In his State of the Union address in 2002, then-US president George W. Bush used the expression “axis of evil” to describe Iran, North Korea and Iraq. The phrase was a deliberate evocation of the Axis powers of World War II — Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan — whose actions eviscerated the peace of the period between the two world wars and plunged the world into another conflagration.
The expression drew significant criticism in the US and abroad. Critics said that the three countries were not sufficiently aligned to be an “axis.”
However, hindsight shows that the Bush administration was half right. An axis of evil was forming, but the shock of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, distorted US foreign policy and diverted attention from the key protagonists: China and Russia.
Today, China’s rapid militarization, neo-imperialist foreign policy and Han-Chinese ultra-nationalism are well-documented, but it has taken Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to rouse the international foreign policy establishment from its intellectual torpor over his similarly nefarious designs and revanchist foreign policy.
Perhaps nothing typifies the myopic nature of Western foreign policy over the past few decades more than former US president Barack Obama’s ridicule of then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during a televised debate in 2012. Mocking Romney for warning that Russia posed the greatest geopolitical threat to the US, Obama said: “The 1980s are calling. They want their foreign policy back. The Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Since his 2002 address, the Bush administration’s warnings over Iran and North Korea have been vindicated. Iranian leaders and the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps have repeatedly vowed to “eradicate Israel off the face of the Earth,” while its scientists are on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, North Korea continues to develop its nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile technology, while its leadership appears increasingly unpredictable.
However, by declaring a “war on terror,” the US and its allies threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Middle East in a fruitless search for “weapons of mass destruction” and regime change. Their tunnel vision over al-Qaeda and terrorism afforded Beijing the space to engage, virtually unchallenged, in an unprecedented peacetime military buildup.
Having spent decades remodeling itself to fight a terrorist insurgency in the desserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military — and those of its allies — are unprepared to fight a state-on-state war.
There are concerning signs that China and Russia have formed an alliance of convenience. Many analysts suspect that when Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met face-to-face prior to the Beijing Winter Olympics, they agreed to “scratch each other’s backs,” with China turning a blind eye toward Ukraine and Russia reciprocating as China invaded Taiwan. The cozy “bromance” between Putin and Xi might be turning into something more.
A CNN report said that a US diplomatic cable shared intelligence with Washington’s allies in Europe and Asia that showed the Kremlin approached Beijing for assistance in its invasion of Ukraine. The provision of military assistance from China to Russia would raise the prospect of a Cold War-style proxy conflict in Ukraine, akin to the wars in Vietnam and on the Korean Peninsula, with East ranged against West, democracies pitted against autocracies.
The globe appears to be dividing into two geopolitical hemispheres, with Taiwan, the US, European countries, India, Japan and South Korea on one side and an authoritarian bloc — China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea — on the other.
As the world unwinds from a historically unprecedented period of peace, Taiwan finds itself on a new geostrategic fault line, and on the front line against the real “axis of evil.”
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the largest naval exercise in the region, are aimed at deepening international collaboration and interaction while strengthening tactical capabilities and flexibility in tackling maritime crises. China was invited to participate in RIMPAC in 2014 and 2016, but it was excluded this year. The underlying reason is that Beijing’s ambitions of regional expansion and challenging the international order have raised global concern. The world has made clear its suspicions of China, and its exclusion from RIMPAC this year will bring about a sea change in years to come. The purpose of excluding China is primarily
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Delegation-level visits between the two countries have become an integral part of transformed relations between India and the US. Therefore, the visit by a bipartisan group of seven US lawmakers, led by US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul to India from June 16 to Thursday last week would have largely gone unnoticed in India and abroad. However, the US delegation’s four-day visit to India assumed huge importance this time, because of the meeting between the US lawmakers and the Dalai Lama. This in turn brings us to the focal question: How and to what extent