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Anglozionism

The City of London Elects Sunak as next British Prime Minister!

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Note by the Algora Editors: In the last week, the Kremlin escalated a major rhetorical offensive on the subject of Ukraine’s false flag “dirty bomb” plot, along the line that:  

“There is information about the contacts of the office of the President of Ukraine with representatives of the United Kingdom on the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons technology”.

Suddenly Liz Truss resigns, Boris Johnson withdraws his candidacy for the premiership, even Ben Wallace, the hawkish Defense Minister, is called  to Washington and then he also withdraws his candidacy. Did the Russians have the “smoking gun” on the plot to stage a false flag “dirty bomb” event? Very possible.

If so, then, is this the turning point in the war in Ukraine, the moment when the war in Ukraine has been decided? Is this the winning strategy of the Kremlin’s Special Military Operation?

by Gilbert Doctorow via Doctorow

Aside from the United Kingdom itself, there may be no single country taking a greater interest in the ongoing competition to replace Liz Truss as British Prime Minister than in India. After all, the leading contender for the post, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian descent and is married to the daughter of one of India’s richest men.

Against this background, a couple of hours ago I was delighted to participate alongside a half dozen other talking heads on a featured live broadcast hosted by Republic TV of India.  My fellow panelists, mostly Indians plus one Brit, examined the prospects of a Sunak premiership from various angles:  What will this mean for Indian-UK relations?  Whether an Indian can win not merely within the closed circle of Tory parliamentarians but in the next general election in two years time, when the people of Britain decide at the ballot box if they are content to be led by a man of color? What will a Sunak premiership mean for the pound sterling?  What does a Sunak premiership imply for British foreign policy generally?

As the last speaker, I was given the opportunity to upend the playing board and to suggest that Mr. Sunak, if he wins, will have been elected by ….the City of London.  This is not merely because he worked for Goldman Sachs before entering the House of Commons six years ago. It is because the City of London, aka Capital or The Markets effectively removed Liz Truss from office by facilitating the dramatic crash of gilts and the slide of the pound. The markets were responding to one stimulus: the evident incompetence, particularly the ignorance of economic laws demonstrated by the PM and her Chancellor of the Exchequer when they rolled out their mini-Budget shortly after taking office. The City was not interested in ideological convictions of the PM; they were interested in what works and what does not work in the real world.

Now what is extraordinary about that, you may ask? It is extraordinary that in the UK Capital still speaks, still decides who runs the country and how.  That raw fact alone may be the best justification for Brexit, because it sets Britain apart from every country on the Continent. Here in Europe we see incompetence in the premiers, in the cabinets of country after country. For the most part, it is not because the individuals in power are stupid, but because they have assumed portfolios for which they have had no grounding in their education or in their professional careers.  They receive their portfolios or leadership batons strictly through political horse-trading among coalition partners who have different agendas and agree only on the desirability of sharing out the spoils of electoral victory within the proportional representation schemes in place. And the same applies to the European Commission which sits atop all of the member states and barks orders. What is the quality of economic or defense decisions that you can expect to come from the desk of one Ursula von der Leyen, whose professional education was as a gynecologist and who was kicked upstairs to Brussels after she failed, as minister, to keep the German Defense Ministry free of corruption scandals.

 Here across Europe, and particularly in what is considered to be the locomotive of the European Union’s economy, Germany, Capital is silent.  Silent in the face of economic incompetence in high places no less egregious than that displayed by Liz Truss.  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is destroying the German economy by his stubborn, asinine insistence on denying Russian hydrocarbons access to the German and EU markets.

German companies are announcing their transfer of production to the United States and Asian countries where the cost of energy is vastly lower and where their end products can be competitive on global markets.  In fertilizers and glass and metals, industry is already shutting down capacity due to excessive energy costs, while Mr. Scholz beams before the television cameras as he announces that Germany will not run short of gas this winter because of his purchases from every imaginable supplier except Russia, damn the price.  Nonetheless, Industry and Capital are silent here about the political leadership responsible for the pending catastrophe. Only workers come out on the streets to complain about inflation and unsupportable energy costs at the household level.

