| Sreemoy Talukdar brings you the essential cheat sheet on foreign affairs covering India and the world |  | | Welcome to Firstpost's global brief. We start with a very interesting summit between India and Russia, the timing of which couldn't have been more intriguing — comes as it does in the same week as Joe Biden's 'democracy summit', where India is an invitee but obviously, Russia isn't. We also track WTA's move to cancel all tournaments in China and Hong Kong, leaked 'Xinjiang Papers', US-Russia tension over Ukraine and EU's $340 billion infrastructure plan to counter China's Belt and Road projects. | | TOP FIVE NEWS UPDATES | | Putin to visit Modi, India to host first 2+2 talks with Russia on Biden's 'democracy summit' week | | India, Russia ties are poised at a peculiar equilibrium. In terms of grand strategy, the two countries find themselves at the opposite ends of the emerging great power rivalry between the US and China, and drifting further apart. Russia is rapidly strengthening ties with China, a neighbour with whom India is locked in an intense showdown. Moscow is also warming up to Pakistan, whereas India is now the fulcrum of the Indo-Pacific policy of the US, which is breathing fire over Russia's troop buildup near Ukrainian border. In this tangled web of misalignments, despite American pressure and looming threat of US CAATSA sanctions over India's purchase of S-400 missile defence systems from Moscow — the first tranche of which will arrive soon — New Delhi remains deeply invested in Russia and that investment is not wholly unreciprocated by Moscow. It is in this context we must place Russian president Vladimir Putin's upcoming visit to India on December 6, the day when the two countries will also hold their inaugural dialogue in the 2+2 format involving the foreign and defence ministers of both sides. Putin's arrival in India — one of just two foreign trips the Russian president has made this year — will mark the first in-person meeting with prime minister Narendra Modi since their engagement on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Brasilia in November 2019. And towards the end of that same week, Modi will take part in US president's Joe Biden's 'democracy summit' on November 9 and 10, from where Russia has been excluded. That should give you an idea about the nature of India's 'multipolar' diplomacy. Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson of India's ministry of external affairs, told reporters on Thursday that December 6 will begin with EAM S Jaishankar and defence minister Rajnath Singh's holding bilateral interactions with their counterparts, and then proceeding to the newly instituted 2 2 dialogue mechanism. The Modi-Putin summit (21st India-Russia Annual Summit) will be held in the afternoon, and a joint statement will be issued in the end, according to Indian media reports. The leaders "will review the state and prospects of bilateral relations between the two nations and will discuss ways to further strengthen the strategic partnership between the two countries." News agency ANI had earlier reported, quoting government sources, that Putin's visit may see the inking for 7.5 lakh AK-203 assault rifles, for which "necessary clearances have been done including the final approval from the Cabinet Committee on Security." The Russian designed AK-203 will be reportedly made in a factory in Amethi. Nanan Unnikrishnan of ORF writes in Times of India that "one presidential visit is not likely to magically remove all irritants (in Indo-Russian ties), but the rich agenda of the visit suggests that policymakers are aware of the challenges and the need to address them quickly." Incidentally, Russian foreign minister Lavrov has described Biden's 'democracy summit', which Modi will be attending in the same week, as "one of the most odious projects that has emerged under the trademark of this world order." | | WTA cancels all tournaments in China over Peng Shuai, IOC claims to have held a 'second call' | | In a ballsy move, the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) on Wednesday announced that is has decided to immediately suspend all the women's tennis tournaments in China and Hong Kong over the China's treatment of Peng Shuai. Multiple grand slam winner Peng had publicly accused a powerful Chinese Communist Party official, the now retired Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault November 2, and has not been seen for weeks except for some stage-managed appearances that neither give assurance that she is safe, or free and acting in her own accord. This is remarkable because "7 of the 30 top women's professional tennis tournaments by prize money take place in China (Beijing, Wuhan, Zhengzhou, Shenzhen, HK, Tianjin, Zhuhai)" and it would likely result in a loss of millions of dollars of business for the WTA. But its chair Steve Simon has said in a statement: "If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded – equality for women – would suffer an immense setback. I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players." He also said that "unless China takes the steps we have asked for (full and transparent investigation – without censorship – into Peng Shuai's sexual assault accusation), we cannot put our players and staff at risk by holding events in China. China's leaders have left the WTA with no choice." WTA's action contrasts those with those of the ATP (the men's tour) and the ITF that have "steered clear of the subject of future events in a market worth billions of dollars," points out Guardian. While the WTA has earned widespread praise, the ATP has instead called for "a line of open direct communication" between Peng and the WTA. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that has been accused of staging a "publicity stunt" for Chinese Communist Party by holding a video call with Peng on 21 November and claiming that she was "safe and well", said it had held a second call with the tennis player on Wednesday. This time, the IOC provided no details, except a statement saying that "there are different ways to achieve her well-being and safety. We have taken a very human and person-centred approach to her situation". Meanwhile, China, through its state media has called the WTA "betrayers of the Olympic spirit" while the Chinese foreign ministry has warned against "politicising sports". China's rather muted official response is due to the fact that it scheduled to host the Winter Olympics next year. Else, it is safe to say, we'd have seen more fire and brimstone. | | Leaked documents link Xi Jinping directly to CCP's crackdown on Uyghur minorities | | A new set of Chinese government documents, that have been leaked to the Uyghur Tribunal – an independent people's tribunal based in the UK, show that top Chinese Communist Party leaders, including president Xi Jinping, is directly involved in the Chinese state's crackdown on Uyghur Muslims — an ethnic Turkic community based in China's Xinjiang region. According to Guardian, "the documents – including three speeches by Chinese president Xi Jinping in April 2014 – cover security, population control and the need to punish the Uyghur population. Some are marked top secret." They show the highest levels of the CCP leadership's involvement in calls for Uyghur re-education and relocation to "rectify an imbalance in the Uyghur and Han population in Xinjiang." These were "handed in full in digital form to the tribunal in September, but have not been published in full in order to protect the source of the leak." BBC adds that the Uyghur Tribunal "asked three academics who specialise in the field — Drs Adrian Zenz, David Tobin and James Millward — to authenticate the documents. Branded the 'Xinjiang Papers', after the region which is home to most of China's Uyghurs, these documents reveal how CCP leaders including Xi and Premier Li Keqiang made statements which directly led to policies affecting the Uyghurs and other Muslims. These include forced internments, mass sterilisations, forced assimilation, 're-education', and coercion of detained Uyghurs to work in factories. China has consistently denied that it is committing genocide against Uyghurs. Some of the documents were the subject of an earlier report, but the latest leak has previously unseen information." The papers have been redacted to remove reception stamps and the "leak covers 11 documents and 300 unique pages ranging from April 2014 to May 2018." Wall Street Journal reports that in one of the speeches, Xi is seen "warning about the dangers of religious influence and unemployment among minorities, and emphasizing the importance of 'population proportion,' or the balance between minorities and Han Chinese, for maintaining control in the region." The set also contains the text of a 2017 speech by Xinjiang Communist Party boss Chen Quanguo, in which he directly links the internment camps to orders from Beijing, listing them alongside the region's mass surveillance platform as an example of efforts to "fully implement the central goal" laid out for Xinjiang by Xi, reports WSJ. | | US-Russia ties heat up over Ukraine, Putin wants guarantee against NATO expansion | | US-Russia relationship, tetchy at the best of times, are facing renewed tension over Moscow's decision to ramp up deployment of tens of thousands of troops massing close to the border with Ukraine, a former USSR nation that wants to join the NATO alliance. On Wednesday, Moscow accused Ukraine of deploying "half its army" to confront pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country and said it had launched its own regular winter drills. As Reuters reports, these announcements came at a time of high tension between the two countries, with NATO meeting for the second day to discuss a Russian troop build-up that Kyiv fears may be a prelude to an invasion. Russia has consistently denied that and sought to portray