Samarkand is hosting the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to discuss Iran’s prospective membership in the group while Belarus has also applied to join the group, Crux reports (above). As the SCO has become more anti-US and most members are authoritarian regimes, what is democratic India doing there?
China learned from Russia’s post-1991 experience and pursued its economic liberalization with more care, analyst Nancy Qian writes for Project Syndicate. But it ultimately could not avoid the political implications of pro-market policies and is now following Russia down the road to autocracy – continuing a century-long pattern of mirroring its neighbor’s historical trajectory.
History indicates that China will move cautiously on Taiwan and base its actions on Russia’s experience. The more successful Ukraine’s resistance is, and the more costly the war is for Russia, the more likely there will be peace across the Taiwan Strait. RTWT
“[Xi] is in a ‘no surprises’ mode, even more so than usual [so] a venture to see China’s favorite dictators’ club, the SCO, is low risk for him — but allows him to perform some kind of international leadership at home in the run up to the [20th Party] Congress,” said Daniel Baer, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017 and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, POLITICO reports.
“China is willing to give Russia some tacit support politically, diplomatically and to some extent economically, but the bottom line is that it isn’t going to go out of its way and undercut its other strategic objectives to support Russia,” Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells CNN.
