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國際現勢 -- 開欄文
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瀏覽18,244 ｜回應25｜推薦2 |
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川普上台後，世局大戲一齣接一齣；國際高潮一波又一波。他並非原因或主角，只不過身間觸媒和插科打諢兩個角色而已。悲劇變鬧劇一再上演，根據「量變導致質變」法則，在川痞/川瘋/川丑三合一變形臭蟲下台前，我們怕不是要看好幾場慘劇。能不能渡過這個「川劫」，就要看我們大家的造化，和一眾善男信女「阿門」或「阿彌陀佛」的修為了。
由於節目繁多，劇情層出不窮：
1) 「親愛的，我把『規則』變沒了」
2) 「親愛的，我不裝了！自由主義的面具太沉重，還是帝國主義本尊帥氣」
3) 「親愛的，『大衛大戰歌利亞』的戲碼改成『卡尼勇嗆川瘋子』」
4) 「親愛的，『阿貓阿狗』們登場機會來了」
5)、6)、7)、8)、9)…，族繁不及備載。
故開此欄，一起欣賞當下各顯神通，讓人眼花繚爛的棋局和好戲。同喜還是同悲，且聽下回分解。本部落格原有個別地區或重大議題的專欄，仍然照常營業。
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美軍高端防空飛彈低庫存背景 - Doyle McManus
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希望習總千萬不要因為這篇報導的訊息，而起了躍躍欲試或鋌而走險的念頭。此外，美國的「財大氣粗」碰上無人機這種新科技，就露出一戳就破的「紙老虎」原形。
U.S. is running low on advanced defensive missiles — and it could take years to recover
Doyle McManus, 09/06/26
The statistics are sobering — so sobering that Defense Department officials refuse to confirm, deny or discuss them.
From Feb. 28 through July, the first five months of the war with Iraq, U.S. forces burned through almost 60% of the nation's advanced defensive missiles — the Patriot and THAAD interceptors that protect American troops.
When the war began, the Pentagon had almost 2,800 Patriot and THAAD missiles in its worldwide inventory, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank. By the end of July, that number had dropped to about 1,100, CSIS reported. Almost two-thirds of the Patriots and almost 40% of the longer-range THAAD were gone.
"This is a generational annihilation of our theater missile defense capability," said Tom Karako, director of CSIS's Missile Defense Project. "There's no way you can look at this and not see it's a setback."
The White House and the Pentagon have not challenged the CSIS figures, although they have issued sweeping denials that any shortage exists.
"We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need," President Trump said in July.
That's true, but misleading. The U.S. military still holds vast inventories of short-range offensive missiles. But the sophisticated defensive missiles that protect U.S. troops no longer are abundant — as even Trump has acknowledged.
"We have certain types of munitions [of which] we have unlimited, virtual unlimited supply," he said last month. "We have others where it's a little bit tighter."
The result is a squeeze that has prompted U.S. commanders to husband Patriot and THAAD interceptors as scarce assets.
For much of August, when a frayed de facto ceasefire was in effect, U.S. forces did not respond with high-end missiles when Iran attacked oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
But when Iran launched rockets against U.S. bases in Jordan last week, Patriots reportedly were used to knock the incoming missiles down. (The Pentagon has declined to confirm or deny those reports.)
The U.S. weapons arsenal "no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan," the Council on Foreign Relations warned in a report last month. Defense planners share the same concern over a potential Russian assault on the Baltic states.
The conservative Heritage Foundation has forecast that the Pentagon's inventory of missiles would run out "within the first week of a Taiwan conflict."
In Europe, a U.S. defense official told the Associated Press last month that the shortfall was "beyond critical." If Russia attacked a NATO country, the official said, U.S. forces in the area would "take punch after punch in the mouth."
The core question is whether the United States has so few missiles that it cannot credibly deter China or Russia from attacking their neighbors.
"You've got to be strong enough to send a clear message that our enemies should not try anything because we're a credible force," said Leon Panetta, President Obama's former defense secretary. "Now we're losing a lot of that credibility — and that's dangerous."
Knowing that U.S. forces have been left without thousands of weapons needed to deter conflict, Karako said, could in itself be provocative. "It could tempt an aggressor to do something, knowing that we have fewer [missiles] to thwart them."
The obvious remedy is to build more interceptors — a process Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered even before the war began. But ramping up missile production won't immediately replenish the stockpile.
Before the Iran war, defense contractors were producing only about 620 Patriots and 96 THAAD each year — fewer than half the number expended during a few weeks this spring.
At current production rates, it will take at least three years to return the Patriot inventory to its prewar level, and at least four years for THAAD, CSIS reported.
Defense experts warn that the stocks need to be even larger than they were before the war to credibly deter China or Russia.
Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and principal author of the CSIS estimates, says most analysts believe it will take years after replenishing the stocks expended in the Persian Gulf to build a credible deterrent against China.
The Pentagon has enough munitions, both offensive and defensive, to continue fighting the campaign against Iran, he added — but some of those less-sophisticated weapons can be used only at shorter ranges, which means placing more troops in harm's way.
Cancian said the CSIS figures were based on publicly available Pentagon budget and acquisition documents, updated in some cases from recent press reports — but not from leaks of classified information.
The roots of the missile shortage began long before the war with Iran. Trump and Hegseth are not the only ones to blame, although their belief that Iran would quickly capitulate appears to have been a major factor.
Nor did former President Biden cause the shortage, as Trump has claimed Biden gave several hundred Patriots to Ukraine, but the shortfall is far larger than that.
The underlying problem, defense experts say, is that the United States designed its missile defense programs for a world in which only a few major powers like China and Russia posed serious threats.
But the landscape of military technology has changed. Missiles and drones have become cheaper and easier to acquire, and countries like Iran can strike targets at great distances without making a huge investment in weaponry.
That's a transformational change — and the Pentagon has been behind the curve, argues Michael C. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "This is the kind of situation in which great-power militaries like the United States struggle," he said.
So the Trump administration faces several challenges. It needs to replenish its depleted stores of advanced defensive missiles — a process that has only just begun, and which Congress has not yet funded. Meanwhile, Horowitz and others argue, it also needs to build less expensive missile and drone systems to fill the multiyear gap before Patriot and THAAD inventories can be restored.
The Pentagon has begun that process, deploying several relatively inexpensive anti-drone missile systems.
Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year included $7.7 billion for low-cost missile and drone programs, but 13 months later, more than 90% of the money remains unspent, Horowitz said.
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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中、美太空爭霸戰蓄勢欲發 -- Cassell Bryan-Low等
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US, China arm for space warfare: hunter satellites and orbital weapons
Amid the rapidly-evolving field of military space operations, Beijing and Washington are preparing for the possibility of conflict extending into space.
Cassell Bryan-Low/Joey Roulette/Eduardo Baptista, 09/02/26
In June, a secretive unmanned Chinese spaceplane closely monitored by U.S. military analysts released a small satellite hundreds of miles above Earth in an orbital region crowded with commercial and military satellites. The object then looped around another Chinese satellite before returning towards the spaceplane, according to U.S. space-tracking firm LeoLabs.
Little is known about the satellite or the mission. But the U.S. military operates a similarly secretive spaceplane resembling a small shuttle, also with no crew. Both programs reflect the rapidly evolving field of military space operations as Beijing and Washington prepare for the possibility of conflict extending into space, according to a Reuters review of documents, space-tracking data and interviews with current and former military officials.
Chinese researchers linked to the military are developing technologies ranging from satellites designed to pursue and even capture other spacecraft to systems that could extend fuel supplies while doing so, according to a Reuters review of patent-related documents, procurement notices and academic papers. And the United States and Britain conducted their first joint military operation in space in the path of a suspected Chinese spy satellite, according to commercial space-tracking data.
"The Chinese are rapidly developing capabilities," including ground- and space-based weapons designed to interfere with or destroy targets, U.S. Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman said in July. The threat from China is "substantial," added Saltzman, who is retiring.
Satellites have become indispensable to modern warfare, as conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated. For decades they have provided communications, navigation and intelligence services to armed forces on Earth, and once placed in orbit typically remained on fixed paths. Increasingly, however, militaries view them as active weapons platforms capable of launching attacks by disrupting a satellite’s operations through jamming or laser dazzling, or even capturing enemy spacecraft.
Disruption of U.S. space capabilities would "cripple our massive military in the terrestrial sphere," affecting everything from surveillance to missile defense, said Everett Dolman, a former professor at the U.S. Air Force's Air War College. Spaceplanes, because they are agile and capable of deploying satellites or carrying cargo, could appear to opponents as potential "space fighters," he said.
ALLIES JOIN THE U.S. EFFORT
The growing competition comes as Earth's orbit becomes increasingly crowded. SpaceX, which recently debuted on public markets, operates about 11,000 Starlink satellites and plans a constellation of larger AI-enabled data centers in space. China is building rival networks, while U.S. President Donald Trump's Golden Dome missile defense program envisions space-based interceptors.
The United States is also refining capabilities that could prove important in a future conflict.