The question which the moderator on Republic TV tossed to me was what to expect by way of foreign policy from a Sunak premiership.  My answer took no time to formulate:  it is likely to be a foreign policy dictated by The City of London. I expect this policy to be more moderate, less strident and hostile towards Russia and China than the policy of Boris Johnson or Liz Truss.  Not friendly, you understand, but not vicious either. Sunak is unlikely to speak about his readiness to press the nuclear button. At some point Realism has to trump Ideology and the Bubble.

Uncategorized

Can Iran’s T34 Drones Stop World War Three?

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by Declan Hayes

© Photo: REUTERS/Wana News Agency

Iran’s Shahed 136 kamikaze drone, the T34 of our age, is a global game changer, not least because some 22 countries are clamoring to buy them.

Iran’s Shahed 136 kamikaze drone, the T34 of our age, is a global game changer, not least because some 22 countries are clambering to buy them. First tested in Yemen and now going through its paces in the T34’s old stomping ground of Ukraine, these kamikazedrones, like the T34s before them, are showing themselves to be sturdy war horses that deliver bang for buck.

By releasing the Shahed 136 in swarms, Russian forces can overwhelm NATO’s defenses and, as the Shahed 136 loiters in mid-flight to choose its target, it causes consternation in Zelensky’s conscripts. Although it can evade missile defense systems [but] is vulnerable to small arms’ fire, NATO and their Israeli allies rightly fear it.

One important reason to fear Iran’s kamikaze drones is they were developed and produced under NATO’s most severe sanctions, instigated at the behest of nuclear armed Israel, which now knows with 100% certainty that its own illegal nuclear sites are totally vulnerable to Hezbollah strikes using even more advanced and infinitely more lethal versions of the Shahed 136.

For, let’s face it. Although Iran’s engineers can be very proud of their work, there is no doubt that Russia, Pakistan, India and, especially China, are reverse engineering Iran’s wunder-armament because it fits directly into the war doctrine of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army, which is to wage asymmetric warfare against the U.S. 7th Fleet and anyone and anything else NATO sends into the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

Lest this truism is lost on Japan, which has one of the world’s best navies, Japan should let the 7th Fleet stand alone. If the U.S. and its colonies wish to go toe to toe against China’s entire arsenal, Japan should not get involved as its cities are much too vulnerable to Chinese and North Korean counter attack. If the U.S. has a beef with China, just as it has a beef with all others, Japan should not make it Japan’s problem. If the U.S. sowed the wind, let the U.S. reap the whirlwind.

And then there is the calumny of calling these drones kamikaze. The original kamikaze were the divine winds, the typhoons which saw off the Mongol invaders and the more recent kamikaze were the patriotic Japanese pilots who flew their Mitsubishi and Kawasaki planes into attacking American warships off the Okinawan coast. Although the Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero was a beautiful plane that took the Americans some years to come to grips with, NATO has no hope of corralling Iran’s kamikazes. That is because the reverse engineers of Iran, Pakistan, India and China do not work under the same constrictions Imperial Japan’s engineers did.

In contrast to the Zero, it is the engineering simplicity of the Shahed series that make them the T34 of our age. Although the T34 had an inferior design to Germany’s over engineered Tiger tank, German generals von Kleist, Guderian and Jodl all affirmed what a game changer the T34 was. The engineering genius of the Soviets, much like their British allies with their ground breaking Sten gun, and their Mosquito wooden wonder bombers, was that they kept it simple.

The Germans, on the other hand, were obsessed with their engineering, rather than with winning the war. Even though the Nazis had jets ready to go in 1938, they only brought them into service in 1945 when the war was already lost and when the Luftwaffe’s pilots had not yet learned the best way to use defensive jets or to land them safely. As with the V1, V2 and V3 rocket series, the Nazis squandered their technological advantages. As they did by embroiling themselves in the muck and mire of the Ukraine where the Wehrmacht’s advanced weaponry ground to a halt, causing its officers and men, when faced with ever fresh waves of T34s, to despair.

