale (low, medium, high).

Within the US intelligence community, the CIA has thus joined the FBI and the Department of Energy (DOE) in supporting the possibility of a laboratory-related incident.

According to a 2023 report, among the US agencies that have investigated the pandemic’s origins, one remains undecided, while four others, along with the National Intelligence Council, lean toward a natural origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What does ‘laboratory origin’ really mean?

According to The New York Times, the CIA’s revised assessment is based not on new evidence, but on a reinterpretation of existing data. However, neither the reasoning behind its reassessment nor the supporting data have been made public – making it impossible to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the agency’s conclusions.

Adding to the complexity, “laboratory origin” is an umbrella term encompassing multiple, sometimes contradictory, scenarios.

Confirming CNN’s 2023 report on the Department of Energy’s revised stance, The New York Times noted that the DOE identifies the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WCDC) as the outbreak’s likely source, while the FBI attributes it to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). At the time of writing, the CIA had not disclosed which scenario it deems most plausible.

Though WCDC is not an actual research laboratory, some of its employees were participating in wildlife sampling programs at the time of the outbreak. In late 2019, WCDC moved to a location close to the Huanan market. A theory implicating the WCDC confirms evidence that the earliest detected cases are epidemiologically and geographically linked to the market, and suggests that the virus emerged naturally.

In contrast, WIV is a research institute operating across two campuses, one situated 12 kilometers from the market as the crow flies and the other, which houses the P4 laboratory, 27 kilometers away.

Scenarios implicating WIV generally posit that “gain-of-function” coronavirus experiments – intended to enhance a virus’s transmissibility or virulence – were conducted under biosecurity conditions deemed to be unsafe, at level 2. The presence in Wuhan of a biosafety level 4 laboratory is therefore irrelevant to this scenario.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, has a single origin. If it did escape from a laboratory, it could not have simultaneously leaked from two separate labs conducting different types of research. Two mutually incompatible hypotheses are not two points in favor of a lab origin – and this is not even considering alternative lab-leak scenarios positing that the virus was engineered in a US lab and then sent to Wuhan.

Beyond determining where the virus originated, the nature of the virus is another source of divergence among lab-accident scenarios. Was it a naturally-occurring virus that accidentally infected a scientist during fieldwork? A virus cultured in a laboratory, passaged on cells or animals? Or even a directly genetically modified virus?

Here again, SARS-CoV-2 cannot be at the same time a natural virus and the result of lab experiments. Accumulating arguments built on conflicting premises does not strengthen the case for a research-related incident.

No evidence of a laboratory-related incident

The lab-origin hypothesis would carry much more weight if definitive proof emerged that, by late December 2019, a Wuhan laboratory possessed a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

Hazard suits hang at the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan. Photo: Wuhan Institute of Virology

In the case of the 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in southern England, for example, virus sequencing quickly led investigators to nearby high-security laboratories conducting research on a similar virus. The inquiry ultimately traced the outbreak to faulty effluent pipes at the facilities.

In contrast, to date, no virus has been identified that could have been used in a laboratory as a direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

If the virus did emerge from a research-related incident, two possibilities remain: It was either an uncharacterized natural virus, unknown even to the researchers who worked on it, or it was a previously characterized virus that had not been disclosed – either because it was recently identified or because it was part of a classified program – and that is still being kept under wraps by scientists in Wuhan.

This is in particular the case if SARS-CoV-2 was the result of genetic engineering.

A lab-modified virus implies that its genetic sequence was known to some researchers before the pandemic. However, by 2021, the US intelligence community had determined that researchers at WIV had no prior knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak.

While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, concrete data have yet to emerge supporting the hypothesis of laboratory modification.

Theories about a potential lab origin have also fueled speculation about the involvement of accomplices outside of Wuhan, in China or abroad. A US Senate committee report put forward a China-only scenario, citing the suspicious 2020 death of a Beijing-based researcher working on a new vaccine.

Other theories center on the US-based NGO EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with WIV to collect and study natural coronaviruses before its funding was abruptly cut off at President Donald Trump’s request in Spring 2020.

The organization’s president has since been banned from federal funding for five years, facing criticism over oversight issues, including delayed reporting of an experiment on a chimeric coronavirus and failure to provide WIV’s laboratory notebooks.

Among the most high-profile figures implicated in US-based complicity theories is Anthony Fauci, the former White House Covid advisor and head of the agency that funded the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and WIV.

But allegations against Fauci go far beyond him approving research grants. One narrative claims that Fauci deliberately suppressed discussions about the pandemic’s origin, pressuring researchers to alter their conclusions in exchange for funding. No evidence has surfaced to support this claim.

Anticipating potential retribution from his successor and the Republican Party, former President Joe Biden preemptively granted Fauci a presidential pardon. However, newly elected President Donald Trump has since revoked Fauci’s personal security detail, and Republican Senator Rand Paul has vowed to continue efforts to prosecute him.

The natural-origin theory faces hurdles as well

The multiplicity of lab-origin scenarios is caused by the absence of data supporting this type of origin. As a result, anything is possible.

Data related to the origin of the Covid-19 exist, however. So far, available data suggest the virus may have originated naturally from animals sold at the Huanan Market.

Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. Photo: Weibo

Multiple types of data, from various Chinese sources, support this hypothesis: The residences of the cases with earliest onset dates are located in the vicinity of the Huanan Market, whether the cases were epidemiologically linked to the market or not.

The two early SARS-CoV-2 lineages were detected at the market; and data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CCDC), that we analyzed, indicated that raccoon dogs and civets – species implicated in earlier SARS outbreaks – were present in the market’s southwest corner, where traces of SARS-CoV-2 were frequently detected.

However, by the time the CCDC team arrived at the Huanan market for sample collection, just hours after its closure, raccoon dogs and civets were no longer present. As a result, no direct traces of infection could be detected, and the definitive evidence some are hoping for may never be uncovered.

But even if such proof were to emerge, it would not likely settle the debate. Additional confirmation would be needed to show that the animals were not secondarily infected by humans in the market. Moreover, skeptics could argue that the animals themselves came from a laboratory. In other words, the controversy is far from over.

For now, with the new Trump administration focused on finding a culprit, the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic will remain in the spotlight. Senator Rand Paul, now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), has made the issue his hobbyhorse.

The declassification of information from the US intelligence community may help assess the merits of competing conclusions regarding the origin of the pandemic. In parallel, however, the new administration may unfairly target researchers, potentially resulting in more innocent victims.

Florence Débarre is CNRS research director and a researcher in evolutionary biology, Sorbonne University.

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

Continue Reading

India and America: a certain ambivalence  – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

America reaches us everywhere: in our villages by the mountains, in our towns by the sea, in our cities by the desert. America shapes and distorts, regenerates and ruins. America is hope and America is anxiety.  

My first memorable encounter with American power was a story my father told me in the mid-1980s in our village in the mountains of Kashmir. Our few acres of rice fields would have a rich harvest in the autumn. After school, I would carry samovars of tea for the workers harvesting and threshing the grain. My father, an energetic civil servant in his mid-thirties, would join us after work.  

We would drink tea, and he would tell me stories. One of those afternoons, my father spoke of the bleak years of his adolescence in the 1960s, when hunger stalked not just our little villages, not just India and Pakistan but all of Asia. He was born in the early fifties as Asia and Africa were winning back their freedom from European empires, whose extractive colonialism had squeezed the colonies of almost everything valuable.  

Father spoke of an American man. A scientist who traveled to India in the early 1960s, worked with Indian scientists, and introduced high-yielding crop varieties that multiplied agricultural yields and significantly helped reduce global hunger.  

“It was the Green Revolution,” father said. “His name is Norman Borlaug.” 

“Norman Borlaug.” I repeated. 

Norman Borlaug, who was born on a farm in Iowa, who eventually won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his singular contribution to significantly reducing hunger in Asia and Latin America, defined the best of America for me. 

I never forgot his name. 

India has grappled with American power—through its rise and rise and its relative decline, through its benevolence and its cruelty—with a range of responses rooted in experiences of colonialism and its own visions of economic and political power: from postcolonial righteous indignation to reluctant supplication to defiant Soviet embrace to today’s amoral nationalism.  

