Source: WeChat official account: Buyidao has been authorized to reprint
Writing/Nine Life Sabre
Within one day, Antony Blinken visited the “core area of Moscow’s sphere of influence”?
According to the White House statement, US Secretary of State Brynken launched a trip to Central Asia on February 28, paying a visit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan successively.
In Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, Antony Blinken will hold a ministerial meeting of the “C5+1” mechanism with the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and other five Central Asian countries, and then go to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
After the one-day “flash visit”, Antony Blinken will go to New Delhi, India, the next day to attend the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting to be held from March 1 to 2.
The American media also interpreted this trip as “an opportunity for Washington to further isolate Russia and try to contact and improve the alliance”, so that the five Central Asian countries “should not be complicit in Moscow’s evasion of sanctions”.
Can this “Dragonfly Skimming the Water” work?
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Antony Blinken was the first Biden cabinet official to visit Central Asia. At the same time, this is the second time that Antony Blinken attended the “C5+1” ministerial meeting, and also the first offline participation.
The last “C5+1” ministerial meeting was held online in March last year. At that time, Antony Blinken first expressed his position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and then made a surprising statement, proposing the possibility of the United States re establishing military bases or transit bases in Central Asia.
According to the report at that time, the five Central Asian countries were “confused” about the proposal.
At the end of last year, NATO held the military exercise as scheduled, but the “unbreakable brotherhood – 2022” military exercise originally planned by the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on the Russian side did not move, which made the outside world doubt the “tenacity” between the five Central Asian countries and Russia.
The vagueness of its position makes the United States focus on Central Asia as the target of “digging the wall”, but its role seems to be small. As of the evening of the 28th, from the details of the meeting officially released by the White House, none of the parties had made different statements from the previous one.
According to Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs of the State Department at the White House, the United States knows that a visit by Antony Blinken will not have much impact on the relations between Central Asia and China and Russia.
According to the US side, Antony Blinken’s visit will highlight that the United States is a “reliable partner”, but the exact reliability is unknown.
Whether it is reliable or not, in the meeting with the foreign ministers of the five countries, “economic cooperation” and “values” are always on Antony Blinken’s lips.
Perhaps for fear that inducement would not work, Antony Blinken came up with the old method of “regional threat” before the meeting with the Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan, Mokhtar Tileuberdi.
In the press release released by the White House, Antony Blinken said such a sentence that attracted the attention of the media: “Sometimes we just say those words, but they have no real meaning. Of course, at this special moment, they can resonate more than usual.”.
“Those words” clearly refer to the “reaffirmation of the commitment of the United States to the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Central Asian countries” emphasized by Antony Blinken in the previous sentence.
Why do you mention this? Because Russia and Kazakhstan have the longest continuous land border in the world.
According to Reuters, this has triggered some people’s security concerns about Kazakhstan, which “has the second largest population in the former Soviet Union after Ukraine and Russia”.
Antony Blinken openly and secretly sent a signal to the five Central Asian countries that it was time to “stand in line” on the issue of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, perhaps who was the next Ukraine.
However, given the long-term attitude of the United States towards Central Asia, it is difficult for Antony Blinken to complete his contribution in one battle.
The last time the United States Secretary of State visited Central Asia was in 2020. During his visit, Pompeo, the then Secretary of State, had repeatedly provoked the relations between Central Asian countries and China, which was clearly a disrespect for the independent diplomacy of Central Asian countries.
Last week, on the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the United Nations General Assembly voted on the 23rd to request the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. These five Central Asian countries, together with Antony Blinken’s next visit to India, either abstained or did not vote.
If it is difficult to face up to the five Central Asian countries and persist in forming cliques, Antony Blinken’s trip can only brush off his sense of existence.
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Just when Antony Blinken was busy on his trip to Central Asia, a new wave of “strange talk” about China began to stir up in the United States.
First of all, some people began to repeat the old tune on the issue of “COVID-19 Traceability”. The “Ministry of Energy”, which was unable to cope with the epidemic, still operated this matter.
