Why shouldn't the presumption be that they will just negotiate deals with Iran and accommodate the regime the United States flirted with trying to change? India, Japan, Pakistan, others are already negotiating Hormuz passage directly. Why not presume they will "clean up" by working directly with the source of the closure?
A couple of years old - but this was a fun podcast that really dug into what "Asia" is and isn't becoming. "State of Asia with Evan Feigenbaum ... On what Evan calls 'security narcissism,' Asian rules, and Europe's absent...
Most countries' response to "[you] guard and police Hormuz" in the absence of U.S. power because you are the ones "who use it" will presumably be to accommodate and then make deals with Tehran.
Spoiler alert: Fighting a conventional war with China, much less under the shadow of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, won't be anything like picking up Maduro in Caracas.
This story is being replicated in other regions too, e.g., Central Asia, where the China story now includes renewables, manufacturing, and more ... "Where early engagement centered on oil, gas and mining, recent years show a marked shift towards clean...
Somewhat heroically presumes they will be "forced to defend it" rather than just accommodating Iran ... which is essentially what some of them and other key consumers were already doing?
Here we go again with the "reverse Nixon" fantasy. This is an evergreen delusion from people who either played too many games of Risk or Stratego as kids, haven't actually bothered to read the history of what was happening when...
I'm afraid China's economic presence in Central Asia went way beyond oil, gas, and mining some time ago. If folks still think it's all just about extractive industries, they've missed quite a bit about the Chinese presence.
China learned economic coercion from the best, as I wrote with Adam Szubin in this coauthored 2023 essay in @ForeignAffairs: https://t.co/fsxpb7Zusb
If you aspire to primacy, then "WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE" are words that may very well come back to bite the United States in the ass.
The President posted this? If he was actually trying to persuade allies, partners, and others to deploy to Hormuz, this surely is not going to do it. But he obviously thinks this kind of thing is just so cute.
"Evan Feigenbaum, an Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that, after 10 years of US warnings about the need to constrain China, 'we’re now in a bizarro world where the president actually appears to be begging...
I'm no Clausewitz but "whether those operations would begin before or after hostilities end" seems like kind of an important detail.
Basically, the President is looking for an excuse to back out of the trip to Beijing and thus is trying to manufacture one? How else to possibly explain demanding a Chinese expeditionary naval deployment to the Gulf as a...
This is not in fact "a jaw dropping twist" to anyone who has paid attention to China's approach to the Middle East. Beijing has a diversified portfolio of partners and interests, has never put all its eggs in the Iran...