On an October evening in 1949, General Dwight D Eisenhower, who served as the president of Columbia University after leading the Allied forces to victory in World War II, conferred the degree of Doctor of Laws upon Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, at the Low Memorial Library.

The Cold War was on: George Kennan’s argument for “containment of Russian expansive tendencies” had shaped American policy; the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were already in place; the Berlin blockade was ongoing; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was five months old. 

Americans wanted India to “get on the democratic side immediately,” as Henry F. Grady, the first American ambassador to India, put it to Prime Minister Nehru in December 1947. Nehru had read widely about America—from Upton Sinclair to Henry David Thoreau to Reinhold Niebuhr—and admired former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for Indian independence.

But the Indian leader saw America representing “a reactionary policy” in world affairs and was certain that India would not align with a particular nation or group of nations. 

With Eisenhower and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, in his audience, Nehru roasted American Cold War doctrines. “The very process of marshalling of the world into two hostile camps precipitates the conflict which it sought to avoid,” he told his hosts. His fundamental intellectual concerns were radically different.

He spoke of three grave dangers to global peace and progress: colonialism, white supremacy, and hunger. European colonial powers were still delaying decolonization in parts of Asia and most of Africa; American reluctance to push their European allies disappointed him. “It is clear that all vestiges of imperialism and colonialism will have to disappear.” 

The America Nehru spoke to was still Jim Crow America and the civil rights movement was still years away. “Secondly, there is the problem of race relations,” Nehru told his hosts. Indian nationalist leaders and Black civil rights leaders in America—Lala Lajpat Rai, Gandhi, Nehru, Marcus Garvey, W E B Du Bois—had been in conversation for years and saw white supremacy as a defining factor in British colonialism in India and in Jim Crow in America.

“The West has too often despised the Asian and the African and still, in many places, denies them not only equality of rights but even common humanity and kindliness,” Nehru said.

Legacies of war, colonialism, and political turmoil had exacerbated hunger across Asia and Africa. India was facing a shortage of wheat and rice and ensuring food security was an urgent concern for Nehru. “The third reason for war and revolution is misery and want,” he told his hosts. “If we offer no remedy, then other cries and slogans make an appeal to the minds of the people.” 

The East Coast intellectuals were impressed, the Truman administration was irritated, and Nehru was convinced India should “align somewhat” with the United States but not be subservient. The essence of India’s view of America is distilled in a note Nehru wrote to his colleagues who were finalizing a commercial treaty with the United States.

“The safest policy,” he wrote, “appears to be friendly to America, to give them fair terms, to invite their help on such terms, and at the same time not to tie ourselves up too much with their world or their economic policy.” 

That stance of being friendly and open to all the American help one needs while refusing formal military or economic alliances and maintaining autonomy to pursue relationships with other powers to strengthen India’s national interests has survived with minor variations in form and tone over the decades. 

If foreign policy is the face a nation wears to the world, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, American power in the Cold War and Indian responses to that colossal destructive and regenerative force were a series of scowls and smiles, glares and grins, wails and shrugs. Cycles of annoyance and accommodation, hostility and warmth defined the relations between India and the United States during the Cold War. 

The first significant illustration of Nehru’s policy of neutrality was the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. Fearful of the war expanding in Asia but also aware of the opportunity to act as “a counterbalancing force,” in a bipolar world by uniting the Third World and the Commonwealth countries, Nehru’s India cooperated, bargained, and battled with the United States throughout the war at the United Nations. India’s hectic diplomacy and mediation between the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese to find a compromise to end the war were thwarted at various stages by the colliding powers.

Eventually, after Stalin’s death in March 1953, as the warring parties were ready for a ceasefire, a vigorous Indian effort united the Third World and Commonwealth countries behind a UN resolution, forced reluctant Americans to support a compromise on the repatriation of 20,000 prisoners of war, and paved the path to the signing of the Korean armistice. The historian Richard Barnes writes that the experience led Nehru to place “his allegiance squarely” with the Third World. 

After the war, the patrician voice of Jawaharlal Nehru called for Asian and African solidarity, decolonization, and Cold War neutrality. He was a prominent player in the landmark Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, which eventually led to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, along with other flawed giants of his era: Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josef Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sukarno of Indonesia. 

But the promise of Asian solidarity was diminished by the Chinese invasion of India in 1962. Although India’s defeat was crushing, the country encountered two assuring and friendly faces of America power in John F Kennedy and John Kenneth Galbraith, his ambassador to India, who ensured US military support for India and brought warmth to Indian views of America. A year later, in 1963, Norman Borlaug arrived in India, testing his high-yielding crop varieties, collaborating with Indian scientists, and helping India achieve self-sufficiency in a decade. 

Two years after the war with China, in 1964, a broken Nehru died. India was a lesser country without him and everyone who followed him was dwarfed by his shadow. But the mistakes of great men also exact a great price: Nehru’s intransigence and failure to allow a just resolution to the Kashmir dispute contributed to decades of violence, militarization, and great suffering for the people of Kashmir, and the furies unleashed by the battles for my home distorted the polities of India and Pakistan. 

American power and its manifestations in Asia—military aid, alliances, food assistance, deployment of its overwhelming force—remained tied to the fundamental goal of maintaining American supremacy by containing Soviet power and influence. A confluence of values was largely ignored at the altar of strategic interests. As Nehru once remarked in the context of Kashmir, “We cannot afford to lose,” he told a visitor. “Till things improve, democracy and morality can wait.” 

America’s need for an ally on the eastern flank of the Soviet Union willing to offer bases from where American jets could strike inside the Red Imperium was met by Pakistan, which also joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Central Treaty Organization. America reciprocated by supplying weapons, and Pakistani soldiers drove American Patton tanks across the border into Indian territory when the intimate enemies fought another war over Kashmir in 1965. 

Six months after that war, when Lal Bahadur Shastri, her father’s successor, died of a heart attack in Tashkent after signing a peace agreement with Pakistan, Indira Gandhi, the 49-year-old daughter of Nehru, became prime minister in January 1966. The monsoon had failed that year and she needed American wheat to save millions from starvation. President Lyndon Johnson was already embroiled in the Vietnam War when Mrs. Gandhi traveled to the United States to meet him in the spring of 1966.

A year earlier, India’s president, S Radhakrishnan, a philosopher who had served as Nehru’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, proposed a peace plan for Vietnam calling for cessation of hostilities. Johnson wasn’t pleased. As the historian Ramachandra Guha recounts, India was receiving 15 million tons of American wheat under a public loan scheme from the United States in 1965 and 1966. And while Johnson offered Mrs. Gandhi a warm reception, the American president decided to “keep his supplicants on a tight leash.” 

On her return from Washington, Indira Gandhi faced an economic and political crisis at home. The wily old bosses of the Congress Party were trying to be the real power behind the throne. To fight the power brokers, Indira had surrounded herself with a group of brilliant mandarins who preferred the Soviet Union over the United States. A turn toward rousing socialist rhetoric in a very poor country would endear her to the masses. 

In the summer of 1966, the Indian government condemned the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. Mrs. Gandhi traveled to Moscow, where she signed a joint statement with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin condemning the imperial aggression in Vietnam and calling for an “immediate and unconditional” end to the bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong.

A furious Lyndon Johnson ordered that the monthly food shipments to India not be sent without his personal authorization, which he relished in delaying. Inder Malhotra, an Indian journalist, recalled decades later, “India literally almost lived from ‘ship to mouth’ and those of us who lived through that era swallowed a measure of humiliation with every morsel of American food.”  

The war in Vietnam found its way into Satyajit Ray’s 1970 film Pratidwandi, or The Adversary, which captures the upheaval and the despair of the time in India, through a medical school dropout’s search of an unattainable job. In a job interview, an aging suit asks the protagonist to name the most outstanding and significant event of the last decade, and they spar over their choices: the moon landing versus the Vietnam War. The candidate doesn’t find the moon landing surprising or unpredictable considering the advances in space technology. 

“Do you think the war in Vietnam was unpredictable?” the suit demands. 

“Not the war itself. But what it has revealed about the Vietnamese people, about their extraordinary power of resistance. Ordinary people. Peasants,” the candidate replies.  

