STRATEGIC ALERT Service

Although little reported in Western media, an important summit on May-18-19 brought together the Presidents of China and five Central Asian nations (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. They met in Xi’an, in China’s northwestern province of Shaanxi, the city from which the ancient Silk Road was launched 2,100 years ago! A successor to that historical trade route was announced […]

Addressing the G7 working group entitled “Working Together to Confront Multiple Crises,” on May 20, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a guest, confronted the attendees with some uncomfortable truths about the current global systemic crisis and the changes required to address it. Seated between President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he slammed the International Monetary […]

A group of six African countries, led by South Africa, are preparing to send a delegation to Moscow and Kiev in an effort to promote a negotiated settlement to the war. The six are Egypt, the Republic of the Congo, Senegal, South Africa Uganda, Zambia, and the Comoro Islands, which now holds the rotating presidency of the African Union. South […]

Europe has been the scene of two intense diplomatic offensives over the past ten days, albeit with very different aims in view, one undertaken by Ukraine President Zelenskyy and the other by Chinese diplomats. Concerning the first, each step of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s tour from May 13 to 15 served to ratchet up the threat of a direct war between Russia […]

In the highest-level meeting with U.S. officials in months, State Councilor Wang Yi met with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan May 10-11 in Vienna for ten hours of talks. Among the crucial issues raised were Taiwan and Ukraine. This is interpreted as a sign that the channels of communication are now being re-opened, following the shoot-down of a Chinese […]

Germany seems to have dismissed any diplomatic paths to solving the Ukraine conflict, including the Chinese proposal. Thus, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived for talks in Berlin on May 14, the government announced the biggest supply of weapons ever to Kyiv, in the range of €2.7 billion. The list includes another 20 Marder infantry fighting vehicles, 30 Leopard-1 A5 […]

What could better epitomize the metaphor of an “ivory tower” than the meeting of EU Foreign Ministers near Stockholm on May 12, i.e., of a ruling class totally decoupled from their constituencies and the real world. The ministers did, in fact, meet in the brick tower of a 17th-century castle, and they had to relinquish any devices or means, such […]

Ironically, as the European Commission was trying to push its “de-risking” strategy paper down the throat of the Foreign ministers meeting near Stockholm, two examples in the real world indicated how such a strategy goes against the interests of all European nations, even the most anti-China among them. China’s Vice President Han Zheng visited Portugal on May 7-9, as part […]

European Union authorities on May 2 approved the Dutch government’s plan to offer €1.5 billion in buy-out payments to some 3,000 farmers, mainly livestock producers, to shut down in the Netherlands, on condition they agree not to relocate their production anywhere else in the EU. If a farmer accepts a so-called voluntary buy-out, he or she may never farm in […]

Two well-known and respected American physicists, one of them the most recent Nobel Prize winner in that field, have made clear their opposition to the dominant “narrative” of climate change as an allegedly man-made occurrence. Given the accomplishments of both Prof. Theodore Postol and Dr. John F. Clauser, their interventions will undoubtedly impact the views of other scientists around the […]