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The shadow of the Ukraine war loomed large over Russian writings on East Asia, whether China, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, or the BRICS. China’s success versus the US is stressed as the wall the US is building around China is doomed. The US is stuck in a two-front struggle it is bound to lose, as has happened often in history. Separatism in Taiwan and Ukraine is similar, both reflecting shifting identities that pose a threat. No effort to drive a wedge between Russia and China can succeed is the unmistakable message conveyed from March through July.
China’s relationship with Russia is covered in some detail. China found itself in a difficult situation, having good relation with Russia and Ukraine, leaving media confused at first. Then China’s position tilted ever closer to the Russian side, although it never criticized the Ukraine leadership publicly, saying they were victims of American policy. The nuances of Chinese support for Russia are discussed, noting China’s message that threats and pressure do not work, and promising that it will maintain normal economic ties with Russia. From mid-March officials and university instructors began to give short courses on political information concerning the situation in Ukraine, whose main points reflected the Russian position. If the position taken in these courses is more extreme than that expressed internationally by Beijing, it fits into China’s general logic even if there is little prospect for Russian companies in the Chinese stock markets, as the US closely monitors the situation. The situation may ease after the active phase of the conflict ends and the sanctions regime stabilizes. Pandemic restrictions also apply independent of the Ukraine situation, since 2020 the border with China has been essentially closed for travel. Strict procedures apply to Russian cargo; the situation now only deepens that problem. China, however, describes itself as the primary ally of Moscow in opposition to the West, condemning sanctions policies. The challenge of the greatest crisis in world security since WWII exists for China, not only for Russia, an argument that insists no gap will open between the two countries.
This increased attention of NATO to China puts Taiwan in the forefront as the US prepares to depart de-facto from its “one China” policy and actively rearm Taiwan. This raises the need for joint Russo-Chinese forces to neutralize the new threat. The late June NATO summit put Russia and China in different categories. The new NATO strategy called the partnership of Russia and China a threat but foresees “constructive dialogue” with China. US efforts to use a pretext to limit China’s trade ties with Russia, however, leave the door open for constructive dialogue with China, given Europe’s softer stance than the US, which sees China as the main threat. If Chinese are inclined to separate Taiwan and Ukraine, Russians put the two in the same basket.
On the Korean Peninsula, only North Korea matters. It opened the door to a new world order. Its rocket and nuclear programs are a means to defend its sovereignty. For long, each step in the program was sanctioned by the Security Council. If disputes arose over the level of sanctions pressure, they agreed on the principle of further sanctions. Moscow and Beijing understood but did not accept Pyongyang’s behavior. After the summit talks of 2018-19 Moscow and Beijing repeatedly proposed resolutions to get North Korea to go further in return for sanctions relief, but the US blocked them and North Korea responded by putting its moratorium in doubt, ending it in 2022 officially. The US proposed UN sanctions in response. On May 26 it pressed for a vote, and it was unprecedented that Moscow and Beijing vetoed it. This signified a radical shift in the security architecture—a split in the Security Council took priority over joint condemnation of North Korea. This split opened the door to a new world order, it is asserted.
Abe was an anomaly in Japan with his charisma. He was the last major Japanese politician with the historical mission to put an end to the dispute over the Southern Kuriles and sign a peace treaty with Russia, able in 2014 to keep sanctions to a minimum, forge friendly relations, and be pragmatic despite the deterioration in Russian ties with the West. The “window of possibility” which had opened between Russia and Japan in the Abe epoch has closed and will never open anew. 2020 was the turning point due to changes in the international political environment and internal shifts in both countries. Critical was the 2021 confrontation of the Kremlin with America after the change in US administrations. Also, the new situation around Ukraine added a strain in 2022. Playing a role, too, was the formation of a new geopolitical system in Asia, in which only China could be considered an ally of Russia, while Japan and many of its Asian partners entered the opposing camp. Emphasis is given to the change in Russia’s position on a peace treaty with Japan, aiming to show the hopelessness of its position on territorial demarcation. A transformation occurred, too, in discussion of the “crimes of Japanese militarism” in Russia amid an upsurge in “patriotic discourse,” an image spread of Japan as a “satellite of America” totally subservient and as a revisionist state not accepting the results of WWII.