“And no one knew they had it in them. And this is not a matter of technology. . . . It is just plain, human courage and it takes your breath away.” 

The closer American power, wars, and great power gambits came to Indian shores the more American prestige declined in India. In the summer of 1969, as the war escalated in Vietnam and anti-war protests raged across the country, President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were working on a rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China to change the balance of power against the Soviet Union.

General Yahya Khan, the military dictator of Pakistan, who had warm relations with both, became the secret channel between Nixon and the Communist China leadership. 

In December 1970, Pakistan, whose Eastern and Western wings uneasily flanked India, held its national election. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League, which represented the more populous Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, won.

Yahya Khan and the West Pakistani elite, dominated by the Punjabis, which looked down on the Bengalis, refused to allow Rahman form the government. Protests erupted in Dhaka and Yahya Khan’s military responded with genocidal violence, killing hundreds of thousands Bengalis and forcing ten million refugees into India. 

In April 1971, Arthur Blood, an American diplomat in Dhaka, wrote “The Blood Telegram,” to Washington, a devastating plea for action that described the horrors being inflicted by the Pakistani military. Nixon ignored it. Yahya Khan’s secret diplomacy with the Chinese leadership had landed Nixon the coveted invitation to visit the People’s Republic.

American grand strategy was always more important than brown lives in the Third World. Nixon did nothing to restrain Yahya Khan. Public opinion in America wasn’t a concern for Nixon, who was certain of American indifference toward “just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.” 

Three million people were killed in East Pakistan. “To condemn these violations publicly would have destroyed the Pakistani channel, which would be needed for months to complete the opening to China,” Kissinger told The Atlantic in an interview. India, which had been secretly training and arming Bengali insurgents, briskly accelerated ongoing conversations with Moscow and signed a military pact with the Soviet Union in August 1970. Any remaining pretense of nonalignment was over. 

Mrs. Gandhi met with Nixon and Kissinger at the White House, a visit that achieved little in preventing a war between India and Pakistan. Gary H Bass, a Princeton historian, analyzed declassified audio conversations between Nixon and Kissinger, which provided a stunning record of their racist and sexist vocabulary that he believes influenced foreign policy. Among the abusive epithets Kissinger and Nixon used for Mrs. Gandhi and Indians: unattractive, pathetic, repulsive, a scavenging people, masters at subtle flattery. 

“After a short war in December, India defeated Pakistan, and helped create the independent state of Bangladesh. Two memories from that time profoundly shaped India’s attitudes toward America: Nixon dispatching the nuclear-armed USS Enterprise to the Indian Ocean; the Soviet Union dispatching naval vessels and submarines to Indian waters in solidarity.” 

The lure of America never ceases to diminish despite the destruction America inflicts and heaps upon the world. The war in Vietnam coincided with the liberalization of American immigration laws in 1965, which removed restrictive national origin quotas for Asia and allowed Asian students, skilled workers, and professionals to migrate to the United States.

An Indian engineering student from Lucknow, in northern India, who studied and worked in America in the 1970s recalled watching a film about the 1964 New York World’s Fair at a United States Information Service outpost in his city: “I was dazzled by what I saw in the film since it was a showcase of all the latest gadgets of modern life.” The Indian diaspora in America grew at an incredibly brisk pace: from 12,000 in 1960 to 450,000 in 1990. 

The long estrangement between India and the United States continued, largely hovering around India’s nuclear ambitions. India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. Four years later, in 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which demanded inspections of nuclear facilities of countries not included in the treaty.

India, which was not a signatory, refused. America stopped nuclear assistance to India’s nuclear power plants, a move it reversed after Mrs. Gandhi traveled to Washington in 1982. India Today, the leading Indian magazine of the time, christened Mrs. Gandhi’s visit “Operation Defrost,” and described it with the Indian love of hyperbole as a “spectacular voyage” in which Mrs. Gandhi “dazzled America,” as no other world leader had in recent memory. 

Two assassinations bookended Indian polity between the early eighties and the early nineties: Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 after she ordered Indian troops to attack the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, to flush out Sikh militants sheltering there; and the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, her younger son, by Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, avenging his botched military intervention in Sri Lanka.

A series of cynical political plays by Mrs. Gandhi and her son had intensified religious strife across the country and contributed to the eruption of an armed insurgency in Kashmir in the winter of 1989–90. Economic policies guiding India’s mixed economy, which combined the “worst aspects of socialism and capitalism,” had brought the economy to the brink of collapse by the summer of 1991. 

It was a time of profound global transformation with the reunification of Germany, the fall of communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union on the verge of dissolution. India faced a moment of reckoning: Its foreign debt had risen to around $72 billion and foreign exchange reserves had collapsed to less than the sum required to finance imports for two weeks.

Desperate, India pawned off its gold on banks in Europe and Japan to raise funds. In June 1991, P. V. Narasimha Rao, a Congress Party leader who had served as Rajiv Gandhi’s foreign minister, took office as prime minister and appointed Manmohan Singh, a Cambridge economist, as finance minister. 

In the summer of 1991, Manmohan Singh dismantled the controlled economy of India by ending the Byzantine regulatory regime that had long stifled industry and opening up the country to foreign investment, removing currency controls, lowering import tariffs, devaluing the rupee, reducing taxes, and scrapping industrial licensing.

In a July 1991 speech to the Indian parliament, Singh, wearing a blue turban and a white sherwani, spoke with controlled passion, and called for a second industrial revolution and a second agricultural revolution. He quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea.” 

In the following decade, Singh’s reforms grew the economy rapidly, producing a new middle class with disposable incomes. In the mid- and late 1990s, I was a student at a public university in a small town a couple of hours from Delhi. Despite our genteel poverty, the sense of possibility and transformation was palpable. The United States in its unipolar moment, and the icons of American capitalism and technology, were quickly replacing the old heroes of socialist India. 

Our conversations at university didn’t center on Nasser, Sukarno, or Nkrumah but on Bill Gates and Sabeer Bhatia, who co-founded Hotmail. Cyber cafes, powered by dial-up Internet, were our gateways to American universities. When McDonald’s came to India, without beef but with a vegetarian menu, the waiting lines recalled religious festivals.

The newspapers and magazines listed the shocking salaries the graduates of elite management and computer sciences schools were offered. Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, Narayana Murthy, and F. C. Kohli, the pioneers of India’s infotech revolution, the billionaire makers of the New India, became names that evoked the same reverence once reserved for the Nehrus and the Gandhis. 

Indian society was enthralled by America and American attitudes to consumerism, capitalism, and individual freedoms. I found work as a reporter for a website in Delhi at the turn of the millennium. Globalization was the vibe. American corporations were outsourcing service jobs by the thousands to India.

The rise of the multibillion outsourcing industry in India even captured the attention of Susan Sontag, who spoke about young Indians acquiring mastery of English and inventing American personas in their call center jobs. “To pull this off, they have to be plausibly American to themselves. They have been assigned American names and little biographies of their American identities,” Sontag said. 

Mujahid, my flatmate, was one of those young Indians. He trained for months to erase traces of Tamil in his English and emerged with a middle-American accent. He taught me American slang and idioms and spoke relentlessly about American sitcoms and the Super Bowl. He would leave for work in the evenings to work on Central Standard Time and pass as an American through the night on calls with customers in Chicago and Milwaukee. His American name was Adam Smith. 

The New India evoked breathless comparisons to the Roaring Twenties. Yet a million mutinies exacting terrible human costs persisted in India along with its euphoric transformation: a savage war still raged in Kashmir; insurgencies flourished in the northeastern states bordering Myanmar and China; Maoist rebels fought Indian forces across the forests of central India; crushing loans and the failure to increase agricultural productivity had pushed thousands of farmers to suicide; the quality of most educational institutions remained bleak; the state of the health care, legal, and policing systems remained terrifying. 

The humiliation of waiting for American wheat and the righteous activism that fought against American hegemony were distant memories when I moved to New York for graduate school in the mid-2000s. India was a rising power, a would-be great power.

“The world—and particularly the United States—is courting India as it never has before,” Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek. “Fascinated by the new growth story, perhaps wary of Asia’s Chinese superpower, searching to hedge some bets, the world has woken up to India’s potential.”