Whereas much of that German failure can be attributed to the fact that the Third Reich was led by a clique of myopic madmen, NATO’s Top Gun myopia is due to their vegetarians’ lust for lucre at the expense of the lives of Panamanians, East Timorese, Palestinians and Russians and of even having a healthy, diverse, domestic economy.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the heart of NATO’s war-obsessed economies, AI was founded, funded, promoted and developed by NATO’s war machine so that NATO, like Hitler’s Reich before it, might have its own array of wunder weapons. But because NATO’s prey have now evolved to surpass the NATO predator at its own game, NATO, like Hitler before it, must prepare for a last roll of the dice. That last throw is a false flag tactical nuclear attack, something the Daily Mail and NATO’s other media outlets are never done prattling about.

First off, NATO has a long history of false flag attacks not only in Syria but in Cuba (Remember the Maine), Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin), and just about anywhere else they have invaded. As NATO’s media were fully complicit in all these war crimes, their bleatings about General Armageddon, Putin, the Wagner Group, the Chechens or the Russian Armed Forces can be safely ignored for the sake of analysis.

If a false flag tactical nuke is deployed, then as with Syria, where NATO wants us to believe that the Syrian Arab Army needlessly deployed chemical weapons every time victory was at hand, the question is cui bono, who benefits? The only answer can be NATO and the gangster Kiev junta it supports. Not only has NATO deployed such weapons in the past but it has repeatedly threatened to use them over the last 70 years against the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and others. Only a simpleton would believe that BlackRock or any of the other financial powers behind NATO would be perturbed by a nuclear bomb in Ukraine, as long as “Putin” could be blamed and their own quarterly profit forecasts were not hurt. If they had no problems using white phosphorus in Serbia and Iraq, why should a small nuke in the Black Sea perturb them?

Far from being idle speculation, that scenario is totally on the money. Even after America’s second nuclear terrorist attack on Nagasaki, many Imperial Japanese Army officers were prepared to fight on regardless. As were considerable numbers of Waffen SS officers as their Reich crumbled around them. And then we have the various doomsday cults, of which there is no shortage in Kiev or, for that matter, in Washington which long ago silenced Phil Donahue and its handful of other genuine anti-war journalists. If Zelensky or his CIA handlers thought they could get away with it, make no mistake, all the evidence indicates they would drop the big one.

The atomization of anti war movements in Britain, Ireland and Germany and the control of their remnants by the military intelligence units of their respective countries does not augur well, either. There currently is no effective opposition in NATO’s home countries to a false flag tactical nuclear bomb. The Nazi regime in Kiev, like the CIA’s head hacking, flesh eating Syrian rebels before them, are begging for NATO air intervention on any false flag pretext that fits the bill.

Given all that, there are only a limited number of end plays. If NATO opens the door to nuclear Armageddon, then it is soyonara and no more cherry blossom seasons in Yasukuni shrine for any of us. If mutually assured self destruction is the price NATO demands, so be it. If, on the other hand, Iran’s engineering resilience can convince the U.S., Israel and their colonies to see that the global chessboard has tilted in favor of China and their other self made enemies, then there might be hope life, as it should be lived, can continue. Though the ball is in NATO’s court, they must realize that they no longer dictate either the play or the rules of the game. They can either live with that reality or perish in the light of that truth.

Cultural/Ideological Divide

Misreading Xi and the Rise of Li

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Li Qiang is now China’s No 2, an appointment that shows Xi’s dedication to a high-tech-led future for China. Image: Screengrab / NDTV

The professional China commentariat and its echo chamber in the Western media were blindsided by the appointment of Shanghai party head Li Qiang as the country’s premier, the number two position to Xi Jinping.

