【2】American democracy is an ongoing struggle to live up to our highest ideals and to heal our divisions; to recommit ourselves to the founding idea of our nation captured in our Declaration of Independence, not unlike many of your documents
via @NYT the humility talk at the Biden Democracy Summit doesn’t come close to the scope and depth of the threat to US democracy https://t.co/ERdy2ztmfx
Between the lines: The data signals that for all the legitimate concerns about the rise of clearly autocratic countries like Russia and China, when it comes to democratic decline, the alarm is coming from inside the house.
the billionaire Sun Hongbin quietly transferred $4.5bn worth of shares in his Chinese real estate firm to a company on a street corner in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
"I suspect the price Honduras will be trying to extract from its Taiwanese patrons not to flip just went up significantly," said Ellis at the U.S. Army War College, pointing to Nicaragua
Nonetheless, in the short term, Nicaragua’s change probably means that the price Honduras will be trying to extract from its Taiwanese patrons not to recognize the PRC probably just went up significantly.
“The major problem was not that China joined the WTO, but that the U.S. failed to enforce China's commitments even though in China's WTO accession agreement, we included extremely strict and unique enforcement provisions against China,” said Barshefsky.
The sole import safeguard imposed against Chinese imports before the mechanism expired in 2013 was the Obama administration’s 2009 imposition of duties on Chinese tire imports linked to the loss of 5,000 U.S. jobs.
Still, it would not have been in the U.S. interest to block China’s entry to WTO 20 years ago, said Hillman,
“There was no way to say ‘no’ because if the U.S. had said ‘no’ and China had not joined the WTO, it would have probably engaged in a whole series of [trade] agreements that would have had the effect of discriminating against the United States,”
But he cautioned against perceptions that China’s WTO entry has been a universally one-sided losing proposition for U.S. businesses that invested in China and established operations there.
“You can see that the firms who are there today were largely the firms who have been there for the last 20 years and they wouldn't be there if they were not making money,” Broadman said
“We're now at a point where Beijing is clearly in broad violation of its 2001 accession agreement,” Broadman said, proposing three options that China should be given: renegotiate its WTO membership terms, be shown the WTO “exit door,” or immediately execute its promised reforms.
Still, a fundamental problem remains that China sees nothing wrong with its behavior.
“Over the last two decades, China has fully delivered on its [WTO] accession commitments … empowering global development and prosperity,” Chinese Ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang, said in a speech at the U.S.-China Business Council’s annual gala last week.
But the gaps in the WTO rule book, which was designed for market economies, have become all too obvious. The subsidies disciplines leave a lot of the huge range of Chinese trade-distorting government interventions uncovered. Attempts to bring more of the companies and agencies of state under them have been foiled by the unhelpful definition of a “public body” set down by the WTO’s dispute settlement system.
China has refused to give up its special and differential developing country status.
He declined to say when, or under what conditions, China would cease to consider itself a developing country altogether under WTO rules
如果有条件，要还价，倒是可行
But it ignores the errors of the US, in particular, in sidelining the WTO and China within it.
a relatively sympathetic analysis of China’s experiences in the WTO, to recognise Washington’s own role in bypassing and undermining the institution. The US has systematically barked up a whole forest of wrong trees ever since China joined, wasting political capital, alienating allies and creating expectations on Capitol Hill it couldn’t possibly meet.
高树超教授现任新加坡管理大学法学院教授
???????? kept Trump’s Phase I agreement with ???????? , while ???????? effectively killed its CAI. ???????? trade with ???????? currently growing faster than ????????’s. Who is making policy on ???????? ? NBA, Wall Street, Hollywood? Europeans don’t see coherence on the other side of the Atlantic. https://t.co/6o1qKOI4MI
Whether or not China ever surpasses it, the US has been bereaved of its 1990s unipolarity. It copes with the trauma by dwelling on what could have been done about it. If only China had not been waved into the World Trade Organization 20 Decembers ago. If only successive White Houses had not been so credulous in their dealings with Beijing. The recriminations go back to 1949, when, as some Republicans still fancy, the US “lost” China to communism.
西方从来就没有阻止中国重新崛起的能力（崛起并不一定要“超越美国”），美国和西方只是在做梦
Second, doing so would have somehow only stymied China, and not the west, even though American and other companies gorged on low-wage labour there ever after.
