Tom Arms’ World Review

United States

Did Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden talk this week? On the surface it would seem they did not.

Blinken spent a constructive few days in Beijing repairing Sino-American relations, at least to the stage where the two sides were talking to each other even if they were failing to agree on very much.

Then, almost as soon as Blinken steps off the plane, his boss calls China’s President Xi Jinping a dictator. The Chinese foreign ministry immediately responded by attacking Biden’s comments as “blatant political provocation.”

The American president is well known for his foreign policy gaffes and when they occur the State Department jumps in to pour oil on troubled waters and restore diplomatic calm. Not this time.

The State Department spokesman said the following day: “We will continue to responsibly manage this relationship and maintain open lines of communications with the PRC. But that, of course, does not mean we will not be blunt about our differences.”

He added: “We have been very clear about the areas in which we disagree, including clear differences about the merits and demerits about democracies versus autocracies.”

It would appear that Blinken and Biden are playing a good cop, bad copy routine. This is partly for domestic consumption. US administrations aim for a bipartisan foreign policy, but that is difficult to achieve in the current polarised climate with China the whipping boy of the Republicans and an increasing number of Democrats.

Africa and Russia

Africa went to Moscow this week. It also went to Kyiv, but the most important and interesting leg of the trip was to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

Of course, it wasn’t all of Africa. It was the heads of government of Egypt, South Africa, Congo, Comoros and South Africa. The delegation was led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who has come under attack for refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and allowing Vladimir Putin to visit South Africa in August despite a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court.

The African leaders called the trip a “Peace Mission” and justified their involvement by the fact that their continent suffered a 30 million tonnes of grain shortfall in 2022 because of the war in Ukraine. They issued a ten-point plan which called for guaranteed grain supplies, an exchange of prisoners of war and the return of all children to their country of origin.

In Kyiv that had to run for air raid shelters during a missile attack and were told by President Zelensky that there could be no peace without Russian withdrawal.

In Moscow, President Putin told them that the grain deal could be cancelled altogether; that the “special military operation” would drag on and that the thousands of Ukrainian children taken to Russia were moved to protect them. In short, there was no joy for the Africans in either capital.

Back in South Africa, the trip has been branded a poorly conceived and badly executed effort to repair Ramaphosa’s tarnished image. The South Africans were especially humiliated when the plane carrying Ramaphosa, his advisers, journalists and 15 containers of weapons, was stopped at Warsaw Airport because it did not have the correct paperwork. The plane had to return to South Africa and start all over again.

Ukraine

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are planning their own diplomatic offensive to back up their military counter-offensive.

It started this week with a fundraiser in London. The British government immediately pledged $3 billion for reconstruction and the Ukrainian contingent laid the groundwork for claiming $450 billion in frozen Russian assets.

Next week, diplomats will meet in Copenhagen to prepare for a Paris “peace summit” at which the Ukrainians will push their own ten-point peace plan. The summit is expected to be held next month and will include Ukraine’s usual supporters with the interesting additions of Brazil, India and possibly even China.

The Global South has been reluctant to fully back Ukraine. Ukraine, however, has been using the argument of the inviolability of borders to persuade key countries to come off the fence. Recognition of existing borders is a key concern of most developing countries whose colonial-era territories are constantly challenged.

China

China’s President Xi Jinping has been casting his covetous eyes in the direction of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands.

Beijing’s claims on Taiwan, the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea and Senkatu Island (Japanese name) and the East China Sea are well known and hotly disputed.

It appears that Beijing is now trawling through its archives to lay claim to the 100-plus Ryukyu Islands which are part of Japan. Their claim goes back to the 14th century when the islands which stretch south of Japan towards Taiwan paid tribute to the Ming Dynasty.

The islands were effectively a Chinese vassal until 1609 when a Japanese fleet arrived and took over. For about 200 years the islands were a medieval condominium with the Chinese as the junior partner. Then in the 19th century the Japanese took full possession.

However, during World War Two, Chiang Kai-shek and Franklin Roosevelt agreed that the islands should be taken away from Japan and placed under joint US-Chinese administration. This never happened because the key Ryukyu Island—Okinawa—became the only part of Japan which was invaded and occupied by American forces.

After the war the US troops remained. Today there are still 26,000 US troops in Okinawa, about half the total number of troops in all of Japan. They are the troops that Xi would have to consider before lodging a formal claim.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".

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One Comment

  • Peter Hirst 30th Jun '23 - 5:15pm

    If we improved our democracy by introducing PR, using more deliberative democracy and working towards a modern constitution we would be in a better place to criticise the autocracies and dictatorships that this government spends so much time condemming . Getting our own ship in order is our primary goal following a decade of sliding into irrelevance.

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