In the joint U.S.-British operation in September last year, U.S. space forces working from a base in Colorado directed a U.S. military satellite to swoop in close to a UK one as China's Shiyan 12-01 satellite passed about 83 kilometers beneath them, according to space intelligence company Slingshot Aerospace. At that altitude, specialists consider the distance relatively close.
Three space experts with military backgrounds told Reuters it appeared intended as a signal to Beijing, including at space-tracking firm COMSPOC. Andrew Turner, a retired senior British air force officer who is now a space consultant, said it was “almost certainly a strategic signal to China” to demonstrate allied unity, capability and a warning to not interfere with the UK satellite.
The U.S. and Britain publicly announced the operation, the first known one between two members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance, but did not disclose its proximity to a Chinese spacecraft. Much of what occurs in space remains classified because of its intelligence implications.
U.S. Space Command told Reuters the mission demonstrated the ability to work with allies in space. Britain's defense ministry said space is increasingly important to military operations and the UK and its partners were conducting advanced orbital operations to protect their national and military interests. Neither commented on the operation’s proximity to the Chinese satellite.
The U.S. Space Force’s next chief of space operations, Lieutenant General Douglas Schiess, had been involved in the operation. In an interview shortly afterward, he said operating close to another spacecraft could help verify whether an allied satellite is functioning properly or determine whether an adversary is "doing something it shouldn't." He declined to say at the time whether another country's satellite had been nearby.
Britain recently disclosed that the mission was conducted alongside a maritime deployment to the Indo-Pacific region.
Using space not only to support military operations on Earth but also to influence their outcome is "really, really important," then U.K. Space Command chief Major General Paul Tedman said in April at a conference. He has since retired from the military.
China's foreign ministry said it was not familiar with the specific details of the U.S.-British operation. More broadly, Beijing opposes the weaponization of space and supports its peaceful use, the ministry said, while accusing Washington of stoking an arms race through efforts including the missile defense system Golden Dome and potential space-based weapons.
Asked about Shiyan 12-01 and the Chinese spaceplane, the ministry said it had no information. State news agency Xinhua has described Shiyan 12-01 as conducting space environment surveys, and the spaceplane as an experimental craft supporting the peaceful use of space.
U.S. Space Force says its own spaceplane is carrying out a range of tests and experiments.
SPACE WEAPONS
U.S. Space Command head General Stephen Whiting has repeatedly emphasized the importance of space to modern warfare, warning that adversaries are developing capabilities to deny the United States access to key systems and reduce military effectiveness. He has said adversaries would likely seek to target U.S. space assets early in a conflict.
To counter such threats, the U.S. must adopt a more active warfighting posture in space, Whiting argues. That means not only protecting U.S. systems but also being prepared to threaten or strike hostile assets if necessary. He has called for orbital interceptors and other weapons.
"We must be well-prepared for conflict in space. And if deterrence fails, we will fight and win," he told a conference in April.
We must be well-prepared for conflict in space
U.S. Space Command chief General Stephen Whiting
Western officials warn of a range of threats, including ground-based lasers, electronic jammers, cyberattacks and anti-satellite missiles.
In orbit, the United States, China and Russia all operate maneuverable satellites capable of approaching and inspecting other spacecraft. Such systems could be adapted to carry weapons, including lasers or projectiles. Western officials say Beijing and Moscow have demonstrated technologies that could be used to threaten U.S. and allied satellites.
The U.S. has also accused Russia of developing an anti-satellite capability involving a satellite designed to carry a nuclear weapon. Moscow has denied that it is developing a space-based anti-satellite nuclear weapon.
The UK's Tedman, in an interview last fall, said militaries now see satellites as “weapons systems” that need to maneuver and fight. The West is “working hard to retain our strategic advantage in space,” he said.
Some specialists note that disrupting satellites remains easier from Earth than through spacecraft-on-spacecraft attacks.
In a rare disclosure about its own capabilities, the U.S. Space Force announced in June that it had introduced an earthbound electromagnetic weapon from L3Harris Technologies designed to disable or disrupt adversary satellites.
"DOGFIGHTING" AND HUNTER SATELLITES
Although the United States remains the world's leading space power, China is rapidly expanding both the number of satellites it operates and the complexity of its missions.
Chinese satellites have demonstrated what U.S. officials describe as orbital "dogfighting," which includes multiple satellites moving in a synchronized way in proximity. Chinese spacecraft have also shown the ability to capture a defunct satellite and move it into a different orbit.
Last year, China conducted what was likely an on-orbit refueling attempt, according to a U.S. Space Force official. Refueling would be a major breakthrough because satellites are normally constrained by the fuel they launch with. The ability to replenish fuel could determine whether a spacecraft remains a hunter or becomes the hunted.
Chinese institutions continue to pursue new capabilities. Patent-related documents show the maker of some of China's most advanced military aircraft acquired technology that allows satellites to autonomously calculate fuel-efficient maneuvers while pursuing another spacecraft.
Meanwhile, a technology-transfer notice published by the National University of Defense Technology described a mature system capable of managing hundreds of satellites simultaneously for both defensive and operational purposes.
Researchers at another major Chinese university with close military ties have also been developing pursuit satellites, including concepts involving multiple spacecraft using nets to capture targets, according to patent-related documents.
The institutions and the People's Liberation Army did not respond to requests for comment. On-orbit capabilities such as re-fueling and capturing another satellite could have non-military uses.
China's official military's newspaper, PLA Daily, said in a 2022 editorial that controlling space was essential for safeguarding national security, seizing the strategic initiative and achieving victory in war.
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伊朗戰爭的確改變了中東局勢 – Joseph Krasuss
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請參考：
* US and Iran trade attacks, marking first major military escalation in a month (08/31)
* Iran Is Facing Its Soviet Moment and Possibly Its End (08/30)
* Military leaders warn Hegseth against extending Iran war operations (08/30)
* Six Months Into the Iran War, Who Is Winning? (08/28)
* After six months, the Iran war has reached its endgame - a costly stalemate (08/27)
Six months on, the Iran war has changed the Middle East, but not in the way its architects had hoped
JOSEPH KRAUSS, 08/28/26
It's been six months since the United States and Israel attacked Iran with the perennial goal of transforming the Middle East through military force. The region has changed, but not in the way they had hoped.
The Islamic Republic survived the assassination of its top leaders and weeks of heavy bombing, and found a potent form of leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. Gulf Arab nations saw worrying gaps open up in the American security umbrella they have relied on for decades — and some are looking at alternatives.
Israel has once again thrashed its enemies without defeating them, and after nearly three years of war in Gaza and new land seizures, is at risk of a generational rupture with the U.S., its closest ally. Hopes of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia — another enduring U.S. and Israeli aspiration — have dimmed even further.
When they attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel hoped to topple its clerical leadership and replace it with a pro-Western government. Instead, they've ended up with a "hardened and very radical regime," said Barbara Leaf, a former ambassador who served as assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in the Biden administration.
"That is going to be exceptionally difficult to deal with, to say the least," she said. Iran's "confidence has grown over the months that it cannot only survive, but it can prevail, it can reset the regional landscape."
Iran was on the ropes before the attack
In the runup to the war, the Islamic Republic appeared more vulnerable than at any point since Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded in 1980.
Iran's currency had cratered, setting off some of the biggest anti-government protests in its history, which were brutally suppressed in January, with thousands killed. Israel and the U.S. had pounded its military and nuclear sites during a 12-day war the previous summer, and its militant allies had been throttled in the wars that followed Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack out of Gaza.
But the tide changed shortly after the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes, as Iran's leaders were quickly replaced and its people — sheltering from the war — ignored exhortations from the attackers to rise up again.
Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical trade route for oil and gas, and attacked Gulf countries hosting U.S. troops, rattling the global economy. U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to a ceasefire in April and signed a deal with Iran in June, which crumbled weeks later.
Iran is now determined to exert permanent control over the strait, to use it to ward off future attacks and secure other concessions, while giving no ground on its disputed nuclear program. It's a risky gamble, especially as the U.S. tightens its blockade and vows new sanctions on Iran's already battered economy.
"Iran has demonstrated that Hormuz gives it significant leverage, but prolonged disruption also hurts its neighbors, China, and the global economy, while encouraging alternatives to the strait," said Yoel Guzansky, an expert on Iran and the Gulf at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies.
"Tehran's danger is confusing its ability to survive with victory and demanding more than its leverage can deliver," he said.
Gulf nations doubt US security guarantees
For decades, the U.S. has been committed to protecting wealthy Gulf oil exporters from external aggression, using a sprawling network of bases across the region.
The arrangement helped secure global energy markets, deterred Saddam's Iraq and later Iran, and contributed to the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf nations becoming havens of prosperity in a volatile region.
It's been tested before, but never like this.
Iran retaliated against Israel, but it also trained its missiles and drones on Gulf nations that had hoped to stay out of the war. It struck U.S. bases and critical energy infrastructure, stretching air defenses and drawing down American supplies of sophisticated interceptors.
Iran responded to attacks on its civilian infrastructure by striking its neighbors' desalination plants. That raised fears that a war begun without consultation with Gulf nations could lead to catastrophic attacks on their water and electricity.