Kishida is much more pro-American than Abe. As ties frayed, the place of Japan was increasingly set by geopolitical understandings, including the view that Japan with its US alliance poses a military threat to Russian territory. In new joint exercises with China, a shift toward Japan could be discerned, including in October 2021 when 5 Russian and 5 Chinese military ships went for the first time around Japan in a sign of treating Japan as an adversary and, some say, in response to Japan participating in NATO military maneuvers in the Black Sea in the summer of 2021. Important qualitative shifts from 2018 were seen in Russia’s position on a peace treaty to demonstrate the hopelessness of Japan’s position on demarcation.
The world requires a new union of states able to bring stability in a transformative era of radical change in international relations. The BRICS foreign ministers met virtually on May 19. Each state has succeeded in distancing itself from global political confrontations. All have full sovereignty, which makes it extremely hard to yield to the collectivism of the West. Not one, even India, has joined in anti-Russian sanctions or harsh criticisms of Moscow. Yet. BRICS can do more, notably in today’s international environment. Is the ongoing crisis a game changer or not a threat to the prior vector of development? If Russia wins in Ukraine in all of its aims, then talk of the former will proceed, and BRICS must assume new functions and proceed now. The US in its boycott of Russia paralyses the structures of managing the world order. Yet BRICS lacks the force to conduct military operations across the world. India, Brazil, and South Africa are preoccupied only with their own regions. Russia has focused on Ukraine. That leaves China, which lacks the military-technological possibilities and the political will for the full expansion of its interests. Giving each a regional mandate would be taken badly by other states, such as in Southeast Asia. An answer could be to expand BRICS, as China proposes. Many agree, however, that BRICS is not yet ready as an organization to lead the world through a period of turbulence.
China
In MKRU on May 23 Yuri Tavrovsky argued that China had won the trade war with the US, but the US is now, before our eyes, trying to erect a great anti-China wall for containment. History shows the ineffectiveness of China’s many walls and also walls to defend European countries. The US walls will definitely fail against Russia and China, too. The European one is complete with a break for Ukraine. The Chinese one remains fragmentary, as seen in failed efforts to enlist ASEAN. Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is a plan for forging the “Indo-Pacific region” that geopolitically and geoeconomically encircles China. Yet the 2018 trade war is on its last legs with US-China trade actually growing 29% in 2021. America has capitulated after US companies and families paid a heavy price. In the 21st century the world is becoming one common space for goods and ideas. It is extremely difficult to stand in the way of this tendency with “walls.”
In MKRU on June 25 Tavrovsky evaluated the chances of America fighting Russia and China on two fronts in the new “Cold War.” First, he insisted that China’s more assertive moves near Taiwan are linked to the conflict in Ukraine, in response to attacks by the West led by the US on both Russia and China. The “Cold War” launched against the USSR from 1946 and ending in the destruction of the country did not conclude in regard to strategy, intensifying in 2017 with NATO on the front lines. As for the “Eastern front,” its formation started recently, although the US was responding to wariness over China’s successes from the start of the century. The 2018 trade war led the way to a full “Cold War.” Treatment of Huawei, Hong Kong, and then arms to Taiwan stimulating separatism are cited along with visits of high officials. Biden could not alter US policy toward China since an anti-Chinese consensus exists in the American elite. America cannot accept losing its hegemony, facing a loss of the status quo and of exploitation of the rest of the world. History shows us what happens in attempts to fight on two fronts, as in the cases of Napoleon, Hitler, and Hirohito. The Soviet Union in the 1970s-80s is another case.