According to an exclusive report in the Wall Street Journal on the 26th, the US Department of Energy recently submitted a “confidential intelligence report” of less than five pages to the US White House and the US Congress, and put forward the “COVID-19 laboratory leakage theory”.
It is ridiculous that the US Department of Energy has no new argument at all, and even gave its own “low credibility” rating for this judgment, which is lower than the “medium credibility” rating given by the FBI in 2021.
The absurdity of this report has even caused criticism in the United States.
Mark Furman, editor of the news website MotherJones, pointed out that “The title of the Wall Street Journal is misleading and irresponsible. Many people will not read the content to understand that the view of the Department of Energy is a minority among all institutions in the United States, and believe that there is’ insufficient confidence ‘in this conclusion.”
A strange “Department of Energy”, together with the report without new arguments, and the biased hype of the Wall Street Journal… all these are hard not to be associated with. Will this be another step in the plan of American politicians to promote “anti-China public opinion”.
Coincidentally, two days after the release of the report on the 26th, on the 28th, the “Ad Hoc Committee on Strategic Competition between China and the United States”, the bridgehead of the House of Representatives against China, will hold the first hearing, which will open the curtain of the “special performance” of the United States anti-China interest groups.
At the beginning of its establishment, the Committee had taken “the origin of COVID-19” as one of the key topics. At this time, inciting public opinion and fighting a “war of cooperation against China” with the Congress can not only show the “tough” position of the Republicans, but also be ready to attack the “weakness” of the Biden government.
This has become a wave. With the cooperation of the United States Congress, the Biden government has been more and more elevated on China-related issues.
On the 27th, the American Politician News Network published an article entitled “The White House has reduced its plan to regulate American investment in China”. This article reveals that Biden will reduce the executive order plan to review US investment in China and focus on “improving the transparency of Sino-US trade”.
This immediately triggered dissatisfaction with the Huaying Sect. Although the executive order has not been cancelled, but its intensity has been reduced, the reaction of the conservatives in the face of any relaxation of Biden’s attitude towards China seems to be stabbed in the spine.
Under the repeated encouragement of the Chinese hardliners, the spiral escalation of tension between China and the United States seems to have become a foregone conclusion. How can the United States government share its energy on the economic issues that really need to be concerned about?
An expert on international issues said that it is difficult not to be in charge. As President, Biden, when dealing with front-line issues, will find that the constant confrontation between China and the United States is very unfavorable to the United States. The United States is now confronted with specific problems such as debt and inflation, which are extremely urgent and require cooperation between China and the United States.
The United States is now holding its own neck. When it can return to the track of cooperation, the United States has to figure out its own way.
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Taken together, to a large extent, the growing anti-China momentum faced by the Biden government is also the inevitable “backbite” of the United States’ long-term geopolitical and camp confrontation.
Antony Blinken went to India on March 1, and will face a “political task” to urge the participating countries to express their positions on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As Indian media and officials had predicted, the Russia-Ukraine conflict may occupy most of the G20 meeting place.
At the same time, during the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, the foreign ministers of the United States, India, Japan and Australia participating in the framework of the “Quadripartite Security Dialogue” will hold the Quadripartite Meeting. The foreign ministers of the four countries will also participate in the Rainina Dialogue, which is a multilateral meeting devoted to geopolitics held in New Delhi every year.
It can be predicted that Antony Blinken will definitely encourage the so-called “regional security threat” in the Asia Pacific region again.
Some media pointed out that India, as the rotating presidency of the G20, “the biggest challenge will be to ensure that the G20 remains on track, and will not be distracted from the real global challenges by participants’ speeches centered on Ukraine and their tendencies”.
The Indian government hopes that the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting will focus on climate change and the debt crisis of developing countries. India also wants to continue to speak for the “Global South”. However, to what extent can the United States and other western countries cooperate?
If the United States insists on going further and further on the narrative path of the confrontation between big powers, this will always be an unsolvable problem.