Tag: Russia

Oil Prices Slide as Investors Worry Energy Demand Is Slowing

Chin@Strategy

HOUSTON — Saudi Arabia is slashing oil exports. U.S. crude oil in storage is dropping. Members of the European Union will soon sharply reduce how much fuel they buy from Russia. Those developments would normally send oil prices sharply higher. Yet oil prices have been sliding. The U.S. benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, fell to about $80 a barrel on Friday from more than $90 at the start of the month. The global supply of oil appears to be falling, but many oil traders think that demand is heading down even…

UK Sees Varied Domestic Threats, Mainly From Iran, Russia and China

Chin@Strategy

The scale of those expulsions, together with the rollout of Western economic sanctions designed to isolate Russia, had proved a surprisingly potent test for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, he added. Well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Britain was especially sensitive to the activities of Russian agents, and its pushback against Moscow’s spy networks intensified after the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian agent, and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Since that episode prompted Britain to expel 23 Russian diplomats on espionage grounds,…

China Is Burning More Coal, a Growing Climate Challenge

Chin@Strategy

China is poised to take advantage of the global urgency to tackle climate change. It is the world’s dominant manufacturer and user of solar panels and wind turbines. It leads the world in producing energy from hydroelectric dams and is building more nuclear power plants than any other country. But China also burns more coal than the rest of the world combined and has accelerated mining and the construction of coal-fired power plants, driving up the country’s emissions of energy-related greenhouse gases nearly 6 percent last year, the fastest pace…

Did Germany Learn From Its Russia Trouble? The Test May Come in China.

Chin@Strategy

BERLIN — Germany understood the trap of strategic vulnerability that it had laid for itself in relying so heavily on Russian gas only after Moscow invaded Ukraine and turned off the spigot. But whether that lesson has been fully absorbed may be tested elsewhere: China. As Chancellor Olaf Scholz prepares for his first visit to Beijing on Thursday, a planeload of executives in tow, Germany’s intelligence chiefs and allies are warning him against pursuing business as usual with a China that is saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait. Were tensions to…

Pentagon’s Strategy Says China and Russia Pose More Dangerous Challenges

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — Eight months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as China pushes to increase its nuclear, space and cyberforces, the Pentagon outlined a sweeping new strategy on Thursday that called for more robust deterrence at an increasingly tense moment in international security. The document, the National Defense Strategy, which also includes reviews of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and missile defenses, has been circulating for months in classified form on Capitol Hill. The last national defense strategy, published in 2018 by the Trump administration, was the first since the end…

Biden’s Tough Tech Trade Restrictions on China

Chin@Strategy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: We’re now engaged in a trade war with China. Actually, you probably haven’t heard this one before. I’m not talking about Donald Trump’s clumsy tariffs aimed at reducing America’s trade deficit. I’m talking instead about the sweeping new controls the Biden administration imposed last Friday on exports of technology to China — controls meant to constrain other advanced countries as well as the United States. Unlike the Trump tariffs, these controls have a clear goal: to prevent or at least delay Beijing’s…

We Are Suddenly Taking On China and Russia at the Same Time

Chin@Strategy

This last rule is huge, because the most advanced semiconductors are made by what I call “a complex adaptive coalition” of companies from America to Europe to Asia. Think of it this way: AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, Apple and Nvidia excel at the design of chips that have billions of transistors packed together ever more tightly to produce the processing power they are seeking. Synopsys and Cadence create sophisticated computer-aided design tools and software on which chip makers actually draw up their newest ideas. Applied Materials creates and modifies the materials…

US will soon need to deter two major nuclear powers for first time, White House says

Chin@Strategy

Within a decade, the US will need to deter two major nuclear weapons powers for the first time, the Biden administrationhas warned, pointing to the Russian arsenal that is increasingly being brandished by Moscow and an expanding Chinese stockpile. The president’s new national security strategy (NSS) depicts China as the most capable long-term competitor, but Russia as the more immediate, disruptive threat, pointing to its nuclear posturing over Ukraine. It warns that threat could grow as Russian forces continue to suffer defeats on the battlefield. “Russia’s conventional military will have…

India and China Call for De-Escalation After Russian Strikes

Chin@Strategy

NEW DELHI — India and China, two powers that have offered Russia some relief in the face of Western sanctions, expressed concern after the deadly missile strikes across Ukraine on Monday and renewed calls for de-escalation and dialogue. Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, told a press briefing that “all countries deserve respect for their sovereignty and territorial integrity” and that “support should be given to all efforts that are conducive to peacefully resolving the crisis.” Arindam Bagchi, the spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, said New…

From Moscow to Tehran, a Crisis of Illiberalism

Chin@Strategy

The worldview behind Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following premises: The West and America are declining, decaying and internally divided. The globalized world is becoming multipolar, with “civilization-states” re-emerging and competing to claim their spheres of influence. And Russia and China in particular represent potent alternatives to Western liberalism that stand ready to contend for global dominance. As badly as the war has gone for Putin, some of this analysis still holds up. The world has indeed responded to the Ukraine War along multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s snub…