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Following tests in 1998, both states declared themselves nuclear weapon-capable states. The Pakistani nuclear doctrine was India-specific and emphasised that given Indian conventional capability, Pakistan reserved the right to use nuclear weapons first in extremis.[6] This provided Pakistan with compelling incentive to provoke India, while remaining secure in the knowledge that its nuclear policy severely limited Indian retaliatory options. As exemplified in the 1999 Kargil conflict when, despite rhetoric from both sides showing willingness to explore nuclear avenues of escalation, India showed restraint in not crossing the Line of Control, avoiding crossing Pakistan’s nuclear red line.

Ironically, the years of nuclear opacity have been relatively more stable than the years following the declaration of India and Pakistan as nuclear powers. In addition, cases like Kargil, the 2001-02 military standoff between India and Pakistan, or the 2008 Mumbai attack show an emboldened and provocative Pakistan that uses its first strike nuclear doctrine as a shield against a restrained India that is limited by its no-first use doctrine. Pakistan’s testing of tactical nuclear weapons further complicates issues, as this operationalises nuclear weapons. Pakistan thus continues to attack India in low-level unconventional methods because it is safe in the knowledge that India’s ability to retaliate is limited. It thus falls upon India to call Pakistan’s bluff. The excuse of targeting terrorist havens in Pakistani territory, as the much-publicised surgical strikes showed, provide an efficient instrument for India to do just that. Thus, escalation of conventional conflict is a much bigger risk in South Asia than is purported.

Here is what we know about the most serious India-Pakistan crisis in more than a decade. On February 14, the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Jaish-e-Mohammed attacked a paramilitary convoy in Pulwama in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. India, on the cusp of a general election, retaliated against its neighbor in the early hours of February 26 with a deep air strike targeting a terrorist camp near the town of Balakot, squarely within Pakistani territory. The following day, Indian and Pakistani forces were involved in an air skirmish in which at least one Indian MiG-21 was shot down; its pilot was captured and subsequently released. Both nuclear-armed countries placed their military forces on alert, and sustained vigorous artillery barrages across the Line of Control that divides them.

Although it might be too early to reconstruct precisely what transpired, the crisis yields some important lessons for the United States. With perhaps the exception of the Korean peninsula, India and Pakistan represent the world’s most likely venue for nuclear conflict. And Washington remains deeply involved with both countries, viewing India as a long-term partner that can play a supporting role in blunting China’s rise, and Pakistan as a frustrating but indispensable player in the negotiations to conclude America’s 17-year war in Afghanistan.

The answer is microchips. And before you react by thinking that’s precisely why China would invade Taiwan to get hold of that country’s highly successful chip fabrication sites, think again.

The enormous global demand for semiconductor products and the influence they have on the lives of billions of humans, coupled with their significant effect on international trade and productivity, mean disruption of supply and development of microchips because of war would have a substantial adverse effect globally that would impact equally as much on the aggressor.

Though China will not show Taiwan, the U.S., or anyone else exactly how it would launch a full blockade or invasion of Taiwan, China’s armed forces find it very valuable to practice. After all, Chinese troops haven’t faced a shooting war since a brief conflict with Vietnam in 1979. Finally, Taiwan will hold national elections next year. Though China’s latest intimidation may not lead to military conflict anytime soon, it may have an effect on how Taiwan’s voters imagine the future.

All that said, the actual risk of imminent Chinese military action against Taiwan remains low. Beijing always flexes military muscle when highest-level U.S. and Taiwanese officials meet face to face. Yet, though Speaker McCarthy’s visit with Taiwan’s president marks the highest-level U.S.-Taiwan meeting on US soil since 1979, China’s latest response was less militarily threatening than its reaction to last summer’s visit to Taiwan by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi – and Beijing is well aware that Washington will notice that.

The United States and other western countries are losing the race with China to develop advanced technologies and retain talent, with Beijing potentially establishing a monopoly in some areas, a new report has said.

China leads in 37 of 44 technologies tracked in a year-long project by thinktank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The fields include electric batteries, hypersonics and advanced radio-frequency communications such as 5G and 6G.

While American leaders fret that China might eventually overtake the U.S. in developing artificial intelligence, Beijing is already way ahead of Washington in enacting rules for the new technology.

Driving the news: Chinese officials will close consultation Wednesday on a second round of generative AI regulation, building on a set of rules governing deepfakes agreed in 2022.

Power transition is a powerful logic in international relations discourse. Between rising powers and existing powers – or a formerly weaker power overtaking a stronger one – it is often viewed as dangerous in world politics. International relations scholars A.F.K. Organski, Jacek Kugler, and Robert Gilpin have long argued that power transition is a basic cause of systemic war.

