EUROPEAN UNION

Navina Heyden, a German blogger, pointed this out: I don’t get the idea of some people – as long as China becomes stronger, its ties with the world will get better… No one in Europe would think so.

Some netizens sensed a subtext here: When China becomes stronger, its relations with the world could get worse. This is obviously believed by quite a few Germans in particular and Westerners in general. 

Compared with most German influencers, Heyden is relatively objective in her views about China. However, she has suffered waves of cyber violence from within Germany since 2020 simply because she said something in fairness to China’s fight against COVID-19. Her case is a vivid example of how people in Germany and other Western countries deal with China-related information through distortion. They won’t embrace voices that contradict their stereotype about China, or those that can prove China has done something right. 

THE SAKER—he world is headed for war and has been headed that way for quite a while now.  Several times, just at the brink, the West decided to pull back, but each time it did that, its ruling elites felt two things: first, they felt even more hatred for Russia for forcing them to back down, and, second, they interpreted the fact that no shooting war happened (yet) as evidence, at least in their minds, that standing on the brink of war is a pretty safe exercise.

THE SAKER—It is important to keep in mind that Polish, German, or Lithuanian military forces are a joke, at best they can have (small) parades, and shoot at unarmed civilians.  But even taking on “just” the Belorussian military alone (without any Russian help) is not an option for them: there is no comparison between a Polish solider (or a Lithuanian one, for that matter) and a Belorussian one, it would be like comparing perfumed and fluffy show-dog with a wolf.  Numbers here matter a lot less than the quality, training, and determination of the soldiers on both sides.

SCF—A few other choice hostile declarations in the European parliamentary report are calls for the EU to curb energy imports from Russia so as to “end dependence on Russian oil and gas”; calls for the EU to cut Russia off from international banking systems, and calls for the EU to strengthen cooperation with the United States and other like-minded partners to “defend democracy globally”.

The latter is particularly laughable coming after the United States left European so-called allies high and dry by its unilateral pullout from Afghanistan. Also this week, the U.S. move to form a new military alliance with Australia, providing the latter with nuclear-powered submarines, caused France to howl about being “stabbed in the back” by Washington owing to Paris losing out on a $50 billion naval contract with Canberra. European lawmakers are voting like pathetic lackeys of the United States despite Europe being treated over and over again as a mere vassal.

PEPE ESCOBAR—Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits. Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.