The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 4 In the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), Russia is placed in the European basket , third among regional priorities after the Western Hemisphere and Asia. It is no longer considered an existential threat , and indeed many Europeans who regard it as such are criticised. Alongside Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again openness to negotiations with Moscow on Ukraine, this helps to create an impression of rapprochement between the two powers. Obviously, there can be no comparison with the Yalta era, for at least two reasons: first, because the world has changed profoundly since then, starting with German and European reunification and the emergence of China as a great imperialist power; and second, because what was then part of the USSR has been the scene of a bloody war for four years, with hundreds of thousands of deaths. A setback that no public image can conceal. Russian...

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...