We have seen many wars occur when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing power. The rise and fall of great powers have happened like this throughout history. A few years ago, Harvard professor Graham Allison coined the term “Thucydides Trap” to describe the likelihood that the US and China would go to war, as Sparta and Athens did in ancient Greece 2,000 years ago, when Athens was threatening to overtake Sparta.

The classical idea of balancing involves military alliances and implies a group of states that work in unison towards constraining the ambitions of a great power.1 Although a high degree of economic interdependence2 progressively emerged amidst the American-centred liberal order that arose in the aftermath of World War II, and which the end of the Cold War consolidated, the international system nevertheless remained hierarchal3 by virtue of the hegemon’s potential weaponisation of economic institutions4 and the concentration of military resources at Washington’s disposal.5 As, in such a scenario, projecting power through warfare was too costly, rising powers like Beijing became more likely to engage in soft balancing than hard balancing.6

Indeed, China’s preference for engaging with the developing world through economic statecraft,7 that is to say, the art of advancing foreign policy goals through a diplomacy focused on market-related matters, is partially born of such structural constraints. Examples of Beijing’s strategy for enhancing its collective financial statecraft8—the subfield of economic statecraft associated with the provision of finance to potential allies through intergovernmental organisations (IGOs)—proceed from the availability of bilateral development finance and the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The seeds of this international developmental organisation (IDO) were sown in 2013, with the support of only 21 Asian states. By the time of its foundation in June 2015, however, the AIIB’s membership had expanded to 56 states, including key American allies (like Germany, France, and the UK, not to mention Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea).9 As expected, the USA has not joined the bank, which Washington initially perceived as a competitor of both the World Bank and the American- and Japanese-sponsored Asian Development Bank (ADB).10

“While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” as aptly stated by a 2017 study published by the US Army War College. Concurrently, if left to its economic machinations, China will overtake the US in all spheres, including militarily. This is the capricious global abyss that the world is currently peering into – one which will eventually force a catastrophic US-China conflict that will change the established world order.

This is what billionaire Ray Dalio also explains in his meticulously researched book – abridged in this video. He states that all empires have a rise, a peak, and a decline (America being in the latter). The decline is marked by a financial burst and internal economic weakness which leads to more printing of money. It is also marked by internal strife between the rich and the poor as well as costly external fighting or both (sounds very familiar). This he says leads to a revolution in that superpower (usually of a violent nature) that aims to redistribute wealth.

The alarming possibility of a major conflict between the US and China has been framed as a likely consequence of a pattern of great power behaviour first identified by the fifth-century BCE historian Thucydides. In his study of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” This argument is now most associated with the Harvard academic Graham Allison, who claims to have identified 16 instances in which a dominant power has sought to suppress an emerging rival before they became too strong. He notes, disconcertingly, that 12 of these ended in war.

Allison first presented his thesis of the “Thucydides Trap” in the Atlantic in 2015, and developed it in a book, Destined for War, in 2017. Since then, Allison’s argument that the relationship between the US and China is growing increasingly volatile has gained even more credibility with tensions over trade, the South China Sea and Taiwan.

Given the meteoric rise of China, the emergence of other important powers, and major redistributions in the global balance of power, power transition theory (PTT) has become an important intellectual factor again. Many observers are anxious about China’s ascendance (and that of other powers) and expect serious conflict between Washington and Beijing in the years to come. Many of them ground their skeptical expectations in PTT or at least a much curtailed under- standing of it. To give just two examples, former US official Susan Shirk claims in her book about China that “history teaches us that rising powers are likely to provoke war,” and political scientist Christopher Layne echoes that “throughout the history of the modern international state system, ascending powers have always challenged the position of the dominant (hegemonic) power in the international system—and these challenges have usually culminated in war.”1 Such skepticism, however, is problematic for three rea- sons. First, it is false theoretically; PTT does not claim that all rising powers will resort to war or that all power transitions will result in war. While highlighting the inherent dangers of power transitions, PTT actually acknowledges that they might result in peace as well as in war. Satisfaction with the existing status quo is the key factor here. Second, it is false empirically; not all power transitions in history have resulted in great-power wars. Third, it leads to flawed policy advice; if rising powers are always aggressive and always challenge the international order, then it makes sense to attempt to contain or oppose them. If, however, rising powers are not always dissatisfied and do not always challenge the status quo, then policies meant to oppose them might breed dangerous dissatisfaction in the first place. Recognizing that even traditional PTT allows for “peaceful power transitions” as well as for “power transition wars” is a useful antidote against such self-defeating policy choices.

