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President Joe Biden is poised to hold the first ever quadrilateral US summit with the leaders of Japan, India and Australia, as the four countries step up co-operation in an effort to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific.The White House said Biden could hold the virtual meeting next week. Choosing a “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” meeting for his first summit highlights his plan to reinvigorate the Quad as part of his China strategy.

India in October invited Australia to join Malabar, a military exercise between the US, India and Japan — the first time the four navies had held joint exercises since 2007. The exercises came as Indian and Chinese troops were again locked in a tense military stand-off in Ladakh.

Admiral Philip Davidson, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, this week said US-India military co-operation had “advanced markedly” and the potential for more co-operation was “the strategic opportunity” of the 21st century.

So far Biden’s foreign policy looks like being all things to all (Washington) people. What is lacking is an organising principle.

my fear about a Biden foreign policy is that it will comfortably settle back into a familiar pre-Trump groove. Indeed so much of what Trump did wrong, and so much of that is so easily undone (leaving the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization, and being rude to allies) that a return to business-as-usual is the likeliest default path. That would be a missed opportunity. If you read Biden’s essay in Foreign Affairs, the words “undo”, “restore”, “repair” and “renew” keep recurring. I would like to see more “rethink”, “question assumptions” and “overhaul” in there.

a more joined-up foreign policy requires a new economic philosophy

while the UK outside the EU may well look to maintain equivalence with existing European trade agreements in Africa, it is unlikely that these will be extended or reformed and the UK will lose the significant influence it once had in shaping EU trade policy towards Africa

Upon leaving the EU, the UK will cease to be party to EU trade agreements and third countries will lose any preferential access to the UK market that those agreements currently confer. However, there are political reasons why the UK may seek to preserve the duty and quota free access to the British market that the large majority of African countries currently enjoy.  Although trade with the UK accounts for only a small proportion of total African goods exports (3.6 per cent), any loss of market access would have a significant negative effect on certain industries (for example Kenya’s cut flower producers).  There will therefore be pressure on the UK from African governments and UK-based development organisations to make sure that African countries do not face increased trade barriers.

The UK seems unlikely to engage in drawn out negotiations to extend or replace existing EU-Africa trade arrangements given the severe constraints on UK trade negotiating capacity after Brexit – the UK currently has only a handful of the estimated 500–750 experienced negotiators that will be needed for post-Brexit trade talks.

Political leaders are usually insulated from major health scares by their wealth and access to private health care. But the coronavirus has already impacted leaders across the world

The consequences will be very different in countries where political institutions are weaker and where the illness or death of a leader has been known to generate the kind of power vacuum that might inspire rival leaders, opposition parties, or the military to launch a power grab. This is a particular problem in countries where checks and balances are weak and political parties don’t have strong decision-making mechanisms, which is true in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Europe

In countries where politics are more personalized, the death of a leader can trigger damaging succession battles that can split the ruling party and, in the worst cases, encourage a military coup

Over the next 30 years, the climate crisis will displace more than 140 million people within their own countries—and many more beyond them. Global warming doesn’t respect lines on a map: It will drive massive waves of displacement across national borders, as it has in Guatemala and Africa’s Sahel region in recent years.

There are two ways forward: climate reparations or climate colonialism. Reparations would use international resources to address inequalities caused or exacerbated by the climate crisis; it would allow for a way out of the climate catastrophe by tackling both mitigation and migration. The climate colonialism alternative, on the other hand, would mean the survival of the wealthiest and devastation for the world’s most vulnerable people.

The wealthy find ways to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of the climate crisis. In Lagos, Nigeria, for example, the government cleared hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers to make way for developers. The so-called Great Wall of Lagos sea wall will shield a planned luxury community on Victoria Island from sea level rise at the expense of neighboring areas. The poor, the unemployed, and those who lack stable housing are seeing their living conditions rapidly deteriorate, with little hope for a solution.

the distinction between the United States’ supposed commitment to a system of rules and China’s alleged lack thereof is misleading in at least three ways. First, it overlooks the United States’ own willingness to ignore, evade, or rewrite the rules whenever they seem inconvenient

China accepts and even defends many principles of the existing order, although of course not all of them

statements such as Blinken’s imply that abandoning today’s rules-based order would leave us in a lawless, rule-free world of naked power politics, unregulated by any norms or principles whatsoever. This is simply not the case: Scholars of widely varying views understand that all international orders—global, regional, liberal, realist, or whatever—require a set of rules to manage the various interactions that inevitably arise between different polities

Saudi and Iranian security officials have been holding secret talks since January without any U.S. involvement—a bit of news that has led some to bemoan a decline in American power as President Biden seeks to withdraw from the Middle East. But in fact, this is good news, both for the United States and for the prospects of calm in the region.

