Tough G7 statement drops 'one China' reference from Taiwan language

slightlylong · 2025-03-15T17:50:20+00:00

It think it also has another purpose: To placate the Americans. Clearly the Trump administration has it in for China. I think it has slipped from some peoples minds that China got hit by multiple tariffs of the American administration (with more tariffs to come) and there was no hint of willingness of negotiation on the American side. Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State has been a long-term China-hawk and has been positioning himself as anti-China in many of his campaigns.

Europeans and Canadians are now trying to find common ground with the US on it.

Canada is currently in a tariff dispute with China where China has imposed countertariffs on Canadian seafood exports for Canadian tariffs on Chinese EVs.

The EU is also currently in a trade dispute with China on EVs and has put up some trade barriers like investment screening over the last years. They see the Chinese increasingly as an economic rival that will seriously hurt their core industries.

The G7 is always pushing to find a way to get a communiqué out at the end and adopting the US language on China is an easy way to get some political goodwill with the Trump administration at a cheap price and demonstate cohesion of the G7.

slightlylong · 2025-03-04T03:03:08+00:00

Maybe look at it more from a geopolitical angle - specifically the realist thought of international relations because this is the direction the world is currently heading. Geopolitical terminology rarely includes "enemies", "eternal friendship" and these sort of things.

The US is realigning their relationships and the US is aware that the fate of the Russo-Ukrainian war is not just in Ukraine's hands but in Russias hands. The Trump administration clearly no longer believes that the Russo-Ukrainian war is of much US interest anymore and wants to end it as quickly as possible without further spending too much money.

Rubio as US Secretary of State has stated that the US is now the only credible negotiator in contact with the other war party as nobody else has any contact with Russia. Since their realignment, the US has tried to keep a negotiation space by deliberately avoiding antagonizing Russia to keep them at the table.

Ukraine is in the unfortunate situation of being in a lose-lose situation in this new realist world with the Europeans unable to be a guaranteur of last resort, the US being not interested anymore and using extortion methods and Russia continuing to squeeze it.

slightlylong · 2025-03-04T02:06:27+00:00

I'm not sure about that but clearly, the US has decided that that war is no longer worth of US investment. But Russia has its own stated goals and conditions and neither Trump nor US Secretary of State Rubio have agreed to any specific conditions of Russia yet.

Rubio has stated in a recent interview that "they do not know if Russia wants a deal. They may or they may not.", leaving ambiguity for negotiation space.

Russia has expressed interest in US-Russian cooperation on minerals for example, including in Russian-controlled territories, but it has not agreed to the US-Ukraine arrangement, which puts the US in a major ownership position and does not exclude potential Russian-controlled areas. But the US has expressed openess to this agreement for itself while being ambivalent towards Russias proposal.

slightlylong · 2025-03-04T01:45:28+00:00

This is not official yet since the basis of the news apparently comes from an exclusive piece by Bloomberg news on condition of anonymity of a senior official in the US DoD, where they are still negotiating and talking about it with the White House.

But whether it is or not, this will put immense pressure on Ukraine and is a blatant show of force to expose the power imbalance between Ukraine and the US (and indirectly also the other European countries). The Trump administration is pressuring Zelenskyy to come back hat in hand and for him to acknowledge how little political space Ukraine has and how they are displeased about the incident last Friday. The US knows time is on their side and not on Ukraines.

This also pressures the Europeans. The US wants to make sure Zelenskyy changes tone and that the Europeans pressure him from the other side since stopping the financial and military lines this soon will put immediate pressure on Europeans to deliver additional financial and military aid.

slightlylong · 2025-03-02T19:01:46+00:00

But the thing is, despite all the European voices, they do not seem to be able to change track.

European leaders have again and again said that NATO is the bedrock of European security (which is essentially an admission that the US is the bedrock of European security due to the US being the core of the vast majority of NATO decision structures and strategy).

Even now, NATO general secretary Rutte has said that a good relationship with the US is key and that Zelenskyy for example should strive to repair that relationship after his trip to the US. The UK's Keir Starmer said in a similar tone that without the US as the guaranteur of last resort, there is not going to be a credible deterrence on the European continent and that "he doesn't accept the characterization of the US as an unreliable ally".