Chinese have explained the situation in Taiwan completely separately from that in Ukraine, and Tavrovsky disagrees. They see this as an internal situation with a possibility war can be avoided. At its foundation, Beijing is wary of economic sanctions comparable to those imposed on Russia. In fact, there is much in common between the rise of separatism in Ukraine and Taiwan. In his book “Ukrainian Threats for Beijing” he pays attention to “Taiwanese identity,” which starts with things such as Ukrainian borscht versus Russian borscht. He adds, we are one people with the Ukrainians, as are the inhabitants of Taiwan with the PRC. Taiwan identity could become aggressive separatism. In Central Asia, separate identities pose a threat.
In MKRU on July 7 Tavrovsky wrote that China had again become the “second front” for Russia, reminding readers that Beijing and Moscow fought together 85 years ago after Japan began its total war against China on July 7, 1937. The USSR was the most active participant in that war while world society was unmoved and Anglo Saxons hoped Japan would turn its forces to the North. Moscow alone helped China, recognizing that its own fate was at stake as was the global balance of forces. The national interests of Russia and China coincided. Unlike countries that capitulated in this war, China fought on knowing that the Soviet Union stood behind it, forging a second front for it. After Germany attacked the USSR, China became the “second front” for the USSR, shifting troops to Europe only after Japanese attacks had been repulsed. China gained little from the US attacks on Japan, finding hope only after the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan on August 8, 1945, which restored China’s territorial integrity and freed it to choose its future development. The US had plans for a third world war, which China thwarted by its decisive role in the Korean War. When China became the “second front” for the USSR, forcing it to face the West and the East, it was one cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. From Trump’s 2018 “Cold War” against China leading Beijing and Moscow to draw closer and with the special operation in Ukraine and the sharp exacerbation of tensions around Taiwan, China and Russia are again playing the role of a “second front” for each other. For unfriendly countries, fighting on two fronts looks unwinnable. China-Russian relations are based on overlapping national interests and on historical traditions.
On March 29 the nuances of Chinese support for Russia were discussed in Kommersant, noting China’s message that threats and pressure do not work on China. It will maintain normal economic ties with Russia. Parallels are drawn with 2014, when Russians pointed to China as an economic alternative to the West. In 2014-15 hopes were even higher until in July 2015 Iurii Solov’ev acknowledged that China was abiding by a significant part of the Western sanctions. On March 10 this year Press Secretary Psaki stressed that China on the whole is doing so now. China’s approach to the situation is complicated and nuanced. Its ambassador to Russia asked companies in mid-March to fill the gap in the Russian market. China found itself in a difficult situation, having good relations with Russia and Ukraine, leaving media confused at first. Then China’s position tilted ever closer to the Russian side. Global Times put it this way, if the US later applies extreme sanctions pressuring China, having Russia as a partner means there will be no need to fear an energy blockade and security of supplies will be high.
Ivan Medoedov proceeded to say that where China and Russia have clear overlapping interests China publicly and actively is supportive, but it is neutral on the rest, distancing itself, for instance, from “denazification.” From mid-March officials and university instructors began to give short courses on political information concerning the situation in Ukraine, whose main points reflected the Russian position. The reason for “sending Russian troops” is treated as “corruption, inter-party and ethic disagreements” in Ukraine, the “murder of 14,000 Russian speakers in the east of the country,” “plans to create weapons of mass destruction,” and also the “advance of NATO in the east.” Guilt for the conflict is assigned to the US, which “provoked Russia” with supplies of weapons to Ukraine and economic restrictions. Before making its decision, Russia “exhausted all diplomatic means.” It chose to “strike with its fist in order to avoid being beaten with 100 fists.” If the position taken in these courses is more extreme than that expressed internationally by Beijing, it fits into the leadership’s general logic.
Does the growing overlap in the positions of Russia and China mean that economic cooperation will strengthen? Most of Russia’s partners in China have taken a wait-and-see approach, minimizing contacts as they watch what Russian regulations and sanctions will produce. Sinopec has paused investment in a chemical gas project, in which the Chinese share was to be $500 million. Alexander Gabuev is cited as seeing little prospect for Russian companies in the Chinese stock markets, as the US closely monitors the situation. The situation may ease after the active phase of the conflict ends and the sanctions regime stabilizes. Ivan Zuenko notes that pandemic restrictions also apply independent of the Ukraine situation. Since 2020 the border with China has been essentially closed for travel. Strict procedures apply to Russian cargo. The situation in 2022 only deepens that problem. Shuttle travel could be restored, however, from year’s end.