If this were just academically wrong, it need not detain us. But there are political consequences to this fantasy. One theme that Donald Trump rode to the White House was that US elites were derelict and even complicit in China’s rise. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama are still held to have sold out industrial America (but not credited for the cheap consumer goods that flowed into many of the same households from a trading China). The premise that a mighty China is some kind of aberration, and not just a regression to the historic mean, props up a lot of US populism.
The speech in Jakarta broke little new ground, said analysts, but they felt it might bolster US credibility in the region after the volatility of Donald Trump’s administration
Despite piles of studies, books, the congressional testimony of on-scene FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan and a 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee report that found CIA interrogation program ineffective at best and dissembling at worst, the pro-torture consensus has hardly budged
“I believe that the ultimate joining of Taiwan and China, the ultimate creation of one China, is the objective of Chinese policy,” Kissinger told Zakaria, “as it has been since the creation of the current regime and that it probably would be in any Chinese government since Taiwan has been considered a historic part of China that was taken away by Japan, by force. That was exactly the situation Nixon and I faced when we first began contact with China.“
focusing on areas including coordination on supply chains, export controls and standards for artificial intelligence
The framework will be “flexible,” with some countries perhaps not signing up to all of the elements, Raimondo said. She said the aim is to engage not just developed nations such as Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand but also emerging economies such as Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.
Key lesson 2: women's labor income share is far below 50% in every world region; at the global level in 2020 women's share is about 35% (vs 65% for men); it has been rising since 2000 (33% for women, 67% for men), but the progress is very slow, and even negative in some regions pic.twitter.com/hrmb3kbuW0
The public has been moving in a more hawkish direction for some time. Surveys show that the diet of propaganda has had an effect in making the public at least nominally more supportive of sending U.S. forces to fight for countries where the U.S. has no vital interests, including Taiwan and Ukraine. The numbers vary depending on the survey, but support for intervention in all cases is trending upwards. That is not a response to “new facts,” but something is changing because political leaders and media outlets are driving public opinion in this direction. Public opinion doesn’t just “turn hawkish.” It is shaped to become so.
A senior gov adviser told me the government will “make a big effort to stabilize growth” next year
The PBOC doesn’t want to ease because whenever they do, the money just flows into property. But they may have little choice. Credit expansion will have to pick up especially if the GDP growth rate for 2022 is set above 5% — with private investment down
"The importance of the Chinese economy is much bigger for the EU than it is for the US" @WeyandSabine says when pressed about where US-EU interests do not fully align @ecfrpic.twitter.com/AB7RsWYcVb
Not a surprise that Scholz wants to continue Merkel’s China policy. But sending this message to Xi before even taking office & promising to keep his coalition partners in check - as this story suggests - that would be something https://t.co/rgif8aQgnK
Olaf Scholz is already on a collision course with his two coalition partners: The coalition agreement writes down a departure from the previous China course, but Scholz probably wants continuity（默克尔背后做思想工作）
In practice, there might be more coalition unity than that, and more continuity with Merkel. The German Greens in the Bundestag are actually quite pragmatic about relations with business: Mikko Huotari, executive director of the Merics think-tank, points out that they have a record at state level of supporting Germany’s export industry. The big industrial players such as Volkswagen are anyway pretty good at promoting their interests no matter who is in government. In any case, Olaf Scholz’s chancellery will no doubt retain a big say in trade policy.
The most interesting part is the overall context. With disillusionment setting in within the German public and businesses about dealing with China, German policy has been drifting towards a mindset sceptical of traditional trade deals that are focused purely on access to export markets.
(“We don’t want everything different, but we want to do a lot better.”). His quote reflects an instinctive respect for consensus, given that the German electorate has placed a coalition government in power for the entire postwar period.
Bütikofer argues that an emergent China-sceptic consensus is aligning the German business, human rights and national security communities.