He recalled being at the World Economic Forum in Davos where he witnessed India dominate the conversation and Klaus Schwab dressed in “a colorful Indian turban and shawl, nibbled on chicken tikka and talked up the country’s prospects with Michael Dell.” 

In New York, I encountered a lot of hand-wringing about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Bagram and the languages of torture and rendition. American colleagues were curious how India saw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is that they simply didn’t incite the fury and advocacy that the Korean and Vietnam wars did in India. 

The Times of India, the highest-selling English newspaper in the country, did publish a cartoon strip called “Dubyaman,” which lampooned George Bush. And India, witnessing the rise of Hindu nationalism in parallel with economic liberalization, had a coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party that refused an American request for 17,000 Indian soldiers to be deployed in Iraq. 

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Hindu nationalist politician with decades of experience, led the Indian government. The political costs of risking the lives of Indian soldiers for an American war would be prohibitive.

The Indian pursuit of strategic autonomy remained alive and well. The Hindu nationalists collaborated with the Bush administration on terrorism—with an eye on Pakistan and Kashmir—and imported American Islamophobic rhetoric for political gain, but the nuclear isolation imposed by America was never forgotten. 

Prime Minister Vajpayee—moved by the pursuit of great power status, as well as converting a nuclear nationalist surge into electoral gains—greenlit the nuclear weapon tests by India in May 1998 and subsequently declared India a nuclear armed state.

Pakistan followed with its own nuclear weapons tests within days. President Bill Clinton imposed sanctions prohibiting American economic and military assistance to India and Pakistan. The nuclear order led by the United States had been punishing since its first nuclear test in 1974. Now, America had tightened the noose of nonproliferation.

“India had been the target of an increasingly restrictive, rigorous and continually expanding regime of technology denial,” the diplomat Shyam Saran, who served as India’s foreign secretary, lamented in “How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century.” India’s economy, energy needs, and electricity shortages were growing. Nuclear power could help but India didn’t have uranium or the advanced nuclear reactors of Europe and the United States since it was barred from the nuclear energy market. 

America evokes unparalleled desire and unparalleled envy. I was in Delhi when I found out about the September 11 attacks: sudden euphoric cries rose from several desks around me. I was a young reporter, and spending my nights trying to learn from Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, and Joan Didion.

I was among the few in the office who went quiet. America ceased to be invincible that morning. In its wounded fury and indiscriminate lashing out—the  invasion of Iraq, industrial use of torture and rendition, wild expansion of homeland security, and shredding of norms and alliances—America began to squander its legitimacy and moral standing. 

China was rising fast, and the heirs of George Kennan and Paul Nitze were energetically offering manifestoes for managing or containing its rise. They spoke of the road to contain Beijing passing through New Delhi.

They spoke of the shared values of liberalism, democracy, and boisterous multiethnic polities. The reliable American quest for preserving the country’s global dominance and the attractions of  a consistently growing Indian economy updated American ideas about India. 

On October 10, 2008, the United States and India signed the US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement after three years of negotiations and domestic opposition. It was unprecedented: India was firm in its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it considered a discriminatory regime. America modified its laws, created the first exception to the nuclear order, accepted in spirit India as a nuclear weapons state, and opened India’s access to nuclear technology.

 India’s embrace of American influence and power was never more clear. Still, the orgiastic moment wouldn’t change the Indian way of doing business: India would be friendly and open to all the American help it needed—while also pursuing relationships with other powers to strengthen its interests. 

The euphoric success with America was followed by a dramatic decline of the Congress Party and subsequent fall of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government. In the summer of 2014, another “New India” was born with the electoral success of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In the following years, Modi’s India focused on two interlinked goals: India’s transformation from a semi-liberal democracy into an authoritarian Hindu-first state, and a vigorously advertised pursuit of great power through transactional nonalignment.  

The presidency of Donald Trump magnified perceptions of American decline as he shredded commitments to multilateral institutions, tore up international agreements, and eviscerated even the pretense of values in the affairs of nations.

Trump took a more aggressive approach to China, increased defense cooperation with India, and strengthened the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue alliance between India, the United States, Australia, and Japan to contain Beijing. The great gift Trump’s America offered Modi’s India was the gift of American silence on minority rights and the limiting of the freedom of press and expression.  

Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden declared: “America is back.” After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden responded with a rousing call of a struggle between “a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

American attempts to make Russia’s isolation a matter of stark moral choice clashed against a transformed world that was uninterested in arranging itself into camps of followers in a Cold War-style confrontation between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. 

The age of transactional nationalism had dawned and the middle powers had energetically embraced it. Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkey made sure that Russians knew that their country, despite being a member of NATO, was still a welcoming tourist destination.

The United Arab Emirates had a surge in property purchases by wealthy Russians looking for safe harbor for their wealth as sanctions squeeze them out of Europe. Brazil, where agriculture is a pillar of the economy, sought ways to avoid American sanctions on Russia in order to keep a steady supply of Russian fertilizers flowing into the country. And India moved to purchase immense amounts of Russian crude oil every day—at a steeply discounted price. 

America was and remains the most powerful player in the game. The world was still keen to influence America, become friends, and do business but American sanctimony and rhetoric about democratic values and the liberal order would evoke yawns and sniggers in India and elsewhere in the Global South. The liberal order turned to ash in the fires that eviscerated Palestinian lives and habitats in Gaza—fires that were kept burning by America.  

Testimonies of the famine in Gaza and images of Palestinian children dying of hunger started reaching us in January and February. American power played a great role in ensuring they had been denied food.

I thought of my father telling me stories about an American man, a scientist, who gave years of his life to help hungry strangers across the world grow more food.  I still remember his name. 

Norman Borlaug.  

Basharat Peer is the author of  “Curfewed Night”, a memoir about the conflict in Kashmir, and  “A Question of Order: India, Turkey and the Return of Strongmen.” He has written for The New Yorker, Granta, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, n+1, and The New York Times. He worked as an opinion editor at The New York Times and at the International Crisis Group as deputy director for its Future of Conflict Program.

This essay was originally published in “ The Ideas Letter, a project of the Open Society Foundations, and is republished with permission.

Continue Reading

As Kremlin eyes US thaw, Russia’s war hawks are squawking – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

At face value, the Kremlin has plenty to celebrate after US and Russian officials held high-level bilateral talks on the war in Ukraine for the first time since the full-scale conflict began in 2022.

Russian delegates at the meeting, which took place on February 18 in Saudi Arabia, struck an ebullient tone. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov concluded that “the American side has begun to better understand our position,” while Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and an envoy for Moscow, noted that the delegates managed to loosen up enough to laugh and joke.

President Vladimir Putin did not attend the meeting, but he characterized it the following day as “very friendly,” going as far as to describe the American delegation as “completely different people” who were “ready to negotiate with an open mind and without any judgment over what was done in the past.”

And the talks are far from the only reason for optimism in Moscow. In statements that echoed Kremlin propaganda, US President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for being invaded and described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator.”

The US then sided with Russia in two United Nations votes on the conflict and opposed language describing Russia as the aggressor in a draft G7 statement marking the anniversary of the war.

This perceived rapprochement between Washington and Moscow has many critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Within Russia the reaction has been mixed. And not everybody in Moscow is celebrating the apparent shift in US policy.

Favoring pragmatism

Of course, many Russians would welcome a thaw in relations. In January, Russia’s leading independent polling group found that 61% of Russians favored peace talks over continuing the war in Ukraine – the highest level yet.

Meanwhile, the number of web searches for “When will the ‘special military operation’ end?” on Yandex, a Russian tech firm, reached its highest-ever weekly total in the wake of the US-Russia talks.

While public opinion is unlikely to shape the Kremlin’s approach given Putin’s sole control over major foreign policy decisions, evidence suggests that a rapprochement with the United States could also be a boon for Putin at home.

In a recently published article in the peer-reviewed journal International Security, my co-author Henry Hale and I found that while most Russians view the US and NATO as threats, they largely prefer a pragmatic, measured response from the Kremlin – an approach they believed Putin delivered prior to the war in 2022.