On March 9 in Kommersant Sergei Strokan’ wrote that China describes itself as the primary ally of Moscow in opposition to the West, condemning sanctions policies. The challenge of the greatest crisis in world security since WWII exists for China, not only for Russia. It includes surrounding and blockading China in opposition to an open global economy and friendly cooperation. Despite US pressure, no fissures are opening between Moscow and Beijing, the Chinese report. Meanwhile, the US is warning China of action if it does not abide by sanctions. Xi Jinping, however, sticks firmly to his opposition to sanctions, readers are informed.
On June 30 in Kommersant Sergei Strokan’ wrote that NATO put Russia and China in different categories. It accused US authorities of railing against China with charges of secret support for its operations in Ukraine as the Treasury Department fined five Chinese companies, even as China denies giving military support. The new NATO strategy calls the partnership of Russia and China a threat but foresees “constructive dialogue” with China. Yet the new limits on China drew protests denying military help to Russia and insisting that the lawful interests of Chinese companies should not be disrupted by US efforts to use a pretext to limit China’s trade ties with Russia. The NATO strategy, however, leaves the door open for dialogue with China, given Europe’s softer stance than that of the US, which sees it as the main direct threat.
Izvestiya on June 28 reported the ideas of Vladimir Portiakov on China’s view of the fact that NATO countries will acquire a previously missing military aspect. This increased attention of NATO to China puts Taiwan in the forefront as the US prepares to depart de-facto from its “one China” policy and actively rearms Taiwan. This raises the need for joint Russo-Chinese forces to neutralize the new threat. A decade earlier NATO omitted China and called Russia a partner.
On June 6 in Nezavisimaya Gazeta Vladimir Skosyrev said that the State Department had copied the Soviet experience by creating a “China house” to coordinate policy toward China, the main threat to the US. Trying to compensate for the sharp drop in the number of sources spying on China, the US has decided to send China experts to more than 40 embassies. Probably drawing on John Le Carre’s “Russia House,” Blinken has chosen this name and is increasing the staff of the State Department by 20-30. Alexander Lukin recalls that Oleg Rakhmanin reacted to worsening Soviet-China relations by initiating a move to include China specialists in more than 40 Soviet embassies and in 1966 established the Institute of the Far East, which worked for the Central Committee and sent out analysts of China’s behavior different from diplomats. The USSR also felt a lack of information on China. Moreover, fearing Chinese spies, the US has made it hard for university exchanges with China. SCMP revealed that the Biden White House formed two secret organizations to fight Chinese spies in the Pentagon and the CIA.
In Nezavisimaya Gazeta on July 4 Vladimir Skosyrev argued that Washington is exacerbating the Tibet question by Congress’s defense of the region’s right to self-determination more radical than the Dalai Lama’s position. Congress denied that Tibet has belonged to China for 700 years and called for talks with the Dalai Lama, in an effort to put more pressure on China. Both parties, backed by the White House, agree on blaming China for violations of human rights. A parallel is drawn with US efforts to arouse opposition between the center and national regions of the Soviet Union. The US effort is to split China and freeze its development is also responding to the fact the Dalai Lama is 87, and a decision on reincarnation looms.
On July 3 in Nezavisimaya Gazeta Anastasiia Bashkatova wrote that Washington faces a choice: battle with Beijing or escape from recession, as authorities discuss removing anti-Chinese limits. In light of spiraling inflation and a likely recession, it could remove tariffs and other restrictions on foreign trade introduced over the past five years to boost growth, COVID quarantines in China pose a threat to trade as well.
Rossiiskaya Gazeta had a special issue devoted to China on July 8 called ‘The Breath of China,” which praised how much over 25 years the Sino-Russian committee for friendship, peace and development had done for exchanges between the two countries and noted its 10th meeting. There followed a number of articles praising Sino-Russian cooperation in all kinds of areas including ecology, medicine, and student exchanges. This issue reassures Russians that all is well in this critical relationship, which no longer is being questioned in today’s environment.