"The fact that the war began without a clear political objective and against the advice of key regional partners, and that there has not been clear evidence of a Plan B once the initial attacks failed to dislodge the Iranian regime, is likely to undermine confidence in the U.S. across the region and may take some time to repair," said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Gulf expert at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Last month, Saudi Arabia entered into a new defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey, an early indication that stalwart American allies might seek new security arrangements. Their options are limited, however.
"The dilemma facing Gulf states is there is no viable alternative to the full range of defense and security networks with the U.S.," Ulrichsen said.
Israel batters its enemies but risks losing its closest friend
Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah launched missiles into Israel days after the outbreak of the war, triggering heavy retaliatory airstrikes and another ground invasion. Israel has reoccupied large parts of southern Lebanon, adding to its wider seizure of territory following the Oct. 7 attack.
Its many tactical victories have come at a mounting cost in international isolation. Israel has been widely accused of genocide in Gaza, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, all of which Israel adamantly denies.
Of greater concern for Israel is its unprecedented erosion of support in the United States. That accelerated as some critics came to see it as having led the U.S. into another Mideast war, something to which the Trump administration has at times lent credence.
As the war settled into a stalemate over the summer, outspoken critics of Israel won some key Democratic primaries across the United States and more than half of House Democrats voted to cut aid to Israel. Israel has also come in for growing criticism from the right.
In addition to deteriorating sentiment in the U.S., there's less chance of forming stronger ties with other countries. Normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia appears increasingly distant.
"The conflicts that have swept across the region since Oct. 7 have led officials in Saudi Arabia to view the current Israeli leadership as contributing to regional instability and not therefore a viable diplomatic partner at the moment," Ulrichsen said.
Krauss reported from across the Middle East for over two decades, including postings in Cairo, Jerusalem and Baghdad.
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世界將走向「具有中國特色」 - Mark Leonard
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A Future With Chinese Characteristics
Mark Leonard, 08/18/26
The world is undergoing a historical and cultural rupture. Just as Hollywood and other American exports once gave the rest of the world a glimpse of modern life and the future that awaited them, China is now doing the same for African, Latin American, and even American young people.
BERLIN—For much of the 20th century, the United States represented not just a place on the map. It was also a point in time. When Western Europeans looked at images of America after World War II—depictions of Hollywood’s glamor, American cars, and newfangled labor-saving devices—they thought they were looking into the future.
The American Dream had an especially irresistible draw for East Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, and for tens of millions of Chinese during the opening and reform era that began after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. China’s great economic reinvention was inspired, in part, by Deng Xiaoping’s awe at American modernity, which he witnessed firsthand during an official visit in 1979.
But fast-forward to 2026, and the positions have been reversed. For most people in most countries, the future can now be seen in China. Just as Hollywood once showed the world what modern life looked like, China is showing African, Latin American, and even American young people what an economy built on green energy, mobile payments and other services, and advanced robotics looks like. For Cobus van Staden of the China-Global South Project, the West is “increasingly being framed as backward-looking [and] associated with the past,” a phenomenon presumably accelerated by Trumpism, with its rejection of renewable energy, diversity, and its social conservatism.
In many parts of the West, disillusionment has given rise to Chinamaxxing on social media, with American and European influencers performatively embracing Chinese mannerisms and aesthetics. And in the Global South, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences.
This signals a genuine historical rupture. For generations, most countries defined themselves in relation to the West. Some sought (or were convinced) to emulate Western development models like the Washington Consensus, and many were keen to acquire Western technology and aid, or simply to get the West’s approval. Other countries did push back against the West’s influence and attack Western hypocrisy, but their counter-models were themselves defined by opposition to the West.
Either way, West-centrism was the prism through which geopolitics was conducted and interpreted. When countries in the Sahel invited Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries to help them deal with insurgencies, it was seen as a reaction against France and its traditional role in the region. When Angola invited Sinopec to exploit its oil fields, it was seen as a snub to Portugal and the United Kingdom. And then there are the many challenges to US hegemony in the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Around the world, memories of bloody Western interventions or financial crises still linger.
Yet younger generations around the world are not even pro- or anti-Western so much as they are post-Western. For them, China, not the US, is at the center of their conceptual universe and envisaged future.
What happened? One of the big differences between countries in the Global South and the Global North is their demographic profile. In the US and Europe, the median age is 40–50, compared to 19 in Nigeria, and 29 in South Africa, India, and Lebanon. That means some 70% of Nigerians aren’t even old enough to have registered the 2003 US invasion of Iraq or the 2008 global financial crisis. As Cobus points out, young West Africans “never knew anything more than the US as we know it now.” The era of Donald Trump encompasses their entire political memory, and they presumably are not very impressed.
This shift in perceptions is not just an African story, of course. In Vietnam, which has long had a fraught relationship with China, young people are becoming less reflexively Sinophobic than their elders. Chelsea Nguyen, a researcher at the London School of Economics, credits the COVID-19 pandemic for catalyzing this change. The West’s perceived mishandling of the pandemic undermined its status as a model worthy of emulation. Many Vietnamese turned to exploring their own history and that of their Asian neighbors, including China. As in much of Africa, growing exposure to China’s rapid technological progress and Chinese consumer goods transformed the country’s global brand.
Meanwhile, Loubna El Amine, a China scholar at King’s College London, notes that in regions riven by instability—such as the Middle East, where the US itself is a big part of the problem—“a lot of the attraction of China is its absence rather than presence.” The latest Arab Opinion Index bears this out, showing that 77% of respondents view US policies as a threat to the region’s security and stability, compared with just 25% for China—and that was well before Trump launched his catastrophic war against Iran. And, of course, China carries none of the colonial baggage that complicates European interventions (or even peacebuilding efforts) in the region.
Still, China has been known to be aggressive in pursuing its economic agenda in the developing world, whether through predatory loans, acquiring critical national infrastructure, or deliberately exporting its domestic overcapacity. Such behavior ruffles feathers as much in Thailand, Mexico, and Nigeria as it does in the US and Europe. Moreover, young people’s widespread distrust of their governments can easily bleed into unhappiness with China when political leaders are seen to be giving it undue privileges.
Since the pivot to China as an exemplar of modernity is in many ways pragmatic and non-ideological, its hold on the popular imagination is still tenuous. Lots of leaders in the West want to compete with China for “soft power.” But the key is not to counter Chinese “propaganda” or improve Western PR. The winners in the battle for hearts and minds will be those who offer real solutions to people’s problems and create more opportunities for prosperity than are currently available.
Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, is the author, most recently, of Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail (Polity Press, 2026). He’s been writing for PS since 2004.
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* Politics
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* Look East for Lessons in Democratic Resistance Aug 20, 2026, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
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美海軍最後一艘亞洲航母移防中東 – Ben Finley/Didi Tang
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請參考：
* How Trump’s war blew a hole in Western defences (子標題：Months of downing Iranian missiles has left stocks of Patriots and Thaads dangerously depleted)
* Centcom commander visits USS Abraham Lincoln amid questions about conditions on ship
US pulls last aircraft carrier in Asia as Trump focuses on Iran and the Western Hemisphere
BEN FINLEY/DIDI TANG, 08/16/26
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's war against Iran is stretching the limits of U.S. aircraft carriers and leaving the western Pacific without one of the key American warships as China shows more signs of aggression.
The USS George Washington is departing the Pacific and expected to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East amid growing concerns about mental health and supply issues aboard the long-deployed carrier. The Lincoln has had its time at sea extended from its original May return date to support operations against Iran.
The lack of a U.S. carrier in the Pacific may be short-lived if the Navy deploys another in the next couple of months. But it shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further retreats from the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the Western Hemisphere.
"The administration says that the Pacific is supposed to be the most important behind the Western Hemisphere," said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead, the U.S. is "doing the exact opposite" of its previously expressed goal of pulling out of the Middle East.
American allies in the Pacific are unsettled over the unpredictability of the Republican administration, Poling said, while Beijing "is quite happy with U.S. distraction, with the frustration of U.S. allies and partners."
China may take advantage of US carrier's absence
Beijing sees the U.S. military presence in the region as a threat to China's rise and an obstacle to its ambition to seize Taiwan, the self-governing island it claims as its own. But the United States has argued that the Pacific region is too important economically to lose.
No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier's absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.
"They're using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the U.S. is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore," Clark said. "They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the U.S. is not able to guarantee their security anymore."
China conducted naval exercises this week with Indonesia and recently has shown signs of aggression toward Japan and the Philippines, two key U.S. allies that also have territorial disputes with Beijing.
China carried out military drills this month near the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. Both China and the Philippines have claims over the shoal. Last month, a Chinese guided-missile destroyer conducted a live-fire exercise off Japan's southernmost island of Okinotori.
Adm. Frank Bradley, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, has been trying to reassure regional allies of Washington's commitment. He was in Manila on Thursday, telling his Filipino counterparts that U.S. special operations forces are ready to step up joint exercises to strengthen the countries' alliance. He also is expected to travel to Japan.
"We have the ability to project force, the United States, anywhere on the globe," Bradley told The Associated Press. "And when the threat in the region of the Middle East has been attended to, we will redeploy and reorient and be able to project that force wherever else it might be required."