High-level summits between Russia and the US have tended to be well received, we found. This is because they tap into a widely held preference for cooperation as well as depicting Russia as a geopolitical “equal” to the US.

Pro-war hardliners speak out

Yet not everyone is pleased with the prospect of closer US ties. Russia’s vocal minority of tub-thumping war supporters is already angry.

This loose community of so-called “Z-patriots” – a reference to the large “Z” letters marking Russian military equipment at the beginning of the war – has been a double-edged sword for the Kremlin.

While they have been helpful in mobilizing grassroots support for the war, they have also lambasted Moscow’s execution and made pointed criticisms of top military brass. Such attacks are, in effect, a way of making veiled attacks on Putin himself.

And we are talking about a sizable minority. Estimates indicate that Z-patriots – the more hawkish and ideologically committed segment of war supporters – represent 13% to 27% of the Russian population.

One of this group’s most prominent ideologues, Zakhar Prilepin, didn’t pull any punches in a recent interview. He described as “humiliating” the fact that “the Russian media community, political scientists and politicians are dancing with joy and telling us how wonderful everything is [now that] Trump has arrived.”

There are reasons to take this group seriously. According to Marlène Laruelle, an expert on nationalism and ideology in Russia, the Z-patriots are emerging as key opinion leaders.

Unlike other ideological camps in Russia, the Z-patriots are very much a product of the war, having emerged from the popular military blogging community and with deep connections to paramilitary and veterans organizations.

Indeed, many sympathized with former mercenary Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s anti-elite rants, while Igor Girkin, a former Donbas warlord who claimed to have sparked the initial war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, openly mocked Putin to his almost million-strong Telegram followers.

The Kremlin partially cracked down on some of the Z-patriots in 2023. Prigozhin’s ill-fated mutiny in June was followed by his suspicious death in a plane crash later that summer, while Girkin was jailed and handed a four-year prison sentence for “inciting extremism.”

Yet the Z-patriots remain a force. Girkin, commenting on the US-Russia talks from prison, lamented the “egregious managerial and command failure” over the past three years and sarcastically concluded that Moscow’s political elites, aware of their own weakness, are likely to “‘drag their heels’ in their inimitable style – and with their well-known genius.”

Other pro-war voices expressed skepticism about the information communicated by the Russian delegation and ironically said they expected the Kremlin would pass a law against “discrediting Russia-American relations,” a play on the March 2022 law against “discrediting” Russia’s military.

Sanctions relief a concern

Some of the sharpest criticisms of the Kremlin have been about the economy.

Recent weeks have seen renewed optimism among many in Russia that sanctions relief is on the horizon and that sought-after Western brands may return. Russia – since 2022 the most sanctioned country in the world – had previously appeared to accept that sanctions would remain for decades to come.

The Russian delegation at the recent talks emphasized the prospect of economic cooperation with the United States, no doubt believing Trump to be receptive to such mercantile framings.

A few days later, Putin announced a willingness to develop Russia’s rare earth minerals with foreign partners, including the United States, in what appeared to be an attempt to outbid Zelenskyy.

This, too, provoked a populist backlash among Z-patriots. “Grampa’s lost it,” one wrote in a thinly veiled swipe at Putin.

Another displayed dismay that “stealing Russia’s natural resources once again became a prospect for mutually beneficial cooperation with American partners.”

“We’ve barely begun to develop small and medium businesses,” Prilepin noted, deriding the “unbearable” excitement around the possibility of Western brands returning.

These sentiments have struck a chord with other parts of society. After all, some Russian businesses have benefited from Western brands’ exit from the Russian market. The government is attempting to fend off these criticisms with a new bill proposed to Russia’s parliament on February 27 calling to ban Western companies that had financially supported Ukraine.

What to do about veterans?

Perhaps most consequential will be what happens to the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers currently on the front lines.

While runaway military spending and lavish payouts to soldiers continue to strain the Russian economy, demobilization also poses risks.

A report from the Institute for the Study of War recently concluded that demobilization would be politically risky for the Kremlin, fearful that masses of disgruntled veterans might constitute a potential challenge.

That said, many of the estimated 700,000 Russian troops in Ukraine will eventually return to civilian life and likely become an important constituency in Russian politics moving forward.

The Z-patriots may be a product of war, but they will have an afterlife beyond it. Meanwhile, regardless of any Russian rapprochement with the White House – or perhaps because of it – Russia’s hawks won’t be turning into doves anytime soon.

Adam Lenton is an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University.

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

Continue Reading

New US missile aims to pierce China’s rising air power – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

The US Air Force’s newly unveiled AIM-260A Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM) promises to reshape aerial warfare with its extended range, advanced guidance and stealth compatibility—just as China’s airpower developments escalate the fight for air superiority.

Last month, The War Zone reported that the US Air Force had confirmed the authenticity of the recently released AIM-260A JATM’s rendering.

With a more extended range yet a similar size to the AIM-120 AMRAAM, this missile is poised to replace the latter in US military service. Included in a US Navy industry day briefing, the JATM remains highly classified, with technical and programmatic details withheld.

However, it is believed to feature advanced propulsion systems, multi-mode guidance technologies and the capability to receive guidance from various sources such as ground radar and satellites.

While publicly available information about the AIM-260A’s range is scant, Naval News mentions that the most recent AIM-120D-3 variant was nearing the threshold range of the AIM-260A at 190 kilometers, but the latter missile likely exceeds that range.

The rendering reveals a sleek design optimized for high speed and low drag. It features a notably longer rocket motor than the AIM-120, suggesting significantly enhanced range and speed capabilities.

The AIM-260A is anticipated to be fitted in stealth fighters like the F-22 and F-35, as well as future stealthy drones under the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. This development reflects the US military’s response to longer-range threats, particularly from Chinese missiles.

Despite active testing, the exact timeline for the AIM-260A’s fielding remains unclear, and there has been no public confirmation of its operational status yet. The JATM’s advanced propulsion and potentially multi-mode seeker technology highlight significant advancements in US air-to-air combat capabilities.

This development follows the relatively recent unveiling of advanced Chinese air-to-air missiles. The People’s Liberation Army-Air Force (PLAAF) has unveiled its J-16 fighters equipped with the PL-17 missile, a long-range beyond visual range (BVR) weapon designed to neutralize high-value aerial targets, such as airborne warning and control system (AWACS) and tankers.

The PL-17, significantly larger than its predecessor, the PL-15, features a dual-pulse rocket motor, thrust-vectoring controls, and speeds exceeding Mach 4. Its guidance system integrates an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and a two-way datalink, enhancing resistance to electronic countermeasures.

Additionally, China is developing hypersonic air-to-air missiles to counter US stealth bombers, such as the B-21 Raider. These weapons, reportedly capable of reaching Mach 9, leverage solid-fuel pulse engines and extreme heat resistance, allowing unpredictable flight paths.

China’s missile strategy aligns with its broader anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) doctrine, aiming to push US and allied forces farther from its coastline.

The BVR revolution in fighter combat has shifted engagements from close-range dogfights to long-range, sensor-driven confrontations, with fighters using stealth, electronic warfare (EW), and active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar to detect and engage adversaries from standoff distances, often before detection, says  Samuel Leiter in a March 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) paper.

Leiter mentions that this shift reduces attrition and maintains an advantage, emphasizing the critical need for enhanced capabilities in modern aerial warfare.

He points out that simulations show that US and Japanese forces with superior aircraft like the F-22 and F-35 consistently perform those of China in engagements despite numerical disadvantages.

However, China may already have countermeasures for the AIM-260A and similar missiles. In June 2024, Asian Military Review mentions that China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and PLA Naval Air Force (PLANAF) are deploying sophisticated EW platforms like the Y-9DZ and J-16D.

These platforms, equipped with advanced jamming pods and electronic support measures (ESM), are designed to disrupt enemy missile guidance systems and radar operations.

China’s innovation in EW aims to neutralize BVR threats and maintain air superiority in contested regions, reflecting a shift towards dominating the electronic spectrum to counter advanced missile technologies.

As to how US and Chinese stealth fighters compare, Brent Eastwood mentions in a 1945 article this month that while China’s J-20 features radar-evading features, advanced avionics, and long-range strike capabilities, its stealth is considered inferior to US fifth-generation jets such as the F-22 and F-35.