Li is a tech-savvy supporter of high-tech entrepreneurship who believes that China’s future lies in the digital economy. Xi, the Western press insisted with near unanimity, had reverted to Maoism.

Precisely the opposite of what the commentariat expected seems to have happened and the Western press is scrambling to explain the anomaly. Here’s a sampling of Western press comment:

“Xi Jinping promotes loyal Shanghai chief” (Reuters)

“Xi Jinping promotes loyal Shanghai chief to upper echelons of power” (Financial Times)

“A loyal aide in Shanghai takes a leading role in Beijing” (New York Times)

“Xi loyalist likely to be China’s next premier” (Barron’s)

“Promotion of Shanghai chief puts loyalty over everything” (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg tried to explain why it failed to foresee Li’s rise saying, “When Li’s initial lighter-touch approach to China’s strict Covid Zero strategy was breached by the more transmissible omicron variant earlier this year, [his] ascent was cast into doubt.”

That loyalty was a factor in Li’s appointment is obvious. Political leaders, Chinese or Western, do not normally appoint deputies who are known for disloyalty.

The “loyalty” explanation is no explanation at all. A better explanation is that the Anglo-American political establishment has misread Xi from beginning to end.

Li’s appointment should be a wake-up call. The ubiquitous ideological blinders and preconceptions in the foreign policy establishment are the cause of a chronic misreading of China, leading to concomitant political reactions with dangerous implications and consequences.

Xi Jinping and his new de facto deputy Li Qiang in a file photo. Image: NDTV / Screengrab

In fact, Li’s appointment as premier-designate was foreseeable as well as foreseen. Asia Times wrote as much on October 21, forecasting that Xi would opt for retiring four out of the seven Politburo Standing Committee members, including not only Premier Li Keqiang, but also the widely touted premiership candidate Wang Yang, and would not miss the opportunity to install a new, younger and different cast of leaders.

Li is the Shanghai party chief. Few if any previous Shanghai leaders have failed to advance to the Standing Committee, Xi included. That his advance to the number two position nonetheless came as a surprise to most Western analysts merely proves how much so many have misread Xi in particular and Chinese governance in general.

Li studied business administration and holds an MBA degree from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a top-tier Asian business and technology school funded by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing. He has supported technological entrepreneurship as the leading edge of China’s development.

Among other things, Li was one of Jack Ma’s most visible supporters in the China Communist Party leadership. He brought Elon Musk’s Tesla to Shanghai. His appointment affirms the leadership’s support for private-led high-tech industry.

Accelerated technological innovation and STEM talent development were keywords in Xi’s work report. What Western analysts (and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken) picked out instead was the reiteration of China’s longstanding policy with respect to Taiwan.

Li was chosen for his track record of economic and financial innovation in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, for bringing in major foreign investment (up by 32% in 2021 despite Covid) and for the policy papers on economic development he wrote for Xi as his assistant in Zhejiang.

So, then, what should be made of Xi’s alleged neo-Maoist, leftist and anti-capitalist emphasis on “common prosperity?”

Throughout his career, Xi has shown himself to be a master of the most characteristic maneuver in Chinese imperial governance: Feint in one direction in order to disarm prospective opponents, while preparing to move in another.

The elements in the Party who opposed Xi in 2012 remain his antagonists, the supporters of a Fortress China that shares the poverty rather than creates the wealth. His first move in power after 2012 was to crush the group around Bo Xilai centered in Chongqing and part of China’s northeastern rust bowl, and to unleash China’s private sector.

Sent packing. China plans to lay off 500,000 heavy industry workers. Photo: AFPXi’s ‘common prosperity’ is more about internal politics than ideology. Photo: AFP

During the past two years, Xi adopted the rhetoric of income redistribution under the watchword “common prosperity,” and cracked down on China’s consumer Internet sector. In classic Chinese style, he adopted the rhetoric of the Communist Party elements he most opposed, only to move decisively in the opposite direction.