"I also feel very confident in the Armed Forces of the Philippines' ability to protect their sovereignty here and for us to remain close with them," he said.
Evan Sankey, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute who focuses on U.S. policy toward China, said aircraft carriers provide psychological assurance to U.S. allies. The absence of carriers in the region, he said, "adds to the general sense that the U.S. is distracted by events in the Middle East."
Trump has relied on aircraft carriers for military actions
Trump has relied heavily on aircraft carriers to support military operations during his second term. For example, the USS Gerald R. Ford returned home in mid-May after an 11-month deployment, the longest since the Vietnam War, during which it supported the U.S. fight against Iran and the capture of Venezuela's then-leader, Nicolás Maduro.
The Ford had experienced a fire in a laundry space that forced the carrier to turn around and return to the Mediterranean Sea for repairs and left hundreds of sailors without places to sleep. Meanwhile, the Lincoln has spent a record uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days. Democratic lawmakers have been calling for investigations and greater visibility into conditions aboard the ship.
Warships and their crews can only handle so much, said Robert Farley, who teaches national security and diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and often writes about aircraft carriers.
"People don't get enough rest. It's psychologically exhausting. And R&R is part of keeping the crew healthy," Farley said. "Sometimes it's framed as, 'These people haven't had a vacation.' But we are dealing with well-known limits on the capacity of a crew to operate at top efficiency over time. And that just declines."
Clark, of the Hudson Institute, said the squeeze on the nation's aircraft carriers stems from the lack of preparation and planning for the Iran war.
"If we were going to mobilize to do this kind of conflict, and we anticipated it might go this long, we might have done some changes to the carrier schedule to make sure more would be available," Clark said.
Clark said the Navy has 11 aircraft carriers and typically deploys two or three at a time. But it could soon deploy four if the USS Theodore Roosevelt leaves San Diego for the Middle East, allowing the Washington to return to Pacific.
But the massive warships will need maintenance, likely causing a bottleneck at the nation's only two carrier shipyards.
"We'll end up with a maintenance debt that needs to be paid for the next few years," Clark said. "We'll probably have less carrier presence than we've had in the previous years because carriers will be lined up to get into the shipyard."
There are questions about the use of aircraft carriers in modern warfare
Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow in the Quincy Institute's East Asia Program, questions the future need for aircraft carriers as warfare rapidly changes.
Carriers can be more easily targeted with drones and missiles, particularly by an adversary such as China, Swaine said, while smaller ships and submarines can be as effective in striking targets as the fighter jets that launch off a carrier.
Top Navy officials have indicated a desire to move away from a heavy reliance on carriers. Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, told The Associated Press in February that he wants to convince commanders to use smaller, newer ships and other assets instead of consistently turning to huge aircraft carriers.
Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.
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麥加協議：沙、土、巴聯防 -- Timour Azhari等
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請參考：
* The Strategic Rationale for the Mecca Pact
* The Houthis could be first big test for Mecca mutual defense pact
* ‘Muslim Nato’ could see Saudia Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan clash with Israel or Iran
這個「聯防協議」只是虛晃一槍，說來聽聽；不可能有任何實際聯防作用。
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan pledge mutual defence as Middle East turmoil escalates
Timour Azhari/Ariba Shahid/Tuvan Gumrukcu, 08/07/26
Summary
* Pact says armed attack on one signatory would count as attack on all
* Statement gives no specifics on commitments or defence obligations
* Agreement follows nearly a year of negotiations, Reuters reported in January
RIYADH/KARACHI/ANKARA, Aug 7 - Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed a joint defence agreement in Mecca on Friday, wedding Sunni Muslim U.S. allies alarmed at a regional conflagration that has brought Iranian missile fire onto Gulf oil exporters.
Iran and its allies have been firing on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and blockading their energy shipments, since the U.S. and Israel attacked it on February 28 in a major escalation after years of regional tumult.
The "Mecca Joint Defence Agreement" is intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression and stipulates that an armed attack against any of the three would be regarded as an attack on all, they said in a joint statement.
However, the statement did not give specifics on the commitments each had accepted and it was not clear how far their agreement would bind them to any particular military action in each other's defence.
Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz said the agreement was not aimed at any specific country. A Turkish official added that it was purely defensive and did not abrogate any existing agreements the countries had with other states.
The three nations share concerns about the increasingly aggressive military stances of both Israel and revolutionary Shi'ite Iran, as their longtime U.S. ally struggles to contain regional upheaval that has caused a global energy crisis.
POWERFUL POLITICAL SYMBOLISM
"Three of the Muslim world's most influential states are convening at a moment of heightened uncertainty, demonstrating a growing willingness among regional and middle powers to coordinate more closely on security matters," said Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, a Saudi-based think tank.
"The trilateral framework could strengthen the three countries' collective diplomatic and defense weight while contributing to the emergence of a more regionally driven security architecture," Sager added.
Turkey has NATO's second-largest military. Saudi Arabia is home to Islam's holiest sites and one of the world's top oil exporters, while Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed Muslim country.
However, Rayed Krimly, Saudi deputy minister for public diplomacy, said in a social media post that the accord does not represent an effort to establish a military axis or a sectarian bloc.
"Nor is it linked to any nuclear ambitions or arms race," he said.
Although Pakistan agreed a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia last year, it has not responded to Iran's attacks on the kingdom militarily. It has also played down suggestions its nuclear deterrent might be extended to allies, saying last year of its pact with Saudi Arabia that atomic weapons were "not on the radar".
Both Pakistan and Turkey have also voiced support for a maritime defence coalition Saudi Arabia has announced to protect regional shipping and energy routes.
Friday's pact was signed in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and follows nearly a year of negotiations, reported by Reuters in January.
PACT BUILDS ON LONGSTANDING MILITARY TIES
The Middle East has been in flames for nearly three years since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
Israel has waged war in Gaza, invaded southern Lebanon and seized territory in Syria as well as launching two air campaigns against Iran. Tehran has fired on Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan and Israel.
While Turkey and Pakistan, on the fringes of the Middle East, have avoided significant direct attacks, both are anxious to calm conflicts that threaten their own security and economies.
For Saudi Arabia, three years of Middle East conflicts have imperiled its oil exports and ambitious development plans and drawn big questions over the reliability of its longstanding U.S. security umbrella.
Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow for Middle East Security at the RUSI think tank, said the agreement was focused on counterbalancing Iranian hegemony in the region and building deterrence against Israel rather than moving towards a confrontation with Tehran.
"I think the objective is very much the opposite," Ozcelik said.
Pakistan has provided training and technical assistance to Saudi forces for decades, while Turkey and Pakistan have exchanged warships and training aircraft. Saudi Arabia is a major purchaser of drones from Turkey.
Pakistan has deployed about 8,000 troops, fighter jets, drones and an air-defence system to the kingdom and opened negotiations with Kuwait to provide security in exchange for energy cooperation and investment.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office declined to comment. A spokesperson for India's Foreign Ministry said the pact was a development that the country was closely following. Iran did not immediately comment.
By Timour Azhari, Ariba Shahid, Tuvan Gumrukcu and Samia Nakhoul; Additional reporting by Daren Butler, Maha El-Dahan, Ramiy Ayyub, Menna Alaa El Din and Saurabh Sharma; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Sharon Singleton
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Ariba Shahid is a Reuters correspondent based in Pakistan, reporting on the economy, energy, mining, climate and foreign policy. She previously reported for DealStreetAsia and Profit magazine, and was an OCCRP research fellow in South Asia.
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烏克蘭在裏海襲擊伊朗貨輪 -- Tim Lister/Leila Gharagozlou
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請參考：
* Caspian Sea：裏海：世界上最大的封閉內陸水體；或被歸類為最大的湖泊；或是歸類為條件完整的海。它是一個內流盆地，位於歐洲和亞洲之間，處高加索以東；中亞廣闊乾草原以西；東歐俄羅斯南部肥沃平原以南；西亞多山伊朗高原以北。
* Chalk One Up for Ukraine (關於烏克蘭無人機技術和空防能力領先地位的報導)
這個事件有趣的地方在於：雙方針對攻擊「目標」各說各話；伊朗宣稱貨物是從俄國運到伊朗；烏克蘭則宣稱貨物是從伊朗運到俄國。烏克蘭在「公湖/公海」襲擊伊朗貨輪的「事實」未變；但襲擊行為的「正當性」就天差地別了。
The Iran and Ukraine wars are colliding on the world’s biggest lake. Here’s what to know
Tim Lister/Leila Gharagozlou, 07/27/26
A satellite image of the Caspian Sea. Planet Observer/Universal Images Group/Getty Images 衛星照片
The Caspian Sea has become the latest region to be sucked into the growing conflict between Iran and its adversaries – not least because it’s a vital artery in the growing relationship between Iran and Russia.
Ukraine at the weekend said its drones had struck two Russian vessels carrying military cargoes in the Caspian, the world’s largest inland body of water. It asserted that both had left Iran for a Russian port.