The secret talks were first reported last month in the Financial Times. The British news site Amwad.media has since reported that five such meetings have been held, beginning as far back as January, and that some of these sessions have also included officials from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan, on topics ranging from the war in Yemen to security in Syria and Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since 2016. Their leaders and diplomats have practically hissed war threats at one another since before then. In other words, even if the talks don’t produce many tangible results, we are witnessing a monumental political shift.

The coronavirus pandemic has opened up similar opportunities for a range of terrorists, insurgents, and criminal organizations. Across the world, they are already seeking to acquire political legitimacy through the provision of public health services, especially in countries and regions where the government has been either unwilling or unable to help.

it is not just terrorist and insurgent groups taking advantage of the crisis to demonstrate an effort toward effective governance. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs have worked assiduously to enforce a curfew in the notoriously ungoverned slums where they operate.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the term “ungoverned spaces” entered the popular lexicon when discussing areas that terrorist groups sought out in which to train, plan, and conduct operations. Areas that few in the West had ever heard about—South America’s Tri-Border Area, the Sahel in North Africa, and Southeast Asian archipelagos—were all tagged with this label. But the term itself is an unfortunate misnomer. No area is truly ungoverned. Rather, nonstate actors and substate groups provide alternative forms of governance to people in these places. And, more often than not, they do so through provision of services that reinforce their social status and lend them a sense of political legitimacy that governments in faraway capital cities lack altogether.

in the world of climate politics it is hard to exaggerate China’s centrality. Thanks to the gigantic surge in economic growth since 2000 and its reliance on coal-fired electricity generation, China is now by far the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. At about 28 percent of the global total, the carbon dioxide produced in China (as opposed to that consumed in the form of Chinese exports) is about as much as that produced by the United States, European Union, and India combined. Per capita, its emissions are now greater than those of the EU if we count carbon dioxide emissions on a production rather than a consumption basis.

Allowing an equal ration for every person on the planet, it remains the case that the historic responsibility for excessive carbon accumulation lies overwhelmingly with the United States and Europe. Still today China’s emissions per capita are less than half those of the United States. But as far as future emissions are concerned, everything hinges on China

if fully implemented, China’s new commitment will by itself lower the projected temperature increase by 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius. It is the largest favorable shock that their models have ever produced. There’s an obvious question, of course: Is Xi for real?

Russia and Ukraine supply almost a third of the world’s wheat exports and since the Russian assault on its neighbour, ports on the Black Sea have come to a virtual standstill. As a result, wheat prices have soared to record highs, overtaking levels seen during the food crisis of 2007-08.

agricultural experts and policymakers have warned of the impact of delayed shipments on countries reliant on the region for wheat, grain, sunflower oil and barley

The surge in prices will fuel soaring food inflation — already at a seven-year high of 7.8 per cent in January — and the biggest impact will be on the food security of poorer grain importers, warned analysts and food aid organisations

Rather than usher in a new era of Chinese influence, Beijing's missteps have shown why it is unlikely to become the world's leading power. Even if it overtakes the United States to have the biggest economy in the world, which many economists believe could happen over the next decade, China will not dislodge Washington from its central position in global affairs for decades to come.

China's assertiveness is generating intense suspicion, if not outright enmity, among its neighbors. Its "peaceful rise" is not taking place in isolation. There may be echoes in today's Asia of the late-nineteenth century in Europe and North America, but this is the one critical difference. The United States came into its own as a great power without any major challenge from its neighbors, while Germany's ascent was aided by the collapsing Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Russian monarchy on its frontiers. China, on the other hand, is surrounded by vibrant countries with fast-growing economies, from South Korea to India to Vietnam, who all believe that this is their time, as well. Even Japan, after two decades of stagnation, still has one of the most formidable navies in the world, as well as the world's third largest economy. China's strategic misfortune is to be bordered by robust and proud nation-states which expect their own stake in the modern world.