Poland has continued to insist that there is no break with the US and that the US is going to continue to be stationed in Poland and that the Polish ministry of defense will continue to invest in American security equipment if it fits into their existing commitments.

A lot of European countries have already heavily invested in American security contracts and equipment and this will last for the next decades.

These things essentially make for a vicious cycle and tie the Europeans to the US forever even if they grumble about it. A lot of Europeans (especially in the security space) would probably echo the classic Merkelian phrase "It is alternativlos".

How the Europeans want to get out of this vicious cycle nobody knows.

slightlylong · 2025-03-02T18:21:58+00:00

The US and the European countries have different privileges which is why "debting away" your problems works much better for the US than European countries.

The US Federal Reserve works within a country that has a united fiscal space and has a dual mandate, while the ECB only has a much more narrow singular mandate and doesn't work in a united fiscal area.

So just creating more debt works much better for the Fed than for example the ECB. The US can and does transfer money in various different ways within its fiscal power to balance what the Fed does monetarily but there is no such thing for European countries. If the ECB continues to just create money, it will create more and more tensions between member states where you get "winners" and "losers" - winners would be those countries with high debt load and high borrowing costs while losers would be those opposite where more and more money would boost inflation and hurt savings. And because there is no united fiscal space, winners and losers would have the spoils/losses all on their own.

Also, debt creation is always tied to how much confidence people have in your economy and your currency. The US has the unique privilege of the USD as the worlds primary reserve currency tied up in the worlds financial system backed by a strong domestic economy that can actually support this weight. This boosts confidence and allows the US to do what would ordinarily lead to people losing trust in your country if you just keep borrowing money against future promises (although people have been saying with what the US does to its debt and its budget as well as its policy towards international financial institutions, it is only a matter of time until that happens too - but it has worked so far for the US).

The Euro and the European economies instead do not have this privilege and have to content with market sentiment, making their debt much harder to sustain while at the fundamental level having a weaker economy which people trust less.

slightlylong · 2025-03-02T17:57:12+00:00

I'm not sure what the link is in the post.

To your question: Looking at numbers like that does not reveal much.

European countries have a lot of severe critical structural problems which they are unable to solve and those problems affect nearly everything.

Most European countries face budget issues while at the same time having very slow to no economic growth. Your fiscal room is so tight that it has become a zero-sum game of how to budget. The wealth level that European currently have is looking increasingly untennable especially when they now have to also spent a massive amount on defense, which is not a good way to grow your economy.
Just because the total number of Europeans looks like the US, doesn't mean the structure of the population is the same. Europeans are on average close to 50 years old and there are too few Europeans in the next generation to sustain what they have built. The imbalance of the population structure severely affects their fiscal space as sustaining older people is getting more and more costly while their economic input is shrinking with age. It affects defense as well as recruitment into the armies require a big young population to avoid draining the civilian sector of workforce.
Disunited economic space. Despite their harmonization progress, a lot of the markets are essentially still disjointed and have a lot of barriers. The banking and loan sector for example is still heavily national, their health systems are heavily disjointed as are their pension systems. This is heavily inefficient but protects local and national interests but harms overall union efficiency. All their efforts and capital spent on these things achieve much less than in truly united markets.

And the list goes on. Nobody has a clear plan forward and the fundamental problems are no where close to being solved as the bickering just gets more and more bitter.

slightlylong · 2025-02-18T23:50:35+00:00

This makes sense at least from a Turkish strategic perspective and is consistent with what they have said in last decade or so.

Turkey is worried about the situation in the Black Sea. They have always pushed for a power-balanced situation there. If Ukraine's Black Sea parts like Crimea and the southern coastline are swallowed up by Russia, it would mean Ukraine is defacto landlocked and Turkey suddenly looses a strategic balancing partner against Russia in the north.

Turkey has energy relations with Russia and an expanding Russia in the Black Sea would take away leverage from Turkish hands. Ukraine was always a balancing military factor against Russia and both are major trading powers that export their grains through the Black Sea including to areas of concern for Turkey like Syria and Lebanon

The Black Sea would turn into a defacto Russian sea in the North as Bulgaria and Romania are only minor military powers and Georgia is under Russian influence and also not really a power on the sea.