Ideologically blinded Western analysts and officials consistently miss the point. China’s state is the least ideological, most ruthlessly pragmatic entity in the world. To the extent its leaders succeed, they do so by achieving prosperity and security by whatever means necessary to meet their objectives.

Xi knows that China’s state-owned industry is too sclerotic and corrupt to lead the transition to a digital economy and that the Chinese state needs private entrepreneurs to take the lead. But he also knows that entrenched political interests linked to the state sector will not just grumble at the sudden ascendance of entrepreneurs but also make determined political moves.

“[Li] has a much closer relationship with Xi compared to [Premier] Li Keqiang. … Xi is likely going to give him much more room and power to manage the economy,” Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of the Study Times, the official newspaper of the Central Party School, told the South China Morning Post.

To stay in power, Xi or any other Chinese leader must placate the old guard and defuse popular envy of the newly rich while allowing entrepreneurs to lead economic transformation.

But Xi’s core agenda, repeated in the work report, is to make China a moderately prosperous economy by 2035. To do so, China needs and he must achieve a gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of between 4% and 5% per annum.

Li has demonstrated that he has the energy and executive capability to get things done. A Brookings Institution study reports that in 2018-19 he mobilized Shanghai’s capabilities and workforce in tandem with Elon Musk to build a Tesla factory capable of making 500,000 electric cars annually.

The first Chinese-made Tesla 3 rolls off the line at the Shanghai Gigafactory, while employees of the new facility look on. Creedit: Ti Gong, Shine.com.

Amazingly, It took only ten months for this joint venture to advance from construction to full operation.

The sweeping change in China’s leadership denotes an inflection point. Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 reforms eventually moved nearly 700 million Chinese from countryside to city, replacing the rural economy of traditional China with a smokestack economy dominated by state-owned enterprises.

China’s state sector, in turn, became a political power base in its own right. Xi concluded that he needed a new broom to sweep aside the obstacles to a digitized industrial economy. With Li’s appointment as his de facto deputy, Xi’s well on his way.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

New Book Details How Beijing Manipulated Western Elites

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Authored by Daniel Teng via The Epoch Times,

Beijing’s highly secretive Ministry of State Security (MSS) leveraged and manipulated leading Western political and business elites to deepen the Chinese Communist Party’s influence around the world, according to a new book by Alex Joske, an expert on Chinese foreign interference.

The early pages of “Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World” detail how billionaire George Soros, inspired by his work establishing the Open Society Foundation in post-communist Hungary, carried out similar work for China during Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform era.

The vehicle devised by Soros, and partner Liang Heng, was to establish the Fund for the Reform and Opening of China (the China Fund) to support cultural, business, and scientific research to assist with the country’s opening up, according to Joske, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Yet amid political manoeuvring between factions in the 1980s, the China Fund was forced to partner with the China International Culture Exchange Center (CICEC), an organisation claiming to be under the control of the Ministry of Culture.

George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, arrives for a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on April 27, 2017. (Olivier Hoslet/AFP/Getty Images)

Joske alleges that Soros and Liang soon discovered, however, that CICEC had its own motives for the China Fund, and that was to support political initiatives rather than activities associated with liberalising China.

Soros later closed the China Fund with CICEC co-chair Yu Enguang, revealed to be a “high-ranking official in the external police” or the MSS.

“The MSS seizure of the China Fund was an impressive display of the agency’s confidence in engaging with one of America’s best-connected and wealthiest men. What it learnt could be applied to future operations as the agency grew more aggressive and internationally focused over the following decade,” Joske wrote.

CICEC itself would continue to be a “custom-made organ” for meeting and secretly influencing recruits from around the world.

“Politically sensitive missions like engaging directly with George Soros or posing as liberals with the Party in order to gain the trust of foreigners are home turf for these officers,” he said.

Exploiting Ambition

Joske also notes that the MSS was very adept at exploiting the ambition of Western elites and cites the example of the former co-president of Goldman Sachs, John Thornton.