On the economic front, Beijing is taking aim at another pillar of U.S. power: the dominance of the dollar. China is putting in place an ambitious long-term plan to turn the renminbi into one of the main international currencies. Chinese leaders often discuss the project in technical terms, about reducing currency risk for their companies, but they also do little to hide their frustration with the dollar's privileged status. One Chinese academic even likens the importance of the project to turn the renminbi into a major reserve currency to China's acquisition of a nuclear weapon in the 1960s. The politics of the currency plan are themselves an interesting sidebar to the over-hyping of Chinese influence. While American politicians have been worrying loudly about the risk of China owning so many Treasury bonds ("How do you deal toughly with your banker?" Hillary Clinton asked at a private lunch with then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in March 2009) China has been fretting about how little leverage its U.S. bond holdings give it. The desire to dethrone the dollar is partly rooted in China's frustration that it has absolutely no influence over the Federal Reserve. And yet it has few options other than buying American debt, because the U.S. Treasury bond market is the largest and most liquid in the world.

Britain’s last-ditch proposals to salvage a Brexit deal have resorted to a century-old measure of “reasonableness” in English law: the mythical “Man on the Clapham omnibus”.

To the bewilderment of some EU negotiators, Geoffrey Cox, the UK’s attorney-general, invoked the Victorian-era legal concept to explain how a revamped system of arbitration could guarantee the Northern Ireland backstop plan is not “indefinite”.

“They have no clue,” said one official handling Brexit, who added that the UK’s ideas were becoming “crazier and crazier”

Antarctica, the world’s “last great wilderness,” has for six decades been largely shielded from exploitation. A 1959 agreement born out of Cold War necessity and eventually joined by 54 countries reserved the continent “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” What began as a single agreement expanded into a web of interlocking rules and regulations known as the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). The ATS applies to land and sea, existing alongside other international laws—like the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea—to prevent conflict, foster international cooperation and enable scientific development.

Experts believe Antarctica has a trove of resources, including oil, minerals, commercial fishing, and coal and hydrocarbons. In addition, the region houses the largest freshwater reserve on Earth in large ice sheets, which could soon become attractive to drought-stricken areas.

Among ATS signatories, China has the fastest growing presence, with four Antarctic bases and a fifth underway. Beijing has also in recent years ramped up research expenditures, signed a fueling partnership with Australia, constructed a new icebreaker, announced a permanent airfield and grown its polar tourism industry exponentially. In addition, some evidence suggests China may have already breached parts of the treaty through unreported military and development activities—mirroring a similar disregard for international law in the South China Sea.

Fifty four African nations have committed to join AfCFTA but of the 33 countries to have ratified the agreement so far many lack the customs procedures and infrastructure to facilitate tariff-free trade, said Wamkele Mene, secretary-general of the AfCFTA secretariat.

“If you don’t have the roads, if you don’t have the right equipment for customs authorities at the border to facilitate the fast and efficient transit of goods . . . if you don’t have the infrastructure, both hard and soft, it reduces the meaningfulness of this agreement.”

In 2019, 14.4 per cent of official African exports went to other African countries, a small proportion compared with the 52 per cent in intra-Asian trade and 73 per cent between European nations in the same year

Vladimir Putin’s willingness to threaten to use nuclear weapons is in one respect a good sign: it means Russia is probably losing in Ukraine. It is also a potentially catastrophic one. If Putin’s aim is to scare the west, he is failing

Putin has broken a post-Cuba taboo on threatening to go nuclear. That, in itself, puts us in new territory. Without most people being aware of it, the world is entering its most dangerous period since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis

the prospect of a nuclear exchange has become the most live threat to this century’s peace

As Edward Luce pointed out in an insightful column in the Financial Times, we are already effectively engaged in a Cold War with China. “The consensus,” he writes, “is now so hawkish that it is liable to see any outreach to China as weakness.” You could hear that hawkish consensus in the words of U.S. intelligence chiefs as they testified before the Congress during their annual threat assessment hearing on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines cited China’s ruling Communist Party as the “most consequential” national security threat the U.S. faces. Never mind domestic extremism, enabled by one of the two major political parties. Never mind global warming. Never mind Russia waging an active war in Europe while aggressively pumping out disinformation and promoting authoritarianism worldwide.

Why is it such a great threat even though the country has no history of conquest beyond its region in 5,000 years of history and is far from being able or inclined to pose a direct threat of attack to the U.S.? According to Haines, the reason focusing on China is the intel community's top priority is that China is “increasingly challenging the United States economically, technologically, politically, and militarily around the world.” She continued, asserting that the goal of China’s President Xi Jinping is to “continue efforts to achieve Xi’s vision of making China the preeminent power in East Asia and a major power on the world stage.”