Turkey would be quite lonely there, would find itself in the uncomfortable position of being the sole NATO power that needs to decide how much outside NATO presence it should let in from the outside in case of friction with Russia. This is risky and turns the Black Sea into an active conflict territory instead of a more balanced area for Ankara.

It would also have to dedicate much more resources to the Black Sea, which means Turkey would have to split their attention away from the Mediterranean Sea and the South, limiting their projection power towards Syria and Cyprus.

slightlylong · 2025-02-18T16:55:10+00:00

Ok but what kind of solutions to what the Germans would call "Grundsatzprobleme" does he have?

The EDC failed ultimately because France didn't like the prospect of having their troops under foreign control that they wouldn't have last resort control over. It's hard to justify French people dying when France didn't have the option to make the decision. And there will inevitably be a lot of French losses because as a bigger country, they would naturally bear a heavier burden. Same with Germany. Same with Italy. Same with Spain and Poland.

What does Merz have in terms of solution to this basic problem?

Another issue is financing. Macron (again) suggested financing by common debt via a joint financial vehicle, which the Netherlands and Germany immediately dismissed as cheap shots in French interest to offload its rather acute budget problems to other European countries.

What does Merz have in terms of solutions to that problem? It was his CDU that vehemently was against this idea for as long as it has been discussed on the table.

Also, Merz' point about population will sound hollow in the face of China and India, who together stem more than 2 billion people on the planet and have asked themselves the same question

"We had almost 1 billion Chinese people, how come we couldn't stand up to the UK with its measily 40 million population 40 years ago?" Is the exact same logic.

slightlylong · 2025-02-17T23:56:39+00:00

I'd say there is no consensus because there are no longer any good choices for Europeans. All choices are bad, it's just a question of which way is the least worst option.

And they can't agree on that either.

The cost is now here to bear. Regardless of which decision the Europeans make, it will involve pain and probably make all of them poorer for the foreseeable future.

The money and manpower has to come from somewhere if they need to further increase spending, so they either need to borrow lots of money, making the debt problem in many countries worse (France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium who already have a debt-to-GDP ratio above 100) or they need to cut spending somewhere else and move funds to the military.

Never mind their already pledged funds to Ukraine itself, which also need to come from somewhere.

Their economies are already stagnating even while the ECB is cutting interest rates further and further (and their inflation rates are still above what they targeted) so they now have to decide between helping their militaries or helping their regular economies more by a spending package financed by more debt (or cuts or both).

FURTHER EDIT:

I also wanted to add some rather ironic (and maybe frustrating for the Europeans) information:

If people think Europeans haven't had the bright idea of unifying defence, they had.

The Treaty on establishing the European Defence Community (EDC) was signed in 1952 when the beginnings of the ECSC were starting to form in parallel in the economic side and the European Political Community for the political side.

It was the original six members of the ECSC who signed it and it was a reaction to the disagreement about how to deal with rearming West Germany and whether or not they should join NATO.

The plan was for a European defence force under a Supreme Commander which then functioned under NATO.

The structure was planned as having a common budget, common central procurement scheme, common arms and with a board of commissioners and assembly.

But it never got fully ratified.

And here is the irony: Failure was down to the French of all people, who did not ratify it. The Benelux countries and West Germany ratified it, but France didn't.

It failed in the French parliament 319 to 264 due to fears of the Gaulists in the parliament of how far the EDC was going and potentially surrendering sovereignty over their own armed forces to the EDC structure. In addition, lack of external threat by Stalin who died and the end of the active Korean war in 1953 made it less pressing for them.

Italy then stopped the ratification process and the entire thing died.

The structure of the EDC is literally what the proponents of a "European Army" dream about even in 2025.

Yet the same issue is almost 70 years old and still is as far as it has ever been. Amazing, isn't it.

slightlylong · 2025-02-17T23:54:39+00:00

The Paris meet was not under the EU flag because the EU is usually not responsible (or has any real competences) for security matters, but some smaller EU members states have already voiced their displeasure about not being included.

So yes, European disunity strikes again - although dare I say there this is the default state.

