Chinese President Xi Jinping told his American counterpart Donald Trump in April 2017 that “there are a thousand reasons to make the China-US relationship a success.” He added, “We should make the ‘cooperation cake’ bigger, define a list of priority cooperation areas and strive to gather as many early harvests as possible. Our two countries should accelerate negotiations on the bilateral investment agreement, promote healthy development of two-way trade and investment and explore pragmatic cooperation in infrastructure construction, energy, and other fields.” There is a growing recognition in the United States that strategic confrontation with China would lead to disaster. American hawks claim that China is poised to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force and propose military measures to stop this alleged aggression.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles kicked off his four-day visit to India on Monday. On Wednesday, he held discussions with his Indian counterpart Rajnath Singh. «The intent of exploiting the China-India border disputes to make trouble demonstrates that Australia has limited means to sow discord between China and India,» said Lan. The joint statement did not refer to China. As of press time, there is no report about Singh’s response to Marles’ words on China. This indicates that India has different views on China and its relations with Australia and India’s willingness to strengthen ties with Australia seems not as strong as that of Australia.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, urged on Friday coordinated improvement to guarantee that officials do not have the audacity, opportunity, or desire to engage in corruption. He noted that the fight against corruption is a major political struggle that the Party cannot afford to lose and should never lose because it concerns the people. Xi demanded a full victory in the anti-corruption campaign on Friday while addressing a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on improving anti-corruption capability.

The Biden Administration faces a double disaster after its Ukraine miscalculation, namely a US recession and a second strategic humiliation in the space of a year. The United States economy is almost certainly in recession, while oil prices drive inflation that has cut workers’ real pay by about 6% year on year Washington’s earlier boasts of driving Putin from power, destroying Russia’s capacity to make war and halving the size of the Russian economy look ridiculous in retrospect.

Having made multiple declarations that Russia would cease to be a world power after the Ukraine war, President Biden and his top officials are now focused on damage control – warning Ukraine through proxies that it will have to sacrifice territory for a ceasefire.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed all of Asia’s dynamics. Europe had been without war for almost 80 years. The struggle in Yugoslavia was a civil confrontation and therefore different. But a military clash between two large states in the heart of the continent was something largely forgotten during a period without precedent in European history. And yet it happened. In Asia, the last war was 40 years ago when China attacked Vietnam over its conquest of Cambodia. Before that, there were decades of fighting in Korea and Indochina. The idea of a conflict was always more present than in Europe.

Steve Hanke: Like all sanctions, those being imposed on Russia are economic weapons that are being deployed in what is, in fact, an undeclared war against Russia. And like all sanctions, they have proved to be totally ineffective in accomplishing their stated goal of changing Russia’s behavior. Sanctions have never won a war. And if that’s not bad enough, sanctions have been, as economic sanctions often are, counterproductive. Indeed, instead of toppling Vladimir Putin’s regime, the sanctions have done what they typically do: they have created a “rally ’round the flag effect,” which has further entrenched Putin and his associates.

El primer ministro de Japón, Fumio Kishida, está contemplando la posibilidad de acudir a finales de este mes a la cumbre de la OTAN en Madrid en lo que se trataría de la primera participación de un jefe del Gobierno japonés a una reunión de la alianza occidental.

Rusia atacará objetivos que ha evitado atacar hasta ahora en Ucrania si esta recibe de Occidente misiles de largo alcance, advirtió el presidente Vladímir Putin. «Si llegan a suministrarlos, sacaremos las debidas conclusiones y usaremos nuestros medios de destrucción, que no nos faltan, para atacar las instalaciones que hemos evitado atacar hasta la fecha», dijo Putin en una entrevista con el canal de televisión Rossiya 1. Al mismo tiempo, Putin supuso que Occidente planea enviar a Ucrania misiles con un alcance de 45 a 70 kilómetros, equiparables a los de sistemas de fabricación rusa Grad, Uragán y Smerch, «nada novedoso», según el presidente.

The Davos ‘greater disquiet’ emerged however, from an unexpected quarter. Just before the WEF began, the NY Times had run a piece from the editorial team urging Zelensky to negotiate with Russia. It argued that such engagement implied making painful territorial sacrifices. The piece attracted indignant and angry push-back in Europe and the West, possibly because – albeit couched as advice to Kiev – its target was evidently Washington and London (the arch belligerents).