Korean Peninsula
On May 19 in Nezavisimaya Gazeta Alexandr Zhebin wrote that Pyongyang would hardly be accepting of Sweden entering NATO. Loss of its neutrality impacts the 1953 commission of neutral states to observe the Korean armistice. On one side Poland and Czechoslovakia, not yet in the Warsaw Pact, joined; on the other, Sweden and Switzerland. In 1995 there were changes, but talk of neutrality now has no place. Sweden also represents the US in North Korea. Will North Korea continue to accept it in either capacity?
On June 19 Konstantin Asmolov in Nezavisimaya Gazeta described how Pyongyang opened the door to a new world order. Its rocket and nuclear programs are a means to defend its sovereignty. For long, each step in the program was sanctioned by the Security Council. If disputes arose over the level of sanctions pressure, all agreed on the principle of further sanctions. Moscow and Beijing understood but did not accept Pyongyang’s behavior. After the summit talks of 2018-19 Moscow and Beijing repeatedly proposed resolutions to get North Korea to go further in return for sanctions relief, but the US blocked them, and North Korea responded by putting its moratorium in doubt, ending it in 2022 officially. The US proposed UN sanctions in response on May 11 when Russia and China resisted without a vote. On May 26 the US pressed for a vote, and it was unprecedented that Moscow and Beijing vetoed it. This signified a radical shift in the security architecture—a split in the Security Council took priority over joint condemnation of North Korea. This opened the door to a new world order, reducing the role of the UN as world arbiter and leaving states to view nuclear weapons as the only defense from the threat of foreign invasion. Some do not see the system as broken if there is no veto against a nuclear test sanctions resolution, but there is little difference between the two, it is argued.
On July 13 in Rossiiskaya Gazeta an article recalled Kim Il-sung as a partisan leader eighty years ago, having operated in Russia from 1931 and benefited from a secret ruling in 1939 to support the Chinese partisan movement in Manchuria to which Kim belonged. After the neutrality pact with Japan was signed in April 1941, the Soviet side strove to avoid large-scale partisan actions there, but small-scale groups went in and out for raids to gather intelligence. Kim Il-sung in 1942-45 lived in Viatsk, where his wife gave birth to Kim Jong-il, and did not cross the border. In September 1945 he led 170 fighters to Korea, liberating it from Japan and preparing for a special mission. The article highlights Moscow’s longstanding special ties to the Kim family.
Japan
On July 8 in Kommersant Sergei Strokan’ discussed the murder of Abe. The niche left by Abe was not filled after his resignation. It seems as if there is nobody who can do so. Suga was colorless and lasted a year, and Kishida is the opposite of Abe. Kono Taro had been the favorite. Kishida was chosen by a narrow group reminiscent of the Soviet politburo. Abe was an anomaly in Japan with his charisma, remaining the national leader on the streets two years after he left office. He was the last major Japanese politician and the last with the historical mission to put an end to the dispute over the Southern Kuriles and sign a peace treaty with Russia, able in 2014 to keep sanctions to a minimum, forge friendly relations, and be pragmatic despite the deterioration in Russian ties with the West. The “window of possibility,” which had opened between Russia and Japan in the Abe epoch, has closed and will never open anew, readers are informed.
In Iaponskie Issledovaniia, No. 2, 2022, D.V. Strel’tsov wrote about Russia-Japan relations after Abe, pointing to a new stress test. He argues that 2020 was the turning point due to changes in the international political environment and internal shifts in both countries. Critical was the 2021 confrontation of the Kremlin with America after the change in US administrations. Also, the new situation around Ukraine added a strain in 2022. Playing a role, too, was the formation of a new geopolitical system in Asia, in which only China could be considered an ally of Russia, while Japan and many of its Asian partners entered the opposing camp. Emphasis is given to the change in Russia’s position on a peace treaty with Japan, aiming to show the hopelessness of its position on territorial demarcation. A transformation occurred too in discussion of the “crimes of Japanese militarism” in East Asia. Yet, Strel’tsov suggests that making Japan an “unfriendly” state on Russia’s border poses a military and political risk with a cost to Russian security.