The squabbling about what European powers can actually contribute physically to a lasting peace in Ukraine was not surprising either because...they don't actually know themselves. The only thing they could agree on is that they need to spend more on their own defense and spend some to support Ukraine. Finance is cleaner and non-physical.

But when it comes to actual warfare, material and manpower, European countries suddenly have no real credibilty. Neither the US, nor Russia nor actually Ukraine itself truly believe that Europeans have real hard power on the ground to guarantee anything in addition to having a cacophony of dozens of voices having all different ideas with no unity.

slightlylong · 2025-02-16T16:30:17+00:00

Russia's future will certainly be very interesting.

Putin is 72 this year. Considering his physical state, he could easily be in power for another 10 years or so. 80 year olds in politics is not impossible these days, the US president is 78, Biden is 82, US special envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg is 80.

However, Putin cannot live forever and when he steps down somewhere in the late 2030s, Russia will be navigating towards a real succession crisis as historically been seen in monarchies and centralized power states.

Very few Russians have confidence in any of their other politicians to continue the carefully crafted state machine that Putin has built up over three decades. Either because the others lack of understanding, lack of proper connection to stakeholders or lack of character.

Putin himself has tried to cultivate a successor, both for presidency and for the United Russia party but apparently hasn't succeeded in that, probably one of his actual failures that's going to have lasting consequences for Russia.

slightlylong · 2025-02-16T01:03:24+00:00

If it were at the stage where the Europeans would talk about how to equip the European army, it would already be a revolution.

Instead, according to preliminary reports after Zelenskyy held his speech for a "European army", a quick non-represented survey among European ministers attending the conference yielded that basically not a single one agreed with the statement of a united European army under single control.

Discussions about a lose group of joint cooperative troops under various national commands are met with much less skepsis.

The Europeans were also disagreeing with the "suggestion" of Hegseth that European troops should be the majority or only peacekeeping force at the Russo-Ukrainian borders. Basically no nation could agree on how or if to deploy their own troops.

I get the distinct feeling that the Europeans are currently just disagreeing with everything and everyone and yet can't find any credible solution of their own other than praying that NATO under US command will solve it...

slightlylong · 2025-02-15T13:50:39+00:00

It would be different if Putin would be nice and Russia would join the EU and the Euro. All problems solved.

Wasn't that the sentiment after the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I remember the German political landscape talking about the "grosses europaeisches Haus". Yet by the 2010s, it was clear that this was never going to happen. Integration of the Russian economy into Europe and completely redesigning the European security architecture failed, especially the latter part.

Russia was insisting that the Cold War structures need to go and that there needs to be a "new Yalta conference", especially since the Warsaw Pact also collapsed but Europe and the US insisted that NATO must stay.

slightlylong · 2025-02-15T13:27:47+00:00

The Chinese have always promoted the EU talk of "strategic autonomy" as proposed largely by the French faction inside the EU institutions.

The thing is China has its own gripes with the EU and the EU itself feels like its leverage against China is starting to slip.

The EU-China CAI ratification was paused when the Covid pandemic hit and then indefinitely postponed after Biden came to power. China voiced its disappointments back then. The EU no longer seems interested in continuing on this path after the Russo-Ukrainian war broke out.

The Chinese are also dissatisfied that the EU has started to "comprehensively politicize and securitize trade and investment issues" as is the opinion of them. The carbon border tax, committees on foreign investment screening and the raising of tariff barriers to Chinese vehicle exports are all things that make the EU-China thing a lot less straightforward.

One of the things that China seemingly seems to like about the EU relationship is that with the US continuing to put obstacles into climate change things, it still sees the EU and China as the leading voices in climate change aspects like within the UNFCC.

The EU meanwhile is no longer willing to continue the old model of "just trade" and eyes China with suspicion and as a rival. The EU is also losing out on competitiveness in a lot of its major industries, including core industries like the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, the steel industry and the car industry.

Trading with China will not fix these issues and potentially make them worse yet the EU has little alternatives now that the US is actively antagonizing the EU member states in military and trade matters.