显然是“责任全在对方”，只说中国制裁，不说首先是欧盟制裁
the mess we’re seeing in supply chains is down to a huge shift in demand, away from services and towards consumer durables全球现象
Mr. Biden’s aides are driven by concern that a new arms race is heating up over hypersonic weapons, space arms and cyberweapons, all of which could unleash a costly and destabilizing spiral of move and countermove. The fear is that an attack that blinded space satellites or command-and-control systems could quickly escalate, in ways that were not imaginable in the nuclear competitions of the Cold War
When the Chinese launched a hypersonic missile in July, circling the globe once and then deploying a maneuverable glide vehicle that could zig and zag on an unpredictable path and deliver a weapon anywhere on earth, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the U.S. was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment.”
“Why are they building all of this capability?” he asked on CBS News. While it is not clear what Chinese strategists intend, he said, the hypersonic glide vehicle appears to be “a first-use weapon.”
It is possible, many arms control experts say, that the Chinese buildup is motivated by the deployment of U.S. missile defenses in the Pacific — land-based systems in California, Alaska, Guam and South Korea, and aboard ships patrolling off Japan and the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. has always insisted that these systems are designed to deter North Korea. But the Chinese government has long voiced worries that North Korea’s nuclear program provides a convenient excuse for the United States to build a system aimed at containing Chinese nuclear weapons
because an inert government is the next best thing to no government at all
come to dominate in a new age of robber barons in America=中国政府的攻击
For the first time in our history, there was not a peaceful transfer of power following a U.S. presidential election.
It is hard to be optimistic about the future of such a divided America. We will be weakened. We will be diminished. Our divisions will become ever greater impediments to progress. And so will begin the precipitous decline of the United States. We will not be the shining city on the Hill anymore or the last best hope of the world. We will not even be able to stand up to the growing global threats that we face.
Biden has framed America’s great power competition with China and Russia as a battle between democracy and autocracy. Most of the world’s poor, and an increasing share of those living in the west, pay little attention to such abstractions. What will move people in continents such as Africa is material improvements to their lives
Sure, Washington can sanction bad actors, reinforce internet security, harden weak points in infrastructure, and call out election interference. But will those measures deter a power intent on fomenting civil war, as Russia is doing at this very moment in the Balkans?
Kennan recognized this from the start. In 1998, when the US Senate ratified NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, he predicted that Russia would “gradually react quite adversely,” and the West would claim that is just “how the Russians are.”
the West has consistently dismissed the Kremlin’s security concerns relating to ex-Soviet countries and portrayed Russian resistance to NATO’s eastward expansion as paranoid revanchism
Volodymyr Zelensky, dons fatigues and praises the military, or presses for a firm commitment on the country’s NATO membership, ordinary Russians get the message that there is a security threat on the border – and it is not the Russian troops
Along with the economic ramifications mentioned on the call, Sullivan said Biden relayed that the US is prepared to bolster defense capabilities in the region
if...the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures
俄方：
"In response, Vladimir Putin stressed that the responsibility should not be shifted onto the shoulders of Russia, since it is NATO that is making dangerous attempts to conquer Ukrainian territory and is building up its military potential at our borders," the Kremlin statement said. "Therefore, Russia is seriously interested in obtaining reliable, legally fixed guarantees excluding the expansion of NATO in the eastern direction and the deployment of offensive strike weapons systems in the states adjacent to Russia."
Although the Kremlin said that Mr. Biden agreed to continue discussing Mr. Putin’s demands, U.S. officials rejected Mr. Putin’s analysis of the situation and said they would never make promises about possible NATO expansions.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia rebuffed President Biden’s concerns about Russia’s troop buildup near Ukraine, telling his American counterpart that it was the West that was raising military tensions in the region by increasing its “military potential near our borders,” the Kremlin said.
One is Biden’s administration attempting a more assertive policy towards Russia aimed at achieving tangible outcomes for Ukraine. The other is Putin’s easily predictable heavy-handed response and complete intransigence.
拜登：get concessions from Putin on key elements of Minsk, get Germany and others on board with regards to Ukraine’s NATO membership action plan or derail NS2，还是要逼杀俄国，从明斯克协议撤出
Worth reminding that US opposition to NS2 is partly driven by the interests of US gas exporters,
And how likely is it that he would invade Ukraine after NS2 is up and running?
is a mighty dangerous energy weapon, which would allow Putin to suffocate Ukrainian economy without any invasions.