Ukraine and NATO as the aggressors. For Russia, Ukraine's intensifying security ties with the US and NATO are an "existential threat". At a ceremony for foreign ambassadors at the Kremlin on Wednesday, the Russian president said: "the threat on our western border is really growing… It is enough to see how close NATO military infrastructure has moved to Russia's borders. This is more than serious for us. In this situation, we are taking appropriate military-technical measures. But, I repeat, we are not threatening anyone… While engaging in dialogue with the United States and its allies, we will insist on the elaboration of concrete agreements that would rule out any further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of weapons systems posing a threat to us in close proximity to Russia's territory. We suggest that substantive talks on this topic should be started." New York Times says Putin's demand "is a nonstarter for NATO." Foreign ministers from NATO member countries gathered Wednesday in Latvia in a signal of the alliance's cohesion and its support for its ex-Soviet member states, where Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of the alliance, said, "It's only Ukraine and 30 NATO allies that decide when Ukraine is ready to join NATO… Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, and Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence trying to control their neighbors." In this context, US secretary of state Antony Blinken met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov at Stockholm on Thursday and issued a warning that Moscow would pay "severe costs" if it invaded Ukraine. Lavrov warned that his country regarded the eastward expansion of the NATO military alliance as a "fundamental security threat." | | EU unveils $340 billion 'Global Gateway' to counter China's Belt and Road, Beijing hits back | | Some interesting moves are happening on the Europe China front. Stuart Lau of Politico's China Direct reports that Chinese foreign ministry's special representative on Europe, Wu Hongbo, during his visit to Europe this week "expressed Beijing's intention to withdraw sanctions imposed on EU lawmakers, diplomats and think tanks earlier this year — but only if the EU takes the first step and removes its sanctions on Xinjiang officials. European officials shot down the idea immediately. It's the clearest sign yet that Beijing is now having second thoughts about its catch-all sanctions regime against the EU, which has stalled the EU-China investment pact's ratification and pushed Brussels to focus more on transatlantic strategic planning with the U.S." The second development is that the EU has finally come up with its own plan to counter China's Belt and Road project in the geopolitical battle over infrastructure and supply chain. The EU Commission on Wednesday said it plans to invest 300 billion euros ($340 billion) globally by 2027 in infrastructure, digital and climate projects. The scheme, called Global Gateway, is to strengthen Europe's supply chains, boost EU trade and help fight climate change, focusing on digitalisation, health, climate and energy and transport sectors, as well as education and research." President Ursula von der Leyen said the Global Gateway scheme should become a "trusted brand" and said countries need "trusted partners" to design projects that were sustainable in a clear aim at China that has funded rail, roads and ports but has been accused of leaving some countries saddled with debt, points out BBC. The announcement earned immediate retaliation from China. Through its state-affiliated media, Beijing said "the EU is a loosely-bound grouping, with the distribution of national interests within the 27-member bloc fairly divided and the continuity of policies often in doubt, observers said, saying that the group's infrastructure plan is more prone to fail." Global Times sought to turn the tables on EU. "European aid to developing countries is predatory, rather than genuinely assisting local economic development," it wrote in an editorial. | | | | | | | | | | TOP ANALYSES OF THE WEEK | | Main task for India and Russia is to uphold mutual trust | | Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie think tank's Moscow Center, argues that "in a situation when their best friends are bonding with their worst enemies, the main task for both New Delhi and Moscow is to shield the Indo-Russian strategic partnership from the wider and increasingly adverse global context, and uphold mutual trust." | | Putin's India visit will discomfit US but it shouldn't overreact | | Tara Kartha, distinguished fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, writes in The Print on the looming CAATSA sanctions on India over purchase of Russian S400 missile defence systems, that "the US needs to realise that an India that can push back against China – which no one yet has – is worth more to the US designs for Asia than a few missiles that have no