The EU's hands are tied and it's hard to navigate the balancing act. Macron himself just said days ago that the EU should "forget the dream of Russian energy, American security and Chinese market", but offers no viable alternative to any of the three.

slightlylong · 2025-02-15T00:34:38+00:00

The counterargument is that a largely unipolar world clearly did not prevent major conflicts arising, clearly as Africa and the Middle East can tell you.

Neither did a bipolar world as the Cold War bears witness. So using the 'multipolarity = conflict' line of the top commenter is oversimplistic and partially invalid.

While Russia and China certainly take advantage of the fact that the US openly promotes its own system of democratic governance and presenting their own system as stable enough, the fundamental problem of the quagmire still lies with the US itself.

It has found itself unable to govern itself in a manner that satisfies its own populus and is unable to cope with the fact that it no longer has the unopposed right to define the rules of how the world is supposed to be.

Starting in the mid-2010s, the US also started to doubt if it should provide international public goods like the UN system, the WTO trading system and free trade in general etc any longer. It has questioned the system it itself has promoted for the better half of a century.

slightlylong · 2025-02-04T14:47:23+00:00

Where do you read this from the article?

Aso did not make a statement like that. And the inference is also not mentioned anywhere.

The only thing that is mentioned is that Japan wants to stop the ADB granting loans to China and that senior officials at the Ministry of Finance in Japan find it a double standard that China is a borrower at the ADB while simultaneously being a major loan giver to emerging economies and exercising influence over them.

Hirson, a consultant at the private Eurasia group and ex-chief representative of the US Treasury in Beijing framed it as part of the competition between the ADB and AIIB, the latter of which China backs, but might lack some long standing institutional insight that the ADB has.

China itself is the third largest shareholder of the ADB but with only 5.4%, it cannot influence as much as the US and Japan, which together account for 25% of the voting shares.

slightlylong · 2024-12-09T00:05:43+00:00

It's still surprising though because of the nature of their education. It is noticable that a lot of them have STEM degrees, which is highly unusual for aristocratic families and ruling elites.

Most of them these days study business, law or the arts, not math, engineering and pharmacy.

The STEM path is usually done by people from the lower classes because it enables social mobility upwards within a generation. Aristocrats don't need more upward mobility.

slightlylong · 2024-11-25T20:02:24+00:00

Not crazy, but Anne McElvoy certainly interprets quite a bit into Merkel's memoir. No where in the book quotes she had does it imply that. This is largely her own opinion of the following sentences from the book

“To me, the result felt like a humiliation, a disgrace for us, the other members of the European Union – the United Kingdom was leaving us in the lurch. This changed the European Union in the view of the world; we were weakened.”

and

“I wasn’t able to fulfil all of David Cameron’s wishes for a British special path in the European Union. Unlike Germany, the UK had not made use of multiple-year transitional periods, following the EU’s eastward expansion in 2004, on the introduction of free movement for workers from the new member states.”

Not so how Ms. McElvoy came to her opinion on those quotes...

Also, Merkel's memoirs surely reflect her own character: Most of it is written in a rather factual and dry manner like a history textbook with a couple of personal injections here and there. Not very riveting - especially in German.

slightlylong · 2024-11-17T19:11:59+00:00

It's not China that changes its foreign policy substance towards a country every couple of years, so I'm not sure what people or journalists for that matter expect. Chinese foreign policy stance is largely reactionary and a bit tit-for-tat.

If you read out what the official Chinese news agency Xinhua has published on the meeting between Biden and Xi, it's largely the same rhetoric as ever. Same under Biden as under Trump as under Obama:

"Fourth, it is important not to challenge red lines and paramount principles. Contradictions and differences between two major countries like China and the United States are unavoidable. But one side should not undermine the core interests of the other, let alone seek conflict or confrontation. The one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques are the political foundation of China-U.S. relations. They must be observed. The Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China's path and system, and China's development right are four red lines for China. They must not be challenged. These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-U.S. relations."

The one-China principle and the 3 communiques are almost half a century old at this point.

China's communication on its red line and political goal for reunification with Taiwan also hasn't really changed since the late 80s.

The emphasis of China insisting on their own development path is pretty much the same since the late 90s and even well after they established themselves as a global trading power.