In a post on X Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the targets included “ships that were involved in transporting military cargo from Iran, as well as a warship,” subsequently identified by Ukraine’s security service as a Russian missile boat.
Iran countered that one of its commercial vessels carrying a cargo of iron had been struck, killing one seafarer and injuring three others.
The ship, which it did not name, was sailing from the Russian port of Astrakhan to Anzali in Iran, which Iranian regional governor Hadi Hagh-Shenas described as “a safe and reliable corridor for commercial exchanges between the two ports.”
Tensions escalated further Monday when Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said, “Ukraine’s dangerous adventurism will certainly not go unanswered by us.” Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Chargé d’Affaires in Tehran was summoned to the foreign ministry over the incident.
Where is the Caspian Sea?
The recriminations reflect the growing importance of the Caspian, which is bordered by five countries, including Iran and Russia. With the blockade of Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, the Caspian has taken on new significance as a trade route.
The Caspian can help Iran towards “a diversified trade strategy, especially if Iran promotes trade with Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China via rail, and, indirectly, Eastern Europe,” according to Bijan Khajehpour, managing partner of Vienna-based Eurasian Nexus Partners, a consulting firm.
It is “a strategic complement rather than a substitute for Iran’s existing maritime access through the southern waters,” Khajehpour told CNN.
Russian grain and steel are among the cargoes that cross the Caspian. Iran has developed several significant ports on the sea, among them Anzali. Oil and gas from Kazakhstan are transported from the Caspian to a hub on the Black Sea.
For Russia, the Caspian is an important conduit to central Asia and Iran – and a critical route in its expanding strategic partnership with Tehran, one that has a military component as well as Russia’s role in Iran’s civilian nuclear program and oil exploration in Iran.
“The recent blockade by the US (of Iranian ports) has underlined the strategic value of the Caspian Sea route” says Khajehpour. It is also less vulnerable to international sanctions because it is landlocked and largely controlled by Iran, Russia and neighboring states beyond Western naval reach.
Why is the sea so valuable to both Iran and Russia?
The Caspian has become a passageway for the growing military links between Moscow and Tehran. Iran and Russia have a broad strategic agreement covering economic and military collaboration, although it is not a mutual defense pact.
Russia received its first batches of Iranian Shahed attack drones via the Caspian early in its war with Ukraine and has since produced new versions of the drones in plants on Russian soil.
The Caspian route linking Iran’s northern ports to the Russian port of Astrakhan has been targeted by Ukraine before. Last August a cargo ship – the Port Olya 4 – was destroyed while reportedly loaded with Shahed-136 drone components and Iranian munitions.
In 2024, CNN reported that a Russian cargo ship suspected of carrying Iranian ballistic missiles for Moscow’s war against Ukraine was seen at a Russian port on the Caspian Sea. The US Treasury department assessed that the Russian Ministry of Defense had “used the vessel Port Olya-3 to transport CRBMs (close-range ballistic missiles) from Iran to Russia.”
Then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington believed the Russian military had received shipments of Iranian Fatah-360 ballistic missiles and would “likely use them within weeks in Ukraine against Ukrainians.”
At the same time, the US National Security Council warned of the deepening military cooperation between Iran and Russia. Spokesperson Sean Savett told CNN back then that “any transfer of Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia would represent a dramatic escalation in Iran’s support” for the Kremlin in its invasion of Ukraine.
Iran denied it was providing military assistance to Russia at that time.
What is Ukraine hoping to achieve from its strikes?
Ukraine’s drone attacks on vessels and energy infrastructure in the Caspian at the weekend are a demonstration of its growing long-range capabilities and its goal of damaging the industries that support Russia’s war effort.
It’s also a recognition that Iran – like North Korea – plays a significant role in supplying Russia with weapons.
And above all, it’s astute timing from the Ukrainians, with Zelensky traveling to Washington this week to meet with President Donald Trump. Besides the Caspian strikes, Zelensky has said that according to Ukrainian intelligence Russia has provided satellite data to Iran to carry out attacks on US facilities in the Middle East.
The message: we are on the same side.
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烏克蘭成功對西方國家的啟示 - Chrystia Freeland
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下文雖然有明顯的偏執，論述也跳不出西方人「民主八股」的窠臼；但其部份觀點仍然有參考價值。例如：作者在最後一段把普丁和川蠢視為「一丘之貉」。
What Ukraine’s Success Means for the West
Chrystia Freeland, 07/24/26
There are several reasons why Ukraine has been able to stymie its much larger aggressor. For the world’s democracies, the most important lesson to draw from Ukrainians' doggedness and brilliant innovations and improvisations may be that we should not be so surprised.
OXFORD—The changing face of the battle for Ukraine has taken much of the world by surprise, both in terms of the horrific scale of casualties that Russia is enduring—nearly 40,000 last month, according to Ukrainian officials—and the dynamism and sheer chutzpah that has characterized Ukraine’s war effort.
For the world’s democracies, the most important lesson to draw from Ukraine’s doggedness and brilliant innovations and improvisations may be that we should not be so surprised. Our lack of confidence in Ukraine, particularly at the start of the war, and our overestimation of Russia’s military might, is closely connected to our weakening faith in democracy as a system. This political alienation is not only wrong, but dangerous. The courage and determination of ordinary Ukrainians in the face of almost immeasurable challenges should give us more confidence in our core values and way of life.
Ukrainians recently demonstrated those values after four and a half years of war. When determined and constructive mass public protests erupted in the wake of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s sacking last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky responded no less constructively to the complaints by replacing the army commander-in-chief who had opposed Fedorov and his focus on high-tech warfare, underscoring the remarkable fact that Ukraine is determined to fight this war as a democracy.
The Roots of Perseverance
There are several reasons why Ukraine has been able to stymie its much larger aggressor. For starters, Ukraine is not the fractured society Russian President Vladimir Putin brutishly proclaims it to be. Archbishop Borys Gudziak, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the United States and president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, told me, shortly after the war started, that Zelensky is so effective because he is following the lead of the ordinary people of Ukraine. That much was clear in his response to the countrywide pro-Fedorov demonstrations.
The fundamental importance of unity under fire should be familiar to the West. What we are seeing in Ukraine is a latter-day version of the united, democratic British national spirit we recall so proudly in commemorating the escape from Dunkirk, 86 years ago last month.
Ukraine’s system of decentralized, grassroots military procurement is an example of democratic unity in action. Brigades buy their own weapons, directly from arms-makers. Sometimes, they make their own weapons. That means very close interaction between fighters and weapons makers, with innovation cycles sometimes as truncated as two weeks. The defense ministry rewards the most successful brigades with more money to buy weapons. Civilians can and do make direct contributions to their favorite units.
Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, the giant German defense firm, commented on this very homegrown defense sector at the end of March: “It’s Ukrainian housewives,” he told an interviewer. “They have 3-D printers in the kitchen, and they produce parts for drones. This is not innovation.”
Ukrainians could have been insulted, but they decided to see the comment as a back-handed compliment. A #MadeByHousewives hashtag went viral on Ukrainian social media within 24 hours. My friend Oleksandr Kamyshin replied on X: “Rheinmetall says our #LEGODrones are #MadeByHousewives in their kitchens. Fine. Meanwhile our #LEGODrones already burned more than 11,000 Russian tanks.”
Unsurprisingly, Rheinmetall walked back the comment, posting: “We have the utmost respect for the Ukrainian people’s immense efforts in defending themselves ... It is to Ukraine’s particular credit that it is fighting highly effectively even with limited resources.”
At the same time, Ukraine has found that its diversity is its strength, something many Western democracies also should remember. In a political environment where inclusiveness is derided as virtue-signaling, if not positively dangerous, and where we are subjected to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s cartoonish cosplay of vitriolic white Christian masculinity in the Pentagon, Ukraine’s lived reality of war—neither macho nor ethnically rooted—is a powerful corrective.
Women are central to Ukraine’s war effort. Consider Iryna Terekh, the CEO of Fire Point, and possibly the very “housewife” who inspired Papperger’s thoughtless comment. She makes the “flamingo” missiles that were used in the strike on Titan-Barrikady, the Volgograd producer of launch systems for ballistic missiles, last month.
Terekh is in her early thirties, a mother of two, and trained as an architect. She decided to become a missile maker after surviving, with her children and a girlfriend, the occupation and massacre of civilians in Bucha at the start of the war.
Terekh escaped unscathed, and told herself she never wanted to be afraid of being raped by invading soldiers again. At presentations, she likes to give out hot-pink socks, labeled “MILF tech,” inscribed with the motto, “Keep your legs warm and your arsenals full.”
Ukrainian women are fighting, too, including in combat positions. Some 20% of military cadets are women and an astounding 80% of Ukrainians support women’s inclusion in the military. Ukrainian women soldiers tell me they see fighting as feminine. Ukrainian mothers are especially convinced of this. After all, it is a mother’s job to protect her children.
Defining the Nation
Ukraine today is very intentionally a political nation. It is fighting this war as a society united by its values, rather than the sort of “blood and soil” ethnic bond that captivates right-wing populists. Muslim Crimean Tatars, for example, are an important and celebrated part of the war effort, particularly doing dangerous espionage and sabotage operations in Russian-controlled Crimea. And, of course, Ukraine’s war leader, Zelensky, is proudly Jewish.