After quitting the banking giant, Thornton held several prominent positions with major Chinese institutions, including a directorship at the well-known Tsinghua University.

Journalist Josh Rogin alleged Thornton developed one of the “most reliable and high-level networks with the families that run the CCP,” which shaped Thornton’s views on how to manage China relations.

John L. Thornton, guest professor and director of Global Leadership Program at Tsinghua SEM and chairman of the board of the Brookings Institution, speaks during the 2011 Tsinghua Management Global Forum at Tsinghua SEM Auditorium in Beijing on Oct. 25, 2011. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

“Thornton’s beliefs about China’s future have been characterised by the same false narratives the MSS Social Investigation Bureau pushed on foreign scholars, diplomats, and elites. In 2008, he argued in an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine that the Party was actively considering moving towards democracy,” Joske wrote.

“Thornton’s writings reflect the same optimism about China that Party leaders and the MSS learnt to capitalise on decades earlier.”

The former Goldman Sachs executive went on to encourage the Trump administration to befriend Chinese leader Xi Jinping directly. Yet these efforts at diplomatic engagement with the Chinese leadership would eventually give way to tough sanctions on China to correct years of intellectual property theft and unbalanced trade.

Thornton, along with several major Wall Street figures, also allegedly attempted to sway the Biden administration on its China policy, but these efforts have also fallen to the wayside as scrutiny of the Chinese Communist Party becomes more widespread.

Exploiting a Love of China

Joske also draws attention to the Chinese regime’s use of people’s love for China outlining the example involving former Australian Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

Hawke was distraught in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and famously responded by granting 42,000 Chinese nationals’ asylum.

Joske says four years after the massacre, Hawke received a message from the Chinese consul in Sydney inviting him to visit China.

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke in Brisbane, Australia, on Aug. 16, 2010. (William West/AFP/Getty Images)

Hawke felt it was important that Australia-China relations grew, so agreed to do so. There he was received and welcomed by then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and then-Premier Li Peng.

“The special bromance between Chinese and Australian leaders was back on track. Hawke thought the fate of [former Premier] Zhao Ziyang, who eventually died in house arrest, was ‘extremely sad,’ but the importance of building ties to the Party leadership came first,” Joske wrote.

He further added that the issue of Tiananmen was eventually “swept under the rug,” and Hawke would go on to play a valuable role in selling China to the rest of the world.

Read more here…

Military Affairs

OSINT Investigators Name Real Losses of Ukraine’s Army

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OSINT (open-source intelligence) investigators have named real irretrievable losses of Ukraine’s army. As of 20 October 2022, according to OSINT, the Ukrainian Armed Forces had lost 402,000 people, of whom 387,000 were killed.

Losses among mercenaries and volunteers from Poland, the Baltics and Romania totaled 54,000, with 31,240 killed.

These are OSINT figures calculated using funeral agency summaries, morgue extracts and analysis of radio, cellular and satellite exchanges of AFU forces. @RTRDonetsk

The German publication ZEITUNG.DE citing American military experts, including retired representatives of the US Army command, says that the number of deaths among the Armed Forces of Ukraine is over 200 thousand people, or 15-20 thousand monthly. #Ukraine

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Why I’m an Abolitionist

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via  Toby Rogers

Saving Ukrainians from Themselves

Ukraine in Pursuit of the “Good Citizen”

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Sickening… 3 days ago the “Ukrainian people” were awarded the “European Parliament’s 2022 Sakharov [human rights peace] Prize” for their “bravery” and commitment to “democracy and human rights”.

No, it is not a joke. Meanwhile,

  

The Black Sea midnight is black. Blacker than the hands of Ukrainian mothers who bury their sons by the hundreds every day. Blacker than the nights of wives who cannot sleep, knowing that their husbands will never return. Blacker than the thoughts of those officials who sign death sentences for Ukrainian soldiers, sending them to the front. How can the soldiers of Ukraine not be caught at this midnight? Lay down their arms and raise!

