The Internationalism

America has decided to withdraw from the conflict in Afghanistan; during the past twenty years, there have been an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 casualties among opponent militias and the Afghan population, as well as about 5,000 Western casualties among the US mission, the NATO mission and private military contracting forces. An intervention that began in 2001 as a response to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11 th has, over two decades, turned into a war without end, in which the United States has seen its credibility as a world power and guarantor of global order put to the test. This is precisely why the decision to withdraw is controversial, in Washington and in other capitals. It has the air of a surrender in the face of domestic opinion marked by war-weariness; it is not known whether the conflict will really end; it is not known who will fill the void left by the United States and NATO, and how; the knock-on effects that the Afghan shock will hav...

From the series News from the Silk Road The international tensions which China will face on the seas in the next fifteen years could find a buffer in the expansion of China’s influence on land in Central, Southern and Western Asia. Wang Jisi is the dean of the School of International Studies at the University of Beijing and a major figure of the American party in China. His unexpected foray into ‘geopolitics’ has reignited the old clash between different American currents — a phenomenon we analysed more than twenty years ago. At the time, Robert Manning, the author of The Asian Energy Factor and adviser to the State Department in 1991, viewed Asia’s growing dependence on the Persian Gulf for its energy requirements in the light of geoeconomics and geostrategy and foresaw a possible convergence between the USA and China. From a geoeconomic standpoint, both trade and the funding and development of the infrastructure necessary for Asia’s energy needs were more important than terri...

The Strategic Surprise of the Agreement between Beijing and Tehran and the Suggestion of a Six-Power Concert The agreement between Beijing and Tehran falls under the definition of strategic surprise , i.e., events that entirely appertain to the political realm and mark a change or an about-turn in the balance among the powers. New alliances, the breakdown of alliances, the overturning of coalitions, diplomatic openings or unexpected military sorties: these are the regular novelties of international politics that Arrigo Cervetto wrote about. However, if the agreement was an unforeseeable event in itself, the long-term objective economic and political trends. that have determined it and made it possible are entirely investigable. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of December 1979 was interpreted by the United States as a potential threat to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf, and it was a contemporary revival of the Great Game , which had set the British Empire agai...

David Petraeus, Commander of the US forces in Iraq and the Gulf in 2007-2008, then director of the CIA in 2011-12, described the elimination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani on January 3 rd in Baghdad as a defensive action , with which the Trump presidency restored a US deterrence , which was weakened by recent Iranian actions . This is a reference to the attacks conducted indirectly, unclaimed by Tehran, against the Saudi oil infrastructures on September 14 th 2019. In March 2008, when the forces under Petraeus’ command supported the Iraqi Army in the fight against local Shite militias, Soleimani sent a message to the American general: informing him that he was the person in charge for Iranian policies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza therefore the channel through which to define an agreement to resolve the various issues with Tehran. Petraeus holds the advisors of the Quds Force, the spearhead of the Pasdaran asymmetric operations, responsible for the killing of around 600 ...