presence in the maritime region which is the focus area of US-India cooperation." | | Fueling enmity with a friendly US will go down as Xi's biggest error | | C Raja Mohan, of National University of Singapore, argues in Indian Express that "making a friendly America into an enemy prematurely could go down as one of Xi Jinping's egregious strategic errors. For all claims about America's decline, history points to the dangers of underestimating US capacity for self-renewal and the will to retain its primacy." | | Xi's 'united front' offer to Biden is a smokescreen | | Srikanth Kondapalli, professor in Chinese Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, assesses the Biden-Xi virtual meeting for Firstpost. He argues that it "provided an opportunity to China to offer a 'united front' to the US much like the Communist Party offered a similar one to the beleaguered Chiang Kai-shek in 1935. Such collaboration with the Kuomintang against the Japanese offered the communists space to regroup and grow to finally overthrow Chiang himself in 1949. While the context is different, the ominous signals from China are clear." | | US should woo Bangladesh but not as part of anti-China bloc | | Anu Anwar, fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University, and Michael Kugelman of Washington's Wilson Center write in Foreign Policy that America must give more attention to Bangladesh, but the "right way for US to approach Dhaka is to view better relations between the two countries as a good thing in and of itself as well as a logical next step given Bangladesh's economic rise. The wrong way to approach Bangladesh is to try to bring it into an anti-China condominium." | | Japan needs to strengthen own ability to fight: Former PM Shinzo Abe | | In an interview to Nikkei Asia newspaper, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe called for "substantial effort" from the new Fumio Kishida government on defense. He said "While the US has an obligation to defend Japan, it is also naturally asking us to do our part. During the Cold War, Europe had NATO. The combined strength of the US and Japan will be important, so of course, Japan needs to strengthen its own ability to fight. The reality is that China has double the submarines and aircraft of Japan." | | Threatening Taiwan has been profitable for China | | A.A. Bastian, a historian based in Washington, argues in Foreign Policy that "over the last few decades, threatening Taiwan has been advantageous for China, often gotten it what it wanted, and has been more fruitful—and far less costly—than seizing the island by force would have been." | | Defence of democracy against 'outside enemies' misses the point | | Janan Ganesh of Financial Times, in his analysis of Joe Biden's upcoming 'democracy summit', writes, "the defence of democracy against outside enemies, rather than those within, slightly misses the point… Endogenous democratic decline is hugely more daunting… Its premise, that a contest is going on between democracy and its opposite, is right. But the faultline runs mostly through countries, not between them. That point threatens to get lost in the very notion of an international democratic gathering. Shoring up democracy is almost entirely domestic work." | | US needs an accurate, objective review of China's national power | | Jude Blanchette of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in his column for Foreign Affairs takes on the recent trend of 'China decline' argument in the US. He writes, "this latest iteration of the 'China decline' argument suffers from the same basic shortcoming as previous versions: Beijing's perceived weaknesses are not weighed against its potential and actual strengths… If the United States wants to forge an effective and enduring approach to its China policy, analysts and policymakers must begin with an accurate, objective assessment of China's national power." | | US no longer has time for wars driven by moral compulsion, now its necessity | | Aris Roussinos, former war reporter, reviews Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn new book 'Humane' in Unherd where Moyn argues that America's "well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down." But Roussinos differs from the assessment, and posits that "We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion." | | PODCAST WATCH | | CIA torture methods, effects and fight for transparency | | This week's recommendation is weeks old, but interesting. In Foreign Policy magazine's FP Playlist, Amy Mackinnon features "At Liberty, a podcast produced by the American Civil Liberties Union. This episode discusses the CIA's torture programs in the wake of 9/11 and the aftermath for those people who were tortured. Steven Watt, a senior staff lawyer for the ACLU's Human Rights Program, discusses the effects of torture and the fight for transparency." | | | | Copyright © 2021.Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. | |