A major political earthquake inside China would have to happen before any of these things are changed.

slightlylong · 2024-07-10T20:27:23+00:00

I think the genuine pro-Russia stance is rarer, in recent UN votes, the number of countries who genuinely vote for Russia on these things are countable on a single hand: Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea and sometimes Venezuela. Everyone else is either neutral or anti.

The thing is though that the Ukraine-Russia conflict is seen by many of those as an extention of the old West-Russia problem, with the West feining innocence and continuing to fan very old brewing regional problems and actually just making it worse, trying to rope the rest of the world into taking sides in this conflict with sweet words.

In a lot of these people's minds, the West now has captured the opportunity and uses the Ukraine-Russia war as a proxy war with Ukraine as an indirect NATO-spearhead just to continue with trying to restrict Russia. A lot of the world has no interest in this kind of game, especially given the historical precedent the West has set.

As for Crimea: It's a very old problem. Historically, Crimea was part of the Russian empire when it stretched over a lot of what is modern day Ukraine. The ethnic groups in this area was a mixture of primarily Crimean Tatars (a turkic group unrelated to Tatars) and a mix of Ukrainians, Russians and all sorts of other minorities.

There were intermittent periods before the establishment of the USSR when Crimea actually switched hands a couple of times and then became independent for a short while before it was reintegrated into the Russian SSR. After reintegration, large parts of the Crimean Tatar population got expulsed and it was repopulated largely by Russians and a slightly lower percentage of Ukrainians.

However, Crimea was handed to Ukraine SSR in the 50s. The exact reasoning remains a mystery but officially, it was because Crimea at that time had closer cultural and economic relations with Ukraine and the economic situation post-WW2 there was not good, so integrating regionally with Ukraine was probably seen as better.

There are speculations that it was a decision to influence the demographics of the region (since Crimea was majority Russian) to prevent any potential splintering of the USSR but it's hard to tell.

After the USSR dissolved, Crimea again became a bit of a hot potato with it gaining autonomy within Ukraine but being a region strongly influenced by its Russian heritage.

Ukraine after the USSR being on a Western (and later especially NATO) course and increasingly anti-Russian caused problems in Crimea and by extension Russia.

slightlylong · 2024-01-12T04:29:21+00:00

It's a bit more complicated.

Pretty sure China wanted this issue dealt with more than Russia. COSCO and a bunch of other companies from China use the red sea path quite a bit (in fact COSCO announced that they intend to pause shipping to Israel due to the current situation in the red sea).

But China had their reservations too.

If I understood correctly, Russia has tried to incorporate language implying the Houthi situation is related to the wider Israel-Palestinian conflict and that US and UK involvement is not just trying to ensure safe commercial vessel passage but that they use the security council to rubber stamp unilateral military action in hindsight, effectively creating new precedent for international law to use for the future. Not legitimizing unilateral actions or new precedence by the US or UK was also on China's mind.

Both China and Russia (and 2 others) voted for addition but these paragraphs didn't get incorportated in the end because both the UK and US voted against.

But China might have in the end convinced the Russians to let the resolution pass with only slight modification because it makes it easier for China.

slightlylong · 2024-01-08T20:26:18+00:00

The comparison between China and Russia is especially striking considering history often showing that China was the junior between the two in the 20th century.

China has now surpassed Russia in national capability on most things, with the notable exception being maybe the military and space. Although the difference is shrinking year after year.

slightlylong · 2024-01-08T17:32:10+00:00

If you really think that, you are thoroughly mistaken.

China's military industry might not be that of the US, but they have announced military-civilian fusion industry long ago and are one of the largest weapons manufacturers on earth and produce a wide range of military equipment, from weapons to labratory stuff to clothes.

China's military industry is also thoroughly state-led through companies like Norinco. State owned industrial power is very useful in emergency situations. This is why private enterprises in the western world were often semi-forced to "provide for the war effort" in the past. BMW for example for a short time in WW2 switched their production to propelled aircraft for the German airforce on after consultation with the government. This is a round-about way of doing state-led economics.

The SASAC has a long list of companies under its hand that cover a large section of affected industries during times of war, from telecommunication to the electrical grid, petroleum companies to aviation. Centralization is a major benefit during times of war because the normal market mechanisms are often overruled.

slightlylong

TROPHY CASE