I don’t know whether United States (US) President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their foreign-policy advisers have read Robert Axelrod’s classic book on international relations, The Evolution of Cooperation.
Directly or indirectly, the military has always called the shots in Myanmar.
How Joe Biden handles China will be one of the defining issues of his presidency. He inherits a Sino-American relationship that is at its lowest point in 50 years. Some people blame this on his predecessor, Donald Trump. But Trump merits blame for pouring gasoline on a fire.
Until recently, the last time Myanmar’s military supervised a general election whose outcome it didn’t like was back in 1990.
Since the Chinese authorities suddenly halted fintech conglomerate Ant Group’s planned initial public offering in autumn 2020, its parent company, e-commerce king Alibaba, has been facing harsh regulatory scrutiny.
With 2021 still young, and hope in the air thanks to new COVID-19 vaccines and a new occupant in the White House, we can finally stop covering our eyes in horror and peer furtively into the future. As the decade unfolds, which countries are likely to be the biggest economic success stories?
The toxic cocktail of climate change, conflict, and COVID-19 is making itself felt most intensely in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries. As a result, a record 235 million people worldwide will need humanitarian assistance and protection in 2021 – an increase of 40 percent from last year. It can be hard to wrap one’s head around such numbers. But behind the statistics are individual human lives.
Last January, my fellow Elders Mary Robinson and Ban Ki-moon participated in the unveiling of the Doomsday Clock, the annual indicator of global catastrophic risk published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 2020, the clock’s hands moved closer to “midnight” than they have ever been – just 100 seconds away – and they will remain there in 2021.
In his inaugural address, United States (US) President Joe Biden declared that Americans “will be judged” for how they “resolve the cascading crises of our era.” He expressed confidence that the country would “rise to the occasion,” and pledged that the US would lead “not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” The contrast with President Donald Trump’s divisive, isolationist rhetoric could not be sharper.
Seen from Europe, Asia, or even North America, Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, is as remote as can be.
Donald Trump has left the White House, but Trumpism has not left United States (US) politics. With Joe Biden as America’s president, the world hopes that the US will shift away from Trump’s disruptive confrontational approach toward China relations and embark on a path of pragmatic engagement. At stake is whether this crucial bilateral relationship serves to strengthen or shatter the global order.
America and China should cooperate in space. Although the United States (US) can no longer take its extra-terrestrial dominance for granted, it remains the leading player, while China’s space capabilities are growing fast. Most important, both countries, along with the rest of the world, would benefit from a set of clear rules governing the exploration and commercialisation of space.China made history in 2019 by becoming the first country to land a probe on the far side of the Moon.