However, Abraham Abrams mentions in a November 2024 article for Aviation Geek Club that the J-20’s combat radius, nearly double that of the F-22 and F-35, allows for extended operational reach, crucial for Pacific theater engagements.

Abrams notes that the J-20’s advanced stealth design and high-thrust WS-15 engines enhance its speed, maneuverability and non-afterburner supersonic flight capabilities.

With its large internal fuel capacity and sophisticated avionics, Abrams says the J-20’s features provide superior endurance and operational flexibility.

Discussing how US F-22s and F-35s could be used in a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, Kris Osborne mentions in a September 2022 article for The National Interest (TNI) that the deployment of F-22 and F-35 fighter jets could be crucial in countering a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan, ensuring air superiority over the Taiwan Strait.

F-22s flying from Kadena Air Base in Japan, the F-35B’s vertical take-off and landing capabilities enabling operations from austere Pacific island airbases, and the F-35C’s carrier-launch versatility would significantly bolster US and allied air power.

Despite that technological advantage, US fighter readiness levels leave much to be desired. Last month, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that in 2024, F-22 readiness levels fell from 52% to 40.19%, while that of the F-35A held steady at 51.4%.

The ratings of older fighters, such as the F-15E and D, increased to 33% from 55%, respectively, to 52.9% and 63.7% as the oldest, worst-performing aircraft were retired. The F-15EX fleet, with just eight aircraft, had an 83.13% rating.

Further, David Deptula mentions in a May 2024 Forbes article that the US Air Force faces a critical fighter aircraft gap, exacerbated by recent cuts to F-35 purchases, which undermines its ability to counter China’s growing military power in the Pacific.

In line with those cuts to F-35 purchases, the program was placed under US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) scrutiny as it faces serious questions over its USD 2 trillion price tag, upgrade delays, software issues, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and maintenance and logistics problems.

Deptula points out that the US struggles to maintain air superiority with 55 fighter squadrons compared to 134 during Operation Desert Storm.

He stresses that China’s production of approximately 100 J-20 fighters annually, far exceeding the US F-22 fleet fixed at 187 units, further widens this gap, posing a significant threat to Taiwan.

Given those figures, General David Allvin mentioned in a February 2024 Air & Space Forces Magazine article that it would be cost-prohibitive for the US to build enough aircraft to maintain air superiority for days and weeks.

While Allvin says the US in the Pacific should not resign itself to operating in mutually denied airspace as seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, he calls for further development of affordable, off-the-shelf, unmanned aircraft to bolster numbers.

Continue Reading

China explores military applications with DeepSeek – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia, Technology

DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) model can be used in various military applications, from controlling unmanned vehicles to giving commands, according to a white paper recently published by Chongqing Landship Information Technology, an autonomous driving solution provider.

Landship said DeepSeek has excellent potential in military use, such as command, communications, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

“In military strategic planning, DeepSeek can conduct in-depth analysis of massive intelligence information and provide military commanders with accurate decision-making support,” it said. “DeepSeek has powerful language understanding and generation capabilities, allowing it to adapt to battlefield tasks quickly.”

Landship added that DeepSeek could collaborate with satellites, radars, and drones to improve the efficiency and accuracy of military reconnaissance. It can quickly identify key military targets from satellite images and estimate their sizes and numbers, supporting military decision-making.

Landship, formerly Beijing Landship Information Technology Co Ltd, was co-founded in 2012 by Zhang Dezhao and several other autonomous driving experts from Tsinghua University.

In 2015, the same team founded Beijing Zhixingzhe Technology Co, or IDriverPlus, to develop self-driving solutions, including a product called IDriverBrain.

IDriverPlus and Landship brand their products as Xingji, which means “star horse” (or Qianlima — a mythical horse that can run very fast) in Chinese.

Landship said on February 27 that it has deployed DeepSeek in a self-driving military vehicle called Xingji P60. It displayed the vehicle at the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX 2025) in Abu Dhabi from February 17 to 21. 

The company said the P60 integrated Landship’s civil-use self-driving software and DeepSeek’s military-use large language models (LLMs) to achieve efficient information processing and decision-making in complex and changing environments. LLMs refer to AI models like ChatGPT, which can understand human language.
 
IDriverPlus’ Chief Technology Officer and Landship’s General Manager Wang Xiao said the company hopes to lead new trends in the defense sector by offering high-performance products at affordable costs.

According to online footage, the vehicle was not called P60 but CS/VP16B at the exhibition. It was shown at the booth of Norinco, or China North Industries Corporation, a state-owned defense and technology company.

Last October, IDriverPlus signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Harbin No.1 Jiqi Manufacture Group Company Ltd, a unit of Norinco, to jointly develop all-terrain unnamed rescue vehicles.

Huawei’s support

DeepSeek launched its latest AI model, DeepSeek R1, on January 20. It trained the AI model using only 2,000 Nvidia H800 graphic processing units and a low-cost method called “knowledge distillation.”

During the distillation, DeepSeek asked a more intelligent chatbot, such as Alibaba’s Qwen or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, many questions and used the answers to fine-tune its logic to become more intelligent.

DeepSeek R1’s debut in late January caused a slump in United States stocks, as investors worried they might have overvalued AI stocks.  

Xu Bingjun, a military columnist and a senior researcher with Xinhua Liaowang think tank, praised DeepSeek’s low-cost strategy in a recent article titled “How DeepSeek changes military AI and its impact on the United States and Western countries.” 

“DeepSeek can be applied to intelligent combat systems to significantly improve combat effectiveness by analyzing real-time battlefield situations, optimizing combat plans, and predicting enemy actions,” he says in the article.

“With DeepSeek, more autonomous weapons, drones, and unmanned tanks and ships can be developed,” he says. “These unmanned combat platforms can perform tasks autonomously in complex environments, reducing casualties while improving combat efficiency.”

In early February, US lawmakers introduced a bipartisan congressional bill to ban DeepSeek from government devices due to national security concerns. Some states, like New York and Virginia, the US Navy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), have stopped their employees from using DeepSeek on official devices.

Landship said it worked with Huawei Technologies’ Mobile Data Center (MDC) to draft its latest White Paper about DeepSeek’s potential military applications. It said it hopes to promote using DeepSeek in the military field through cooperation.

The White Paper disclosed Huawei’s AI goals for 2025:

  • March – Deploying DeepSeek R1 on Huawei MDC’s system to realize semantic understanding and assisted decision-making, and also to improve real-time reasoning;
  • April – Deploying DeepSeek’s Janus-pro 7B on Huawei MDC’s system to realize multi-modal video understanding and improve real-time image understanding;
  • June –  Running DeepSeek’s natural language processing (NLP) program with Huawei’s 310P and Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics’ RK3588 chips;
  • September – Testing DeepSeek-powered drones;
  • December – Using the drones to identify complex camouflage targets.

On August 17, 2022, IDriverPlus and Huawei signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement to develop “autonomous driving + AI” solutions using Huawei’s Ascend AI chips.

On September 9 of the same year, Huawei’s Vice President Deng Taihua visited IDriverPlus’ headquarters in Beijing to discuss self-driving vehicle projects. IDriverPlus said it would test its software at Huawei’s Ascend AI Computing Center, which commenced operations in February 2023.

Yong Jian is a contributor to the Asia Times. He is a Chinese journalist who specializes in Chinese technology, economy and politics. 

Read: DeepSeek is now the brain of Chinese state-owned firms

Continue Reading

Trump and Vance clash angrily with Zelensky over ‘minerals deal’ – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

The visit of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House has not gone to plan – at least not to his plan. There were extraordinary scenes as a press conference between Zelensky and Trump descended into acrimony, with the US president loudly berating his opposite number, whom he accused of “gambling with world war three.”

“You either make a deal or we’re out,” Trump told Zelensky. Vice President JD Vance also got in on the act, accusing the Ukrainian president of “litigating in front of the American media,” and saying his approach was “disrespectful.” At one point he asked Zelensky: “Have you said ‘thank you’ even once?”