Another important lesson Ukraine provides to the West is that patriotism can be a powerful force in defense of liberal democracy. Patriotism often frightens or alienates liberals and progressives, especially when they see it evoked by the extreme right. But patriotism is being harnessed to unite not only Ukraine, but democracies like Denmark, Canada, and Spain, all of which feel threatened by the United States under President Donald Trump.
To survive, small democracies need allies, and democratic Europe, unlike Trump, is stepping up for Ukraine. It is trendy, especially in US business circles, to write Europe off as rudderless and economically stagnant: “a pretty museum,” a trope embraced by the Trump administration and MAGA Republicans in Congress. But today, when it comes to Ukraine, Europe is meeting the moment.
With former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ouster in Hungary, Europe has defended its own democracy, and is now united on Ukraine. European Union membership played a critical role in the Hungarian vote.
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, who has flirted with pro-MAGA, anti-Ukrainian positions, has now publicly backed Ukraine’s EU membership bid. That has unblocked the EU’s €90 billion ($102 billion) loan—hugely significant support that will keep Ukraine solvent and able to fight through 2026 and into 2027.
Europe’s attitude toward Ukraine, and toward Russia, is entirely different from its position at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, speaking at an informal European Council meeting in late April, expressed what is increasingly the mainstream European view: “I want to wake up those who are living under illusions. Russia is preparing for further acts of aggression.”
As a result, for Europe, Ukraine is no longer a charity case, or a righteous victim to be pitied. Europe has come to view Russia as an existential threat, and Ukraine as the only country in the world that knows how to keep Russia at bay. Ukraine is now—quite rightly—seen as Europe’s shield and arsenal.
Renegade America
The contrast with the US under Trump is jarring. Not only has the US withdrawn most support for Ukraine, but it has also shown real sympathy to Russia—and is proud to say so. In April, Vice President JD Vance told Turning Point USA, the late Charlie Kirk’s quasi-evangelical, MAGA-friendly activist group: “One of the things I’m proudest that we’ve done in this administration is that we told Europe: if you want to buy weapons, you can, but the United States is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine anymore. We’re just out of that business.”
The same month, Hegseth, testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee, was shown a chart by Senator Angus King of Maine illustrating that Ukraine has been receiving aid only from European states. “I think that is a beautiful chart,” Hegseth smugly replied.
Meanwhile, the US fired more Patriot missiles in the first four days of the Iran war than it gave to Ukraine over the past four years. The absurdity of the US position comes into stark relief when one considers Russia’s assistance to Iran with intelligence and weapons. Components that could have been from the Cheboksary plant Ukraine’s flamingos hit last month were found inside an Iran-linked Shahed attack.
This is all important to note, because we could be on the verge of revisionist history. Trump has, all of a sudden, started to praise Ukraine, and even offered at the recent NATO summit to license the Patriot system for Ukraine’s domestic production.
Some of his fans, accustomed to adjusting even core beliefs in line with their hero’s changing whim, are starting to suggest that the US cold shoulder has in fact been a bit of cunning diplomatic jujitsu. Trump, they suggest, has actually helped Ukraine and the EU by forcing them to figure things out on their own.
The real lesson of the war in Ukraine is far different. We are learning that the US, or at least this US administration, cannot be counted on to defend democracy and its traditional allies, even in a fight that democratic forces can win. That is a lesson with consequences far beyond Ukraine.
When Experts Fail
The war in Ukraine should prompt two final reflections.
The first is that many Western experts, if not most, got it wrong from the very beginning (some still do). They predicted that Ukraine would fall quickly, evidently believing Putin’s promise of a three-day “special military operation.” When that turned out to be wrong, they continued to predict Ukraine’s defeat was just a matter of time.
This expert failure has had real consequences. It meant NATO allies held back on arming Ukraine before the war started, because of their conviction that those arms would fall into Russian hands. Assumptions that Russia would inevitably win last year meant Ukraine was forced to devote scarce time and energy to fending off demands that it actually surrender territory unoccupied by Russia to secure peace.
As University of Toronto professor Seva Gunitsky has pointed out, we need to ask why the experts got it so wrong on Ukraine, in part because we need to take care not to repeat those analytical failures elsewhere. It is easy to imagine how the same habits of mind that misled us on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine could lead us astray on China and Taiwan.
The second reflection prompted by Ukraine’s fight for survival is that we live in an age of technological marvels and political failures. Drones and deep-strike missiles mean that everyone is physically vulnerable. From the glittering skyscrapers of Dubai to the onion domes of Red Square, we are all within reach. And yet the Trump-engineered collapse of the rules-based international order, including threats to NATO itself, mean that no one has a reliable insurance policy against that material threat.
In other words, we need to learn from Ukraine because, in the world that Putin and Trump are intent on creating, we are all Ukrainians now.
Chrystia Freeland, a former foreign minister, finance minister, and deputy prime minister of Canada, is Warden of Rhodes House at the University of Oxford. He’s been writing for PS since 2025.
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以規範為基礎社會失序的原因 - Benn Steil
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Why Rules-Based Orders Fail
Benn Steil, 06/26/26
For a brief period after the Cold War, Americans persuaded themselves that the liberal order had become self-sustaining. And yet, any rules-based system elaborate enough to govern and interpret its own operations will eventually confront questions that its rules cannot answer.
NEW YORK—In 1980, Douglas Hofstadter, an obscure young computer science professor at Indiana University, won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Equal parts brain-straining, witty, and epiphanic, “GEB”—as its devotees call it—leveraged math, art, and music to illuminate a remarkable feature of reality. Though systems may appear solid and self-sustaining, they also may contain contradictions that they can never resolve from within.
Consciousness itself is such a system, Hofstadter argued. My brain constructs symbolic representations of the world, and among those symbols is a model of my brain as “myself.” But “I” am not an entity apart from my brain. The idea of “me” emerges from my own brain’s recursive symbolic activity. The self is both real and illusory: a stable experience generated by a process that can never fully explain itself.
This recursive structure, Hofstadter showed, is a source of human creativity and self-awareness. But it can also produce paralysis or collapse. I may fear something, observe that I am fearful, fear that my fearfulness is weakness, and fear that others may disdain me for it. In this case, I will have become trapped in a recursive loop in which my consciousness destabilizes my action.
Can political orders fall into the same pattern? I believe that they can and often do.
Turtles All the Way Down
Consider the so-called rules-based international order. Formulated and largely enacted by the United States at the end of World War II—at the apex of US military and economic dominance—a latticework of global rules and standards took shape, covering security, nuclear nonproliferation, trade, finance, navigation, aviation, communications, public health, food safety, cross-border crime, and human rights. America’s ambition was to create an order that functioned much like a model liberal democracy, in which the rule of law prevailed and political actors operated wholly within and according to its strictures.
Yet the work of philosopher-mathematician Kurt Gödel—the first central figure in Hofstadter’s bestseller—suggests that a fully self-regulating rules-based political order is unattainable. Gödel’s famed “incompleteness theorem,” published in 1931, used an ingenious mathematical argument to demonstrate that any rules-based system elaborate enough to govern and interpret its own operations will eventually confront questions its rules cannot answer.
In a political context, such a system must have rules not just for governing society, but for governing, interpreting, and modifying the rules themselves. Once a political order becomes sufficiently recursive, however, situations inevitably arise in which the rules themselves become contested.
For example, if constitutions must be created through pre-constitutional means, who decides when they are legitimate? Who determines whether an emergency justifies suspending rights? When may judges overrule elected majorities? What if institutions deadlock? Who decides whether a state is acting in legitimate self-defense? Does a treaty obligation supersede national sovereignty?
Though Hofstadter does not mention him, the Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow’s famed “impossibility theorem,” published in 1950, is closely related in structure and implication to Gödel’s theorem. Arrow used mathematics to answer a deceptively simple but profoundly important question about democracy: Is it possible to design a voting system that converts individual preferences into a logically coherent collective decision, while simultaneously satisfying basic standards of democratic fairness?
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. Though countless political theorists had assumed democracy to be a valid mechanism for discovering the public will, Arrow showed that the aggregation problem is insoluble. Democracy cannot reliably transform private preferences into a coherent collective rationality. It tends, instead, to produce incoherence or unfairness.
Gödel’s and Arrow’s findings cast logical doubt on Francis Fukuyama’s famous proposition that liberal democracy represented “the end of history”—the telos of human political evolution. The “liberal” part of liberal democracy relates to the rule of law, which Gödel’s theorem showed to be insufficient for a fully stable political order. The “democracy” part relates to elections, which Arrow’s theorem showed to be insufficient for identifying a coherent collective will.
States of Exception
This brings us to Hofstadter’s second central figure, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, whose famous mind-bending drawings show how systems governed by simple component rules can generate larger structures that appear paradoxical, self-creating, or logically impossible. These include hands drawing themselves, staircases rising endlessly, waterfalls powering themselves, and worlds in which figure and background reverse position. Escher’s art offers a way to visualize the interaction between the liberal-democratic order and its borderlands.