The article makes clear that Japan has in recent times been differentiated from the West, notably after the Ukrainian events of 2014. Media found it not fully following the anti-Russian policies of the West. It is hard to decide if this was a holdover from the Cold War stereotype that Japan does not have its own foreign policy and need not be a focus of blame or a pragmatic calculation that in a conflict in the West there was no need to raise additional tension in the East, where Russian national interests were less directly affected. Japan could be an intermediary for better ties with the West, as in the 1990s it had lobbied for Russia’s entry into APEC, the EAS, etc. The result was a “honeymoon” in personal diplomacy. Fearful of an end to dialogue considered critical by it, Tokyo was under pressure from Moscow at least to 2019. In the fall of that year the situation began to change qualitatively as the confrontation between Russia and the West intensified over Belarus, the Kremlin’s response to the new administration in the US, the Navalny protest in Russia, and Ukraine. No longer were Japan’s “intermediary services” needed in such hopeless conditions. The China factor significantly boosted Russia’s alienation from Japan. Even after 2014 Russia had maintained some balance in Asia between China and states viewed as its opponents, although less so South Korea. But that changed with the new cold war, when only China was deemed an ally. The “spirit of democracy” went beyond Trump’s military orientation, and the Quad strengthened. Russia was forced to define its own place in a new system of geopolitical coordinates—founded on principles of “new bipolarity.” Japan was on the other side. Meanwhile, in Russia amid an upsurge in “patriotic discourse,” an image spread of Japan as a “satellite of America” totally subservient and as a revisionist state not accepting the results of WWII. The end of the “Vladimir-Shinzo” epoch played a role, too.
Kishida is much more pro-American than Abe, adds Strel’tsov, and less willing to defy the “collective will.” It took Moscow some time after September 2020 to set a new line toward Japan. As ties frayed, the place of Japan was increasingly set by geopolitical understandings, including the view that Japan with its US alliance poses a military threat to Russian territory. In new joint exercises with China, a shift toward Japan could be discerned, including in October 2021 when 5 Russian and 5 Chinese military ships passed between Honshu and Hokkaido and went for the first time around Japan in a sign of treating Japan as an adversary and, some say, in response to Japan participating in NATO military maneuvers in the Black Sea in the summer of 2021. Important qualitative shifts from 2018 were seen in Russia’s position on a peace treaty to demonstrate the hopelessness of Japan’s position on demarcation, for example Putin’s proposal to proceed without any conditions—an impossibility for Japan. Two months later Lavrov responded to Abe’s proposal to base a deal on the 1956 treaty by insisting that Japan first “recognize the results of WWII,” legitimizing Russia’s behavior and undercutting Japan’s stance. This was followed in 2020 by the constitutional amendment closing the door fully, as understood by the Russian public. In September 2021 Japanese companies were invited to invest on the islands free of taxes for a decade to Tokyo’s disgust and as a proof to Russians of the futility of working with Japan. Visits by Russian officials and development programs showed that Russia would never leave these territories. Discourse shifted on history, accentuating the militaristic past of Japan and blaming ruling circles for indoctrinating youth with a distorted view of WWII. One argument was that most wrongly blame the USSR or some other state not the US for the atomic bombings. Rhetoric spread on the “crimes of Japanese militarism” in East Asia, a theme earlier neglected. In September 2021 in Khabarovsk a forum recalled the 1949 findings there on Japanese war crimes in Manchuria, interpreted in Japan as joining Russia and China on one side of the barricades against the collective West, also indicated by shifting the end of the war from September 2 to 3 in accord with China, not the US. In the 1990s Japanese imagined that economic weakness could be used to pressure Russia, as in the cases of South Korea in 1965 and China in 1972. Abe was still playing this card in 2016, arguing that the development of economic ties would lead to “resolving the territorial question.” Counting on personal ties with Putin for a deal was also futile since the public would not have agreed, Strel’tsov concludes.