Reporters present described the atmosphere as heated with voices raised by both Trump and Vance. The New York Times said the scene was “one of the most dramatic moments ever to play out in public in the Oval Office and underscored the radical break between the United States and Ukraine since Mr Trump took office.”

Underlying the angry exchanges were differences between the Trump administration and the Ukrainian government over the so-called “minerals deal” that Zelensky was scheduled to sign.

Any lack of Ukrainian enthusiasm for the deal is understandable.

In its present form, it looks more like a memorandum of understanding that leaves several vital issues to be resolved later. The deal on offer is the creation of what will be called a “reconstruction investment fund,” to be jointly owned and managed by the US and Ukraine.

Into the proposed fund will go 50% of the revenue from the exploitation of “all relevant Ukrainian government-owned natural resource assets (whether owned directly or indirectly by the Ukrainian government)” and “other infrastructure relevant to natural resource assets (such as liquified natural gas terminals and port infrastructure).”

That means that private infrastructure – much of it owned by Ukraine’s wealthy oligarchs – is likely to become part of the deal. This has the potential of further increasing friction between Zelensky and some very powerful Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, US contributions are less clearly defined. The preamble to the agreement makes it clear that Ukraine already owes the US. The very first paragraph notes that “the United States of America has provided significant financial and material support to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.”

This figure, according to Trump, amounts to US$350 billion. The actual amount, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, is about half that.

Western and Ukrainian analysts have also pointed out that there may be fewer, and less accessible, mineral and rare earth deposits in Ukraine than are currently assumed. The working estimates have been based mostly on Soviet-era data.

Since the current draft leaves details on ownership, governance and operations to be determined in a future fund agreement, Trump’s very big deal is at best the first step. Future rounds of negotiations are to be expected.

Statement of intent

From a Ukrainian perspective, this is more of a strength than a weakness. It leaves Kyiv with an opportunity to achieve more satisfactory terms in future rounds of negotiation. Even if any improvements will only be marginal, it keeps the US locked into a process that is, overall, beneficial for Ukraine.

Take the example of security guarantees. The draft agreement offers Ukraine nothing anywhere near NATO membership. But it notes that the US “supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace,” adding that: “Participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments.”

The significance of this should not be overstated. At its bare minimum, it is an expression of intent by the US that falls short of security guarantees but still gives the US a stake in the survival of Ukraine as an independent state.

But it is an important signal both in terms of what it does and does not do – a signal to Russia, Europe and Ukraine.

Trump does not envisage that the US will give Ukraine security guarantees “beyond very much.” He seems to think that these guarantees can be provided by European troops (the Kremlin has already cast doubts on this idea).

But this does not mean the idea is completely off the table. On the contrary, because the US commitment is so vague, it gives Trump leverage in every direction.

He can use it as a carrot and a stick against Ukraine to get more favorable terms for US returns from the reconstruction investment fund. He can use it to push Europe towards more decisive action to ramp up defense spending by making any US protection for European peacekeepers contingent on more equitable burden-sharing in NATO.

And he can signal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that the US is serious about making a deal stick – and that higher American economic stakes in Ukraine and corporate presence on the ground would mean US-backed consequences if the Kremlin reneges on a future peace agreement and restarts hostilities.

That these calculations will ultimately lead to the “free, sovereign and secure Ukraine” that the agreement envisages is not a given.

For now, however, despite all the shortcomings and vagueness of the deal on key issues – and the very public argument between the parties – it still looks like it serves all sides’ interests to move forward in this direction.

This article has been updated with details of the meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump.

Stefan Wolff is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko is a professor of international relations and the Jean Monnet professor of European security at the National University Odesa Law Academy.

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

Continue Reading

Steps needed after robot nearly head-butted China festival spectator – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia, Technology

Humanoid robots are supposed to be our loyal assistants, but we saw another side to them the other day. Chinese robot manufacturer Unitree was demonstrating its latest H1 robots at a lantern festival in the city of Taishan, Guangdong province, when one walked up to the crowd barrier and seemed to lunge at an elderly woman, nearly headbutting her.

The incident quickly went viral, and sparked a fierce debate about whether the robot actually attacked the woman or had tripped up. It’s mostly being overlooked that we’re a long way from having robots that could intentionally attack someone – machines like these are often remote controlled – but the danger to the public is clearly real enough.

With sales of humanoid robots set to skyrocket over the next decade, the public will increasingly be at risk from incidents of this kind. In our view as robotics researchers, governments have put very little thought into the risks.

Here are some urgent steps that they should take to make humanoid robots as safe as possible.

1. Increase owner requirements

The first important issue is to what extent humanoid robots will be controlled by users. Whereas Tesla’s Optimus can be remotely operated by people in a control center, others such as the Unitree H1s are controlled by the user with a handheld joystick.

Currently on sale for around $110,000, they come with software development kits on which customers can develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems, though only to a limited extent. For example, your robot could say a sentence or recognize a face but not take your kids to school.

Who is to blame if someone gets hurt or even killed by a human-controlled robot? It’s hard to know for sure – any discussion about liability would first involve proving whether the harm was caused by human error or a mechanical malfunction.

This came up in a Florida case where a widower sued medical robot-maker Intuitive Surgical Inc. over his wife’s death in 2022. Her death was linked to injuries she sustained from a heat burn in her intestine during an operation that was caused by a fault in one of the company’s machines.

The case was dropped in 2024 after being partially dismissed by a district judge. But the fact that the widower sued the manufacturer rather than the medics demonstrated that the robotics industry needs a legal framework for preventing such situations as much as the public does.

While for drones there are aviation laws and other restrictions to govern their use in public areas, there are no specific laws for walking robots.

So far, the only place to have put forward governance guidelines is China’s Shanghai province. Published in summer 2024, those regulations include stipulating that robots must not threaten human security, and that manufacturers must train users on how to use these machines ethically.

For robots controlled by owners, in the UK there is currently nothing preventing someone from taking a robot dog out for a stroll in a busy park, or a humanoid robot to the pub for a pint.

As a starting point, we could ban people from controlling robots under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or when they are otherwise distracted such as using their phones. Their use could also be restricted in risky environments such as confined spaces with lots of members of the public, places with fire or chemical hazards, and the roofs of buildings.

2. Improve design

Robots that looks sleek and can dance and flip are fun to watch, but how safe are the audiences? Safe designs would consider everything from reducing cavities where fingers could get caught, to waterproofing internal components.

Protective barriers or exoskeletons could further reduce unintended contact, while cushioning mechanisms could reduce the effect of an impact.

Robots should be designed to signal their intent through lights, sounds and gestures. For example, they should arguably make a noise when entering a room so as not to surprise anyone.

Even drones can alert their users if they lose signal or battery and need to return to home, and such mechanisms should also be built into walking robots. There are no legal requirements for any such features at present.

Robot opening a door
‘I am now exiting the room.’ Simple Line

It’s not that manufacturers are entirely ignoring these issues for walking robots. Unitree’s quadroped Go2, for instance, blinks and beeps when the battery is low or if it is overheating.

It also has automatic emergency cut-offs in these situations, although they must be triggered by a remote operator when the robot is in “telemetric mode.” Crucially, however, there are no clear regulations to ensure that all manufacturers meet a certain safety standard.

3. Train the operators

Clearly there will be dangers with robots using AI features, but remote-operated models could be even more dangerous. Mistakes could result from users’ lack of real-world training and experience in real-life situations.

There appears to be a major skills gap in operator training, and robotics companies will need to prioritize this to ensure operators can control machines efficiently and safely.

In addition, humans can have delayed reaction times and limited concentration, so we also need systems that can monitor the attention of robot operators and alert them to prevent accidents. This would be similar to the HGV-driver distraction-detection systems that were installed in vehicles in London in 2024.

4. Educate the public

The incident in China has highlighted current misconceptions about humanoid robots as the media are once again blaming AI despite the fact that this was not the issue. This risks causing widespread mistrust and confusion among the public.

If people understand to what extent walking robots are owner-operated or remote-operated, it will change their expectations about what the robot might do, and make everyone safer as a result.

Also, understanding the owner’s level of control is vital for managing buyers’ expectations and forewarning them about how much they’ll need to learn about operating and programming a robot before they buy one.