Hofstadter’s third figure is the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, but our analysis is better served by substituting for him the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt. As the Nazi regime’s “crown jurist” from 1933 to 1936, Schmitt is best known for his pithy, unsettling assertion that the “sovereign is he who decides the exception”—meaning the exception to the prevailing constitutional order in which the decider finds himself.
Schmitt rejected the idea that the rule of law is, or can be, sovereign. Consistent with Gödel, there will always be emergency situations in which the law offers no guidance. Not only is liberal democracy inherently fragile, but, according to Schmitt, its obsession with rules, procedures, and debate—rather than timely and effective action—poses a danger to national security.
That sounds plausible, until one considers that “exceptions” have been numerous and momentous in American history, while commitment to the constitutional order has generally remained strong. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in 1861, or the more ambitious elements of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. None rested on a firm constitutional foundation, yet all came to be widely regarded as legitimate.
The Louisiana Purchase was later seen as foundational to national development. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus took place alongside continued elections and was followed by restoration of constitutional order after the Civil War. And in the wake of FDR’s New Deal, expansive executive regulatory authority was absorbed into the normal structure of governance. In each case, discretionary departures from established rules were not repudiated but retrospectively validated, reinforcing rather than undermining constitutional legitimacy.
Schmitt emphasized the critical historical role of figures who assume extra-legal powers. Those of whom he approved, such as Lincoln, did so to conserve the constitutional order; he referred to them as “commissarial dictators.” By contrast, those who had wrecked the prevailing constitutional order, such as Joseph Stalin, were “sovereign dictators.”
But Schmitt neglected the critical role of public demands and expectations for ensuring restoration of a constitutional order. The best way to understand this dynamic is to visualize liberal democracy as an Escher woodcut in which figure and background are reversible. A Schmittian might identify the black birds in the woodcut below as the foreground of liberal democracy—the rules-based constitutional framework—with the white space representing the realm of exceptions beyond that framework.
M. C. Escher 木刻畫
Yet, just as the white “background” in the woodcut can be perceived as white birds in the true foreground, so exceptions in liberal democracy can be understood, contra Schmitt, as a cooperative domain—the space where actual governance occurs when rules prove insufficient to determine outcomes. Far from undermining liberal democracy, action in this realm often reinforces public confidence by demonstrating that competence and integrity can substitute temporarily for the inherent incompleteness of rules. If confidence remains that the constitutional order will return to the foreground once the crisis has passed, the sovereign is not “he who decides the exception,” but the public that retrospectively legitimizes the decision.
What we may call an “Escher equilibrium” is a condition of political stability in which a rules-based constitutional order retains legitimacy even as governance periodically operates through discretionary action. Like an Escher figure-background reversal, rules occupy the visible foreground of public justification, while the management of exceptions, a necessary but less visible domain, operates in the background. The equilibrium holds so long as discretionary action is perceived as bounded, impersonal, and temporary. It breaks down when exceptions are experienced as limitless, selectively applied, or fundamentally inconsistent with the principles the constitutional order is meant to sustain.
Up Schmitt’s Creek
Over the past quarter-century, however, the US has experienced exceptions that large segments of the public have strongly resisted. These are best understood as Schmittian threats to constitutional order, not merely because they involved departures from ordinary legal constraints, but because they weakened confidence in the system’s ability to manage crises through neutral, rule-bound procedures.
Four cases stand out.
The first was the post-9/11 expansion of the national-security state, which included mass electronic surveillance and assertions of broad executive detention authority, both of which undermined confidence that the rule of law remained operative.
Then came the bailout of major financial institutions during the 2008 financial crisis, which appeared to reward the well-connected at the expense of ordinary households.
The third exception consisted of the COVID-era interventions—including sweeping public-health mandates and emergency administrative measures—which were inconsistently applied and, in some instances, appeared to exceed statutory authority.
The fourth case was the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol and the broader effort to delegitimize the 2020 election. President Donald Trump’s subsequent mass pardon of many participants further deepened divisions between those who saw the attack as an assault on the constitutional order and those who accepted Trump’s false claim that the election had been rigged.
These episodes not only tested the constitutional order but altered how it was perceived. In each case, the exercise of extraordinary power was accompanied by a growing suspicion that the rules were selectively applied, politically manipulated, or simply inadequate. Across very different crises, a growing share of the public came to doubt that liberal-democratic procedures could manage emergencies in both an effective and an impartial manner.
Domestically, the result has been consistent with Schmitt’s critique of the failing Weimar Republic of the 1920s, which exhibited increasing polarization and declining tolerance for liberal-democratic proceduralism. Trump has exploited similar sentiment to test the judicial branch’s willingness and ability to enforce constitutional limits on executive power.
What about internationally? The global rules-based order has always relied on what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called a useful fiction—that the rules themselves, rather than the distribution of geopolitical power, governed international conduct. In reality, the system depended heavily on the one country capable of operating simultaneously within and beyond the rules. The erosion of American predominance, and the rise of China as a near-peer competitor, has shattered that sensitive equilibrium. The US now increasingly demands discretionary freedom of action and rejects the institutional constraints that it created and upheld for decades.
The implications of Gödel and Arrow’s theorems strike directly at the two foundational assumptions of postwar liberal internationalism: that sufficiently comprehensive rules can govern international conduct; and that sufficiently inclusive rules can generate coherent and legitimate collective outcomes. Consider the contrast between the remarkable success of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—which helped reduce average industrial tariffs from roughly 35% in 1947 to 4% by the early 1990s—and the paralysis of the World Trade Organization under the combined pressures of Chinese mercantilism and American protectionism.
Arrow’s theorem implies that as a rules-based regime becomes more inclusive and diversity of preferences increases, coherent and broadly legitimate outcomes become harder to sustain. The GATT excluded the Soviet Union, resulting in a relatively high degree of systemic compatibility among its market-oriented members. But the US wanted a universal WTO, and therefore assented to China’s admission before it had demonstrated adherence to core market principles. A single rules-based system, as Arrow might have anticipated, has proven unable to reconcile the conflicting economic principles under which the two behemoths operate.
The early 1990s represented the apex of the liberal international order, overseen by a single dominant power that both animated the system and broadly operated within its rules. The exemplar was the 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Though set in motion by US President George H.W. Bush, it was conducted strictly in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 678. Because the resolution did not authorize regime change, Bush halted offensive operations once Iraqi forces had been expelled. By the time his son returned US forces to Iraq in 2003, such restraint had become almost unimaginable.
Today, the conditions that sustained the liberal international order have eroded further. The Escher equilibrium that long underpinned it has fractured. The US—sliding toward Schmittian “plebiscitary democracy,” in which an autocrat rules by staged acclamation—is now pursuing a predatory deformation of the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, China seeks to dominate its Asia-Pacific neighborhood through economic coercion and military pressure, and Russia and the European Union contest the political and territorial order of Europe. The global system is no longer anchored by a single hegemonic power willing to subordinate itself to rules that it established and that define the global system.
For a brief period after the Cold War, Americans persuaded themselves that the liberal order had become self-sustaining—that universal rules, democratic legitimacy, and economic interdependence had rendered old-fashioned power politics obsolete. But the order rested less on the autonomous authority of rules than on a historically exceptional concentration of American power and institutional confidence.
That foundation has eroded. The institutions remain, but they have been drained of authority. The rival major powers invoke rules selectively, interpret them opportunistically, or ignore them outright. The exceptions are no longer hidden in the background, as in an Escher woodcut. They have moved to the foreground. And once seen, they can never be unseen.
Benn Steil is Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2024). He’s been writing for PS since 2011.
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「南方諸國」還有意義嗎？ -- Noah Smith
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下文標題雖然講的是「(全球)南方諸國」這個概念或「指號」，其內容除追溯此詞沿革外，重點在討論國家發展政策、相關經濟理論、和意識型態之虛妄。雖然發表已近三年，頗值得一讀；下文附有多幅統計圖，請至原網頁參考。
Does the notion of a "Global South" still make any sense?
There are really four Global Souths.
NOAH SMITH, 10/29/23
Map by Specialgst 全球地圖(以紅、藍兩色表示)
The Israel-Gaza war has caused a lot of heated rhetoric to be thrown around. One of the big talking points is that the U.S.’ support of Israel will cause it to lose support among the nations of the “Global South”. I don’t know if that’s true or not — Muslim countries seem likely to be at least annoyed with the U.S., but India seems more on the pro-Israel side. But regardless, this has drawn my attention to the highly questionable way in which the categories “Global North” and “Global South” are used — not just in online discussions, but by official organizations like the United Nations.
A lot of people use “Global South” interchangeably with “developing countries”, since countries in the north of the globe tend to generally be richer than countries in the south. In fact, I used it myself, in a post about global development, back in 2021:
But as soon as you try to actually categorize all the countries of the world into two groups, you run into difficulties. For example, in 1980 the Brandt Report, issued by an independent international commission, drew a nice clean line:
By Jovan.gec - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 全球「已發展 VS 發展中」國家
The red and blue map at the top of this post, which is from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), is clearly based on the Brandt Line, with just two changes: It moves South Korea and Israel into the “developed” category.