Cultural/Ideological Divide

Xi Jinping Sends a Strong Message to the West

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This video is circulating in China, so a small context to it…

In China, opponents are excluded — the former Secretary General of the Communist Party of China, Hu Jintao, was forcibly removed from the meeting room.

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party was held in China: there were about 2300 delegates from all over the country at the meeting, but one turned out to be superfluous. The former Secretary General of the Party of China, Hu Jintao, was forcibly taken out of the hall.

The footage shows how two stewards approach Hu and escort him to the exit. The politician only looks around in confusion, but does not find support. Hu Jintao’s departure was not explained in the party.

Hu Jintao stands for maintaining good US relations, and is also an opponent of a forceful solution to the Taiwan issue. Such a conclusion from the hall “under the handles” is probably a symbolic point in Hu’s political career.

Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Han Zheng and Wang Yang, all Reformist & Liberal figures of the Chinese Communist Party, are out of the new Central Committee of the CPC, says Singapore-based The Strait Times.

There have been clear shifts in the party leadership with the cleansing of the pro-American vector.

The South China Morning Post writes that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s entry into the CCP Central Committee gives him a chance to be included in the Politburo of the CCP Central Committee.

But another party heavyweight, Liu He, apparently, did not enter the new composition of the CCP Central Committee. Liu was Xi Jinping’s main economic backbone and a key “Americanist” of the ruling group. He graduated from the School of Public Administration, Kennedy at Harvard University. During the trade war under Trump He oversaw negotiations with the United States. And although the negotiations were tough, He and the White House team were able to reach a deal in early 2020 (albeit a very conditional one).

This may mean that Xi does not need the services of the “Americanist” He due to the escalation around Taiwan – which will be at the center of the Secretary General’s third term.

Energy Wars

France and Germany Are on the Verge of a Quarrel

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The leaders of the key European Union countries continue slowly but surely to quarrel. However, there are fewer and fewer common, unifying topics.

And the main anti-Russian energy map is gradually being lost.

Germany and France want to play it completely differently.

Thus, Olaf Scholz said that he intends to allocate €200 billion for the implementation of the domestic energy assistance program. And Emmanuel Macron was outraged by this.

The first one (Scholz) is trying to somehow save the country’s economy by reducing the cost of gas, oil and electricity for consumers. He needs it fundamentally in order to retain power.

And the second (Macron) is furious, because he understands that the “yellow vests” are about to require similar measures. We’ll have to look for money somewhere. In addition, such a policy increases demand, which means that fuel will continue to rise in price. Finally, there is a shortage in Europe. Especially in France, where there are problems with gasoline. And now Germany will become a more attractive consumer for suppliers. The situation will only get worse.

There is another important detail that is not directly related to the relations between Berlin and Paris. This is another precedent. The most serious political and economic decision, capable of affecting the entire EU, was made by one of its member countries, Germany, independently. And Germany didn’t consult anyone. So why can’t others? For example, Hungary. What kind of sanctions can there be against it now, if we do not act according to the rules of double standards?

As for Emmanuel Macron, his current position is gradually becoming clear — to support the unity of the EU, because for all the failures within the country, it will be possible to justify to the population precisely that other members are not in unity on some issues and hence the problems.

Military Affairs

Taiwan Policy Act – Is War with China Next?

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“Currently there is the Taiwan Policy Act, which is wending through Congress right now. And if it passes, it will signal the end of the One China policy, literally a declaration of war. It prepares for a rotational presence of US forces on Taiwan Island, i.e. turning Taiwan into a military base, fast tracking weapons, declaring it a non-NATO ally, sending $6.5 billion worth of asymmetrical, lethal arms. And it does everything except literally declare war. But among those provisions, Section 803 is about sanctions against China. Exactly the type of sanctions that the US has been levying against Russia,” says KJ Noh, a journalist and political analyst.

Listen to more of KJ Noh’s analysis on the podcast.