Carl Strathearn is a lecturer in computer science at Edinburgh Napier University and Emilia Sobolewska is a lecturer and researcher in applied informatics at Edinburgh Napier University.

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

Continue Reading

Trump tariffs could be bargaining chip or economic bomb – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statement on February 25 that the US was experiencing a personal business crisis and that the Trump administration intended to “re-privatize” the economy flashed crisis instructions.

The previous administration over-relying on excessive government spending and excessive regulation, according to Trump’s chief economic official in a speech.” We had an economy that may have had some reasonable metrics but finally was brittle underneath.

Does the Trump administration use the threat of tariffs to stifle international funding in the US, or did taxes began a trade conflict with Europe and Asia, depending on one important political matter: whether the US will experience a recession this year.

Higher tariffs will have a significant impact on domestic inflation because the United States is so dependent on imports. However, the outcome will benefit US growth if the response of the European Community, Japan, and China is an increase in investment in the US.

Recession indicators include the worst consumer confidence survey results since 2021, a decline in freight shipment volumes, a decline in equipment investment in the fourth quarter of 2024, and a 0.9 % decline in retail sales ( before factoring in inflation ) in January.

It’s difficult to connect the dismal survey results released last week by the Conference Board and the University of Michigan with the fact that the top tenth of US earners account for half of consumer spending. The average consumer may be pessimistic, but a tenth of US households ‘ spending choices will determine the pace for aggregate data.

The decline in private investment during the fourth quarter is a major concern. The worst investment report since 2021 was nearly 6/10ths of a percentage point off the fourth quarter’s GDP growth.

The final GDP report for 2024 should be read with caution because the investment component is volatile and the gross domestic product is one of the least reliable series we have. However, it’s still a problem.

A rise in investment in subsidized semiconductor manufacturing facilities was a result of the Biden CHIPS Act. The end of the Biden subsidies likely accounts for a large portion of the equipment investment decline.

Graphic: Asia Times

A harder number to find is nondefense capital goods orders that exclude aircraft, and this indicates a year-over-year decline of more than 20 % as of December 2024.

Graphic: Asia Times

The CASS Index of Freight Volume, which was created from billions of CASS payments, is one of the few reliable indicators of US economic activity. This indicates a significant decline in January. Although wet might be a factor, but freight volume has been declining for several months.

Graphic: Asia Times

If tariffs result in higher prices for both consumers and industrial users, Treasury Secretary Bessent’s “private sector recession” could quickly worsen.

Graphic: Asia Times

Since 2020, imports of capital goods ( excluding cars ) have increased by nearly 40 % in real terms. Semi-finished goods and other production inputs are some of the items that the US currently imports more than it does domestically.

It will be difficult for domestic manufacturers to replace imports with local production because so much of US manufacturing is dependent on foreign inputs. Ex ante, it’s impossible to predict how much of the tariffs will be absorbed by foreign exporters, either through currency devaluation or lower prices, and how much of it will result in price increases.

The Trump administration has threatened that the answer to 20 % tariffs on Chinese imports and 25 % tariffs on European imports will be” a lot.”

Follow David P. Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman

Continue Reading

Australia’s Albanese falls victim to a Chinese burn – Asia Times

By:
On:
In: Asia

As the Albanese government struggles to stay on its political feet, who would have thought the China issue would suddenly insert itself into the campaign, leaving the prime minister looking, at best, flat-footed?

Improving and stabilising what had become a toxic bilateral relationship under Scott Morrison has been one of the Albanese government’s major pluses in its foreign and trade policy.

China has taken off all of the roughly A$20 billion (US$12.4 billion) in barriers it had enacted on Australian exports. Australian lobsters are back on Chinese menus. And who can forget the prime minister’s visit to China, when he was lauded as “a handsome boy.”

But now, almost on the eve of the formal campaign, a Chinese military exercise in the Tasman Sea has not just reminded Australians of Chinese military power, but has left the prime minister appearing poorly informed. Or not wanting to offend the Chinese.

Of course, China did not set out to force Anthony Albanese into what were publicly misleading comments. That was all his own doing. The China incident was on the morning of Friday last week, when its navy commenced the live-fire exercise.

Albanese was briefed on Friday afternoon. Later in the day, a reporter asked him about an ABC report of “commercial pilots [being] warned about a potential hazard in airspace” where three Chinese warships had been sailing.

The prime minister said: “China issued, in accordance with practice, an alert that it would be conducting these activities, including the potential use of live fire.” This told, at best, a sliver of what was a rather alarming story.

The government says the Chinese had acted in accordance with the law, but the amount of notice they’d given (which was not provided directly to Australia) was inadequate. Representations about this were made by Foreign Minister Penny Wong to the Chinese.

It took evidence before Senate estimates hearings this week to paint a full picture of what happened.

On Monday, Rob Sharp, CEO of Airservices Australia (the country’s civil air navigation services provider) told senators: “We became aware at two minutes to ten on Friday morning – and it was, in fact, a Virgin Australia aircraft that advised one of our air traffic controllers – that a foreign warship was broadcasting that they were conducting a live firing 300 nautical miles east off our coast. So that’s how we first found out about the issue.”

Initially, “we didn’t know whether it was a potential hoax or real.” Meanwhile, a number of commercial planes were in the air and some diverted their routes.

On Wednesday, Australian Defense Force Chief David Johnston was asked at another estimates hearing whether Defence was only notified of what was happening from a Virgin flight and Airservices Australia 28 minutes after the Chinese operation firing window commenced. Johnston’s one-word reply was “Yes.”

Australia does not know whether the Chinese ships, which proceeded towards Tasmania, intend to circumnavigate the continent, or whether they have been accompanied by a submarine.

Relations with China won’t be a first-order issue with most voters at this cost-of-living election. But these events play to the Dutton opposition, for whom national security is home-ground territory. They reinforce the broader impression, which has taken hold, of Albanese being poor with detail.

Dutton said on Sydney radio on Thursday, “I don’t know whether he makes things up, but he seems to get flustered in press conferences. You hear it – the umming and ahing, and at the end of it, you don’t know what he’s actually said.

“But what we do know is that he is at odds with the chief of the defense force, and he needs to explain why, on such a totemic issue, he either wasn’t briefed, that he’s made up the facts, that he’s got it wrong.”

Wong hit back, “We have been very clear China is going to keep being China, just as Mr Dutton isn’t going to stop being Dutton – the man who once said it was inconceivable we wouldn’t go to war is going to keep beating the drums of war.

“The Labor government will be calm and consistent; not reckless and arrogant.”

There’s one political complication for Dutton in seeking to exploit the China issue. Despite his natural hawkishness, in recent times he has been treading more softly on China, with an eye to the importance of voters of Chinese heritage in some seats.

The Trump administration has dramatically increased the uncertainty of the international outlook that the Australian government, whether Labor or Coalition, will face during the next parliamentary term.

Defense Minister Richard Marles this week talked up the US administration’s policy in the region. “We are very encouraged by the focus that the Trump administration is giving in terms of its strategic thinking to the Indo Pacific.”

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who was in Washington lobbying for a tariff exemption was also upbeat, declaring that “the alliance and the economic partnership between Australia and the US is as strong as it’s ever been.”

Whether we get that exemption will be an early indication of where we stand in terms of the special relationship with the US. But who knows what the US might want in return.

A volatile world and perhaps pressure from the US may push Australia into spending more on defense, which on present planning is due to tick past 2% of GDP.

Dutton has already said he would put more funding into defence, although, like most other aspects of opposition policy, the amount is vague. The Coalition says when it produces its costings (which will be in the last days before the election) there will be more precision.

We’ve yet to see how the crucial US-China relationship evolves. That trajectory will have implications for Australia, positive or negative.

On the very worst scenario, if China, encouraged by US President Donald Trump’s benign attitude to Russia, moved on Taiwan, the security of which the president has refused to guarantee, that could produce a dire situation in the region.

Australia remains confident of continuing American support for AUKUS. But if Trump becomes even more arbitrary and adventurous, AUKUS could become a lot less popular not in America but in Australia.

Michelle Grattan is professorial fellow, University of Canberra

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

Continue Reading