Nevertheless, on Oct 26 Ukraine used a Bayraktar drone for the first time to destroy a piece of artillery on the separatist side
乌克兰总统管不住军方、情报部门，压不住反对派，民意也不牢固
At the end of October, USS Porter entered the Black Sea, followed by USS Mount Whitney. You could feel from TASS and RIA posts at that time, how alarmed the Russians were about the prospect of another freedom of navigation operation, along the lines of HMS Defender’s
"It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk cruise missiles."
"If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security."
Russia does not want an armed conflict with Ukraine, but will continue to take steps to defend itself, Moscow’s top diplomat has said, as Kiev claims Moscow could order an offensive against its neighbor
Western officials and defense experts are growing more convinced of the closer relationship based on recent economic alliances, military exercises and joint defense development
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that Beijing and Moscow are now more aligned than at any point in the past 60 years.
美国近来不得不承认中俄关系已经紧密到威胁美国的地步，但还是不相信军事联盟
watching closely but caution against reading too much into actions unlikely to flower into a full military alliance.
U.S. steps to contain the two countries have driven them into a marriage of convenience, giving the previously contentious rivals an incentive to marshal resources and intelligence against a common adversary
美国的思维并没有变
“The conversation first was that Russia and China are not going to align,” said Mr. Kofman, the Russian military expert. “Then the conversation was, it appears there’s an alignment, but it’s not very significant. Then it evolved to, there’s an alignment, and it is significant, but it probably won’t last. And that conversation is now evolving into the next stage.”
一直拒绝承认现实
China ordered Russian-made Su-35 jet fighters, which enhanced Beijing’s ability to strike U.S. warships. The U.S. sanctioned China for these deals.
我们都忘了
中国的基本工业品和中高端零部件和俄罗斯的能源、粮食有互补关系
One idea to divide the two countries is for the U.S. to soften its approach to Russia and draw Moscow away from Beijing. But such a strategy remains embryonic, according to analysts, especially when the U.S. appears disinclined to offer the kind of political and economic incentives that would persuade Mr. Putin to loosen ties with Mr. Xi.
“The two texts are not written according to the principle of a menu, where you can choose one or the other, they complement each other and should be considered as a whole,” declared Deputy Foreign Minister
俄国媒体成了小粉红？are already triumphant: “The world before and the world after December 17, 2021 are completely different worlds
Either ... or they face a military-technical alternative说死了 the greater the likelihood that they will suffer a pre-emptive strike.”
俄国国内的宣传也是把自己置于死地而后生，背水一战的感觉
Reading the Western press, one is under the impression that nothing is happening
Russia and the United States commit themselves not to deploy nuclear weapons abroad and to withdraw those already deployed, as well as to eliminate nuclear weapons deployment infrastructure outside their territory. Article 4 states, in part, that “the Russian Federation and all participants which were, as of 27 May 1997, member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, shall not deploy their armed forces and armaments on the territory of any other European state in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997.”
基本上让北约解散，表面上美国根本不可能接受的，但俄国提出来了
In short, “the Russian initiative could help the Americans to quietly leave Central and Eastern Europe,” according to the headline of
The same is true of Japan, for which acceptance of the Treaty clauses means the de-occupation and liquidation of American bases…”挑战美国全球地位，呵呵
And what is Russia offering in exchange for all the concessions demanded of the West? ... Nothing of the sort. In return, it says it is ready… to commit itself not to threaten American security.
笑死：In a word, Russia is demanding that NATO commit suicide, and that the United States be reduced to the role of a regional power.
精神病，疯子
Why this Russian ultimatum?