South Korea and Israel…but not Singapore??? Singapore, which UNCTAD still classifies as a “developing” country, is among the very richest countries on the planet. It’s far richer than the U.S., Canada, Australia, Switzerland, or the countries of North Europe:
GDP/總人口數 統計圖 1 2000 -- 2021
Nor does this wealth come from oil money, like Qatar or the UAE. Singapore’s economy is a highly diversified high-tech economy. It has the highest number of industrial robots per capita of any country except South Korea. It has the #1 ranking in the World Bank’s Human Capital Index. It’s Human Development Index is higher than almost any country’s on the planet — considerably higher than the UN’s own “very high human development” benchmark:
人力資源發展指數圖
In other words, if Singapore isn’t a developed country, then the term “developed country” is utterly and completely meaningless.
But while Singapore is the most glaring omission here, it’s not the only one. Turkey and Malaysia have grown robustly in recent decades, such that their per capita GDP is now comfortably ahead of a number of the countries that UNCTAD includes in its “developed” roster:
GDP/總人口數 統計圖 2 2000 -- 2021
(The gap is narrower if you use the Human Development Index, but it’s still there.)
So what’s going on here? UNCTAD’s website basically says that their present categorization is based on the categories that people used in the past:
This categorization is based on a distinction between developing and developed regions that was commonly used in the past (see Hoffmeister, 2020) and is maintained by UNSD with the understanding that being part of either developed or developing region is through sovereign decision of a state (see the M49 website).
But that makes no sense. The whole idea of a “developing” country is that it’s developing, which means at some point it can become developed. So freezing in the categories of the past makes no sense. Anyway, Hoffmeister’s 2020 paper doesn’t provide much enlightenment here, making some hand-wavey justifications based on which countries have colonial pasts and which don’t (though again, South Korea breaks this mold, and Thailand and Iran never colonized, etc.). It’s only once we go to the UN’s “M49” website that we find some plausible answers:
There is no definition of developing and developed countries (or areas) within the UN system. However, in 1996 the distinction between “Developed regions” and “Developing regions” was introduced to the Standard country or area codes for statistical use (known as M49). These groupings were intended solely for statistical convenience at the time and did not express a judgement about any country’ or area’s stage of development. Over time the use of the distinction between "Developed regions" and "Developing regions", including in the flagship publications of the United Nations, has diminished. Since 2017, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) report and the statistical annex to the Secretary General’s annual report on SDGs progress uses only geographic regions without referring to the two groupings of developed and developing regions. Therefore, following consultation with other international and supranational organizations active in official statistics, the “Developed regions” and “Developing regions” were removed from the "Other groupings" of the M49 in December 2021.
Following its removal from M49, several users expressed the need to maintain the distinction of developed and developing regions based on the understanding that being part of either developed or developing region is through sovereign decision of a state. Therefore, a file was created that contains an updated classification of developed and developing regions as of May 2022, in addition to the historical classification of December 2021…The updated classification reflects a recent action by the Republic of Korea to be considered part of developed regions. (emphasis mine 此段中斜體字部分)
So now I think we have an answer. The UN didn’t actually want to draw a distinction between developing and developed countries, and they’ve tried to remove the classification entirely. But certain countries keep insisting that the distinction be maintained. And whether a country gets included in the “developed” or “developing” blocs is basically at the request of that country’s government. South Korea wants the UN to call it a “developed” country, while Singapore, for all its fabulous wealth and high technology, wishes to be called a “developing” country.
One presumes these desires are political in nature. Singapore, a tiny city-state, has to maintain good relationships with the poorer countries of Southeast Asia that surround it, and so would rather not be singled out from them. Turkey and Malaysia probably have similar imperatives. But South Korea would prefer to advertise its successful development on the world stage.
Anyway, this whole investigation might seem excessively punctilious, but the key point is that the notion of the Global South and Global North is inherently a geopolitical one. Much of it has to do with the politics of decolonization, which played out well before I was born. The notion of former European colonies as a geopolitical bloc — embodied by the Non-Aligned Movement, “Third Worldism”, etc. — left its mark on a lot of these economic categories.
But I think it is possible to classify the world’s economies in a more useful way. The World Bank’s four-tier classification system works pretty well, I think:
世界銀行平均收入金額分級圖
Income, meanwhile, is closely correlated with other indicators of development like education and health.
But categorizing countries by their income today doesn’t tell the whole story here, because it doesn’t show the picture over time. For instance, if you look at the five major World Bank regions that comprise the “Global South” — East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa — you’ll see that they have four very different trajectories:
GDP/總人口數 統計圖 3 1990 -- 2021
East Asia — which includes Southeast Asia — is on a strongly upward trajectory; almost all of the countries in this region have either grown rapidly in recent years or are already high-income.
The Middle East and Latin America look basically identical on this graph — they’re both comfortably upper-middle income regions, but they’ve grown more slowly and have stagnated in recent years (though the Middle East has more heterogeneity than Latin America, and obviously has very different governance).
South Asia is still poor, but is making solid gains, and looks like it might be on an upward path like East Asia (though it’s too early to tell). And Sub-Saharan Africa is mostly poor and stagnant, with a few exceptions at the southern tip and the west coast.
It’s not hard to tell what separates the fast-growing countries from the stagnant ones — it’s manufacturing. If you look at which goods these countries export — which is a good proxy for what they specialize in — you’ll see that the fast-growing countries almost all export manufactured goods, while the stagnant ones mostly export natural resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and agricultural products. Economic research shows this correlation clearly.
And economic theory gives us a clear reason why manufacturing-based economies should grow faster than resource-based ones: productivity. There’s lots of scope to improve the productivity of manufacturing, especially if you’re not near the frontier yet. But there’s just not much scope to improve the productivity of resource extraction (especially because the extraction is often done by foreign companies whose technology is already cutting-edge).
Resource exporters can do lots of things to improve their GDP — stable governance, a good business climate for local services, etc. — but ultimately their space for growth is more limited. And even the most well-governed resource-based economies will be limited by their population sizes — if your country has hundreds of millions of people like Nigeria does, resource rents will be stretched thin, while if you have only a few million people like Norway, there will be more to go around.
In other words, there are basically four Global Souths. I think I’ll give them names:
1. The mostly-developed countries: Industrialized countries that are on the cusp of developed status, and are only thought of as “developing” for historical or political reasons. These include Turkey, Malaysia, and arguably China, Thailand and Mexico.
2. The industrializing countries: Rapidly industrializing countries that are still poor or middle-income but are growing fast. There include India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and potentially the Philippines and Indonesia.
3. The resource exporters: Upper-middle-income countries that specialize in resource extraction. These include Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Iran, Botswana, Namibia, Kazakhstan, and so on.
4. The poor countries: These countries mostly export natural resources but either don’t have enough of them to afford decent standards of living, or are plagued by war and/or poor governance. These include countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and so on.
Every time a country moves from the “industrializing” category to the “mostly-developed” category, the old dividing lines between Global South and Global North become a bit less relevant. Already, this process has turned the two-peaked global income distribution of the old colonialist world into something that looks much more natural:
全球收入(個人每日)分布圖 1800, 1975, 2015
Continuing this process should be the goal of development policy — for poor countries, but also for rich countries and international economic organizations that have an interest in a richer, more equal world. This means helping the industrializing countries escape whatever “middle-income traps” they find themselves in, and propelling as many of the poor countries as possible onto the escalator of industrialization.
Industrialization is the means by which the shackles of the colonial age are thrown off; by this means we can build a world where nations respect each other as equals.
I fear that many on the political Left don’t understand this. When I read accounts of global economic development by thinkers who lean to the socialist side, I often encounter nostalgia for the “trente glorieuses” — the three postwar decades. In those decades, most of the industrial growth happened in rich countries — the old “Global North” — and poor countries mostly exported resources to them. To people on the left, this relationship represents at least a partial rectification of the exploitation of colonialism — finally, the Global South was getting a fair price for their resources!
And sure, it was an improvement. But fundamentally, it still represented an unequal relationship — the Global North controlled all the high-value-added and high-tech parts of the supply chain, while the Global South mainly dug up rocks for them.
Ultimately, that pattern of development was a trap for the resource exporters of the Global South, because it meant they could only rise as high as their resource endowments would allow them to.
The stagnation of countries like Brazil and South Africa demonstrates that there’s an inherent ceiling to resource-based development. (Many saw this trap and tried to break out of it, but only a few like South Korea and Taiwan succeeded.)
The decades since 1990, however, have been a much different story. Manufacturing has finally spread beyond the boundaries of the Global North. It’s not just a few countries like Turkey and Malaysia joining the party, either — China now manufactures more than the U.S. and Europe combined, and the countries of South and Southeast Asia are rising fast.
I believe that despite the geopolitical disruptions caused by the industrialization of much of the Global South, ultimately this will lead to a world that’s both richer and more equal. And we’ll know it’s working because the categories of Global North and Global South will start to make less and less sense; the more ridiculous and out-of-date the old Brandt Line starts to look, the brighter the future will be.
相關閱讀
* Checking in on the Global South (2021)
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