According to Oxford historian Peter Frankopan, we are witnessing the unravelling of the global order. In a period of history marked by a Western financial crisis, a global coronavirus pandemic, war in Europe, rising government debt and political instability across advanced democracies, the Western era is winding down. Indeed, the global order has been steadily moving toward a “post-American World” or “post-Western World” for some time. At the heart of this shift is the rise of China and the emergence of a multipolar system.

While we have grown used to thinking of globalization in terms of liberal democracy and Western-led multilateralism, globalization within a multipolar order will increasingly favour regional autonomy and a struggle to define a new balance of power. Taken together, China, India, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Brazil are becoming regional powers within a loosely coupled global system.

In its policies toward Asia, the United States has long sought to reconcile its unsurpassed military, economic, and rule-setting prowess with a desire for stability. Until recently, this was not hard to accomplish. Washington’s international dominance coincided with the post-1979 “Asian peace”—a period of remarkable stability in East Asia and the Pacific—and so the United States had little trouble holding sway over the region without provoking any conflicts. Over time, Washington even came to believe that U.S. supremacy and regional tranquility could not just coexist but were causally related. As a result, U.S. policymakers made maintaining Asian primacy the foundation of their regional strategy, arguing that without Washington’s leadership, Asia would devolve into warfare.

But as the American author James Baldwin wrote in 1963, “time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.” Even if U.S. primacy was once a source of regional stability, there is little basis to think it will promote harmony today. The United States’ global power has diminished over the past generation, making it harder for Washington to direct the world. Other states have a newfound desire and capacity to resist, subvert, lash out against, or seek alternatives to U.S. preferences, including through violence. And the power of these countries is likely to continue to grow. It defies history to expect that dusk will never come for U.S. hegemony, especially as China—the world’s most populous state and Washington’s primary global competitor—draws power from its central place in the international economic system.

The population remains badly divided, with a substantial section of the electorate believing that the last election was stolen and violence might be justified against political foes. Spending is running out of control, with the debt to GDP ratio nearing the record set after World War II. The level could hit nearly twice that, around 200 percent, by 2050, well beyond the levels which set off Europe’s Euro crisis.

Adjusting foreign policy to reflect available resources and international circumstances is the only way to avoid potentially catastrophic failure.

Multiple signs point to a crisis in global order. The uncoordinated international response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic downturns, the resurgence of nationalist politics, and the hardening of state borders all seem to herald the emergence of a less cooperative and more fragile international system. According to many observers, these developments underscore the dangers of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America first” policies and his retreat from global leadership.

Even before the pandemic, Trump routinely criticized the value of alliances and institutions such as NATO, supported the breakup of the European Union, withdrew from a host of international agreements and organizations, and pandered to autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He has questioned the merits of placing liberal values such as democracy and human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Trump’s clear preference for zero-sum, transactional politics further supports the notion that the United States is abandoning its commitment to promoting a liberal international order.

The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power.

There’s a lot at stake in whether the United States is perceived as—or actually is—a “revisionist” (vice “status quo”) power.

In this “broader MENA” region, whose confines and internal cohesion are unstable, the challenges are ever more complex. Despite the relative consensus between NATO and its Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) partners on the deep-rooted causes of the structural instability, the potential solutions are much debated. NATO’s “Projecting Stability” concept raises as many questions with the partners, as it does within the Alliance, since a desired end-state has yet to be defined. While all efforts contributing to an increase in stability are a priori welcome, the Alliance and its partners must agree on the conditions of stability in order to identify and implement effective means suited to the local context.

Multiple challenges, increasing complexity

The conflicts erupting between the different capitalist regimes in the Middle East pose an imminent threat not only to the population of the region, but to the entire world. Workers can give no support to any of the competing military plans and strategic appetites of these reactionary regimes. With America, Europe, Russia and China all deeply involved in the proxy war in Syria, a large-scale Middle East war could strangle the world oil supply and escalate into war between nuclear-armed powers. The working class is coming face to face with the real possibility of a Third World War.

A deadly opening attack. Nearly untraceable, ruthless proxies spreading chaos on multiple continents. Costly miscalculations. And thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — killed in a conflict that would dwarf the war in Iraq.

Welcome to the US-Iran war, which has the potential to be one of the worst conflicts in history.

While Biden’s visit to Israel and attendance at the Saudi-led summit received much media attention, an undisclosed US-led military summit in March in Egypt between these same regional powers — Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, and Jordan — flew under the radar. The meeting concerned a potential joint military mobilization against Iran and was overseen by General Frank McKenzie, then the head of the US Central Command.

This near-explicit military cooperation between Arab states and Israel is unprecedented and signifies the growing polarization of the Middle East against Iranian influence — a polarization taking place under American guidance.