As always, Russian behavior is dictated by a careful analysis of the “correlation of forces”俄国是不是考虑，算上了中国？
Huge reserves have been accumulated, including gold大家觉得俄国备战已经准备好了
另一处读到：普京这几年确实尝胆卧薪，整顿俄国财政，油价也让俄国储备大增，把经费调到军方，大为改善
If Russia and China coordinate their actions against Ukraine and Taiwan respectively, “everything will become much easier for us. And for China too, from which we will divert attention, which will free our hands even more…”
卧槽，俄国比中国疯多了，“中俄联手把美帝踢出历史舞台的时机到了”
“This is not a proposal for discussion, but an ultimatum — a demand for unconditional surrender. The West has no choice but to lose face
疯了： “we can solve the problem of neutralizing Europe and the United States only by physically eliminating them with our nuclear potential
不过：
The trigger for the Kremlin was the misguided policy of the White House which, after the debacle in Afghanistan, multiplied the number of emissaries to Moscow this autumn, making the weakness of the United States even more obvious in Putin’s eyes: “Senior American officials have made frequent trips to Moscow. The visit of CIA Director William Burns in November was the fourth visit of a senior White House official since the Geneva meeting. It is not difficult to guess that the purpose of the CIA director’s personal visit was not at all to make demands about Ukraine, as the Western media tried to have itt, but to try to find a compromise. Faced with the collapse of international authority due to the unsuccessful withdrawal from Afghanistan, the White House was eager to find a deal with the Kremlin.”
Burns has always advocated the refusal to expand NATO eastward.” Burns’ visit was interpreted in Moscow as an indication that the policy of appeasement
然而，这一切都是谎言：
What Moscow fears in Ukraine is not a few NATO instructors, but freedom.
普京（和习近平一样）害怕民主、自由，肯定会把专制使用到他控制的任何地方，包括俄国国外
俄国老百姓都被“洗脑”了（也许确实如此，但西方也是如此），大家信普京
Very often the best policy with Russia is that of silence and distance: do nothing, say nothing and stand your ground
这是瞎扯
The lessons of 1946-7 are still relevant today. The pioneers of the Cold War were the British, who formed a Western bloc around the Anglo-French core and persuaded isolationist Americans to stay in Europe. In the spring of 1947, the French, Italian and Belgian governments expelled Communist ministers, aware of the threat linked to Moscow’s fifth column in Europe. This clear willingness to resist Stalin finally persuaded Washington to commit itself to European security.
Françoise Thom
Historian, emeritus lecturer at the University of Paris Sorbonne
US president promised to reverse his predecessor’s policies, but instead will negotiate with the Kremlin
For Biden, the showdown with Putin presents a particularly thorny challenge, one that pits his long-stated goal of aggressively confronting foreign autocrats — a sharp reversal, his team argues, of his predecessor’s tendency to coddle them — with the more practical aim of avoiding a war.
“If, in fact, he invades Ukraine, there will be severe consequences — severe consequences — and economic consequences like none he’s ever seen or ever have been seen,” Mr. Biden said.
he “increasingly views Ukraine as a Western aircraft carrier parked just across from Rostov Oblast in southern Russia,” wrote Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment中俄遇到的处境相似，台湾和乌克兰都不愿意回归，不回归就成了敌人，那怎么办？自己“制度”能“变天”来适应一个“小国”吗？
She said the intelligence community recommended against offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia, because much of NATO opposed it, but it was overridden by Mr. Bush.
1975 Helsinki agreement on security and cooperation in Europe—signed by Moscow—which said European states have the right to belong to any international alliance they choose俄国已经不是苏联了
In the best case, Mr. Putin is forced to back down, losing face domestically and internationally作者不觉得西方有什么值得示弱的
The seemingly impetuous Mr. Putin has maneuvered his way into a strategically risky position, and the West ought to leverage the Kremlin’s mistake and drive a hard bargain in any diplomacy满嘴蔑视但拿不出办法来
Europe is in the grip of an energy crisis with low reserves. And with Russia supplying some 40% of the European Union's gas imports, the Kremlin has already shown its ability to checkmate the West's harshest sanctions by limiting production and potentially triggering rolling blackouts across the continent
Without firing a shot, Putin has managed to send the West into a collective panic
feel the need to appease
Another land grab would add俄国并不一定要占地，占领乌克兰后果难以预料，但摧毁乌克兰武装力量则可以威慑乌，给北约真把红线画出来
作者显然是鹰派，主战
as recently as Thursday, European leaders were responding to Putin's bullying tactics and intimidation by trying to nudge him toward the bargaining table.投降？不堪忍受
whatever it takes short of direct military conflict基本上是分割开来
All in all, the Kremlin should be satisfied with the impact of its expectedly menacing response to Biden’s attempt at pushing Putin’s red lines at the beginning of the year. But the issue of Medvedchuk remains.