After the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, ties with Japan sharply deteriorated. At the end of March 2022 43% of Japanese companies had declared their full or partial departure from the Russian market. Although, unlike its Western allies, Japan did not reject the Sakhalin projects, fearing replacement by Chinese companies, the future was dark. In 2019 Japan had taken a 10% stake in “Arctic-2,” but the 30-plus tankers being built in Korea were halted by sanctions. On March 21 Russia responded by declaring Japan an “unfriendly country.” Japan for the first time since 2003 issued a blue book calling the islands “illegally occupied.” Eight Russian diplomats were soon expelled. Ahead, Japan will have to avoid simultaneous confrontations with China and Russia, but the conflict situation will last a long time. The Ukraine crisis did not cause it and only helped to exacerbate it. Talks had restrained Russia, but China will succeed in drawing Russia to its side on Japan policy. Still, Russia runs a risk for its security and should think of how to build a reliable, long-term partnership with Japan, it was argued.
In the same issue of Iaponskie Issledovaniia, M. P. Chiuzhevskaia wrote about the role of the US in Japan-Europe relations, asking if this was actually trilateralism. This idea can be traced back to Prime Minister Ikeda in 1962, regaining favor in the 1980s. Yet the Japan-EU side remained the weak link. Trump’s unpredictability led the two to draw closer. Yet the article doubts that Biden will have that effect, instead widening the search for new partnerships, as in the 2022 Japan-Australia defense pact. One factor has been the US-led effort to draw the Europeans into the Indo-Pacific region. Europeans have seen the US priority focusing on others there and have shifted toward “strategic autonomy” as doubtful as that is. The Biden era has seen less advance in direct Japan-European relations than under Trump. If the conflict in Ukraine turned attention toward Russia, the main challenge in world politics remains the Sino-US confrontation. Before our eyes the regional foreign policy architecture is changing into the return of blocs. The EU lacks an Indo-Pacific strategy backed by resources, and it is hard to speak of trilateralism as an international mechanism apart from some economic activity, seen in a November 30, 2021 meeting of economic ministers. The author stresses the term “junior partners” of the US and the wariness they have about US political stability toward them, leading to diversification. Some deepening of bilateral ties is expected but only when the results are seen as effective.
BRICS
Vzgliad on May 20 described China’s dreams of a coalition for running the world. It asserts that China has let it be known that the world requires a new union of states able to bring stability in a transformative era of radical change in international relations, pointing to BRICS. But can its members overthrow the collective West? The BRICS foreign ministers met virtually on May 19. Despite an economic crisis in these states, pride can be taken in a string of successes. The new development bank is off to a good start. BRICS also succeeded in distancing itself from global political confrontations. All have full sovereignty, which makes it extremely hard to yield to the collectivism of the West. Not one, even India, has joined in anti-Russian sanctions or harsh criticisms of Moscow. BRICS can do more, notably in today’s international environment. Is the ongoing crisis a game changer or not a threat to the prior vector of development is key. If Russia wins in Ukraine in all of its aims, then talk of the former will proceed, and BRICS must assume new functions and proceed now. The US in its boycott of Russia paralyses the structure of managing the world order, the Security Council and the G20. Yet BRICS lacks the force to conduct military operations across the world. India, Brazil, and South Africa are preoccupied only with their own regions. Russia has focused on Ukraine. That leaves China, which lacks the military-technological possibilities and the political will for the full expansion of its interests. Giving each a regional mandate would be taken badly by other states, such as in Southeast Asia toward China. An answer could be to expand BRICS, as China proposes. New members should meet four conditions: regional leaders of sufficient power; fully sovereign entities; candidates unopposed by present members’ and states desirous of entry and resistant to US unilateralism. Turkey qualifies. Saudi Arabia and Iran, although their conflict could paralyze the group, which already faces Indo-Chinese divisions, are next. Many agree that BRICS is not yet ready as an organization to lead the world through a period of turbulence. Only the Security Council can do that if the US stops sabotaging it, concludes the article.
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