A brutal dictator, having staked a claim to power based on conspiracy theories and promises of imperial restoration, rebuilds his military. He begins threatening to seize his neighbors’ territory, blames democracies for the crisis and demands that, to solve it, they must rewrite the rules of international politics — and redraw the map — to suit him. The democracies agree to peace talks, hoping, as they must, to avoid war without unduly rewarding aggression
but it might be enough to take more territory close to the current enclaves in Eastern Ukraine and perhaps set more viable long-term boundaries. This would however be an enormous gamble for Putin to take. In part this would be because of the international reaction
Russia is under siege. The country’s enemies have advanced to its borders. A hostile Nato alliance now threatens to incorporate Ukraine
如果这样，那普京出师有名，摊牌叫你了（作者重复俄的申诉而已）
But the Kremlin narrative is nonsense. There is no risk that Nato will attack Russia. The reason that so many countries joined the alliance in the 1990s is because they fear Russian aggression
Stephen Walt: even bad guys has security concerns/demands
说普京只是转移视线，掩盖自己的困境
For that reason, it is not in America’s power to grant Russia the stable “sphere of influence” that Putin demands
how to preserve Washington’s global leadership role at a time when its model of governance, both domestically and internationally, is increasingly called into question，到底谁内政不稳？美国的咄咄逼人其实是掩盖自己的内乱，世界上越来越多的国家敢跟华盛顿叫阵，美国自己的民主牌也不好使，
self-delusion than the oft-repeated bromide that the United States’ rivals are on “the wrong side of history,”
美国只会诋毁他人，但作者还是坚持“美国的行动是正义的”，但谁杀人最多？
If the Kremlin’s artificially manufactured crisis over Ukraine is any indication, Putin now senses that the time is ripe to move from defensive stalemate to an offensive initiative, 拜登怎么想都无关，大家敢叫阵
However, this framing of democratic erosion in the face of authoritarian, populist leaders as a sort of balance sheet to be assessed by rational bean-counters misreads the trends that have fueled it
Stoltenberg said both conditions were unacceptable because they breached Nato’s “core principles” of offering membership to all and defending allies equally.
Moscow believes that Kyiv won't make any concessions unless they are forced to by Washington or by Russian military force. Putin is currently trying with the former (and not attempting negotiations with Kyiv) and will likely attempt the latter if it fails
俄国的行动是有坚定的决心，有实质，会跟上的，不只是吓唬
1) specific demands
2) tied to a short timeline
3) promising a "military and military-technical" response
4) with substantial military capabilities capable of an escalation including an invasion on short notice
“They are deliberately backing themselves into a corner where their credibility will be questioned if they don't achieve concessions or use military force”
“The spring buildup failed to achieves Russia's aims at deterring these steps, and the HMS Defender incident, Ukrainian TB2 strike in the Donbas (the footage was released publicly), and NATO bomber flights over Ukraine/Black Sea, etc. are public embarrassments for Moscow.”
Putin issued the warning during his second phone call this month with Biden, after the U.S. president reiterated how Russia would face unprecedented and punishing sanctions from Washington and its allies if Putin were to proceed with a new invasion of Ukraine
Russian officials see a time frame of just weeks for Biden to agree to demands that NATO has long refused, including effectively allowing Russia to veto the security decisions of Ukraine and other nations in the region. The White House has rejected any such bans on NATO membership out of hand, saying all sovereign nations should retain the right to make decisions about their own security.
这种交换与台湾和其相似
俄方：要有结果，但目前双方“都有诚意”
Putin last week made it clear he would not wait long for the written security guarantees he demands. He said he was not interested in negotiations, only results
“It is you who must give us guarantees, and you must do it immediately, right now,”
“It is the United States that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep.”
西方更觉得不可思议，俄国内外交困，实力远远不及西方，怎么敢开大口？西方这种把俄国要求世卫诈唬的态度也危险，因为有一种不把对方当真的认识，俄国公开说“30年来第一次美国愿意坐下来跟俄国一对一对等谈判”，加强了美国把俄国当成发脾气的认识，But he added that it was “absolutely mandatory” that the United States guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO.
说得这么清楚、直接，美国还是听不见
“We need long-term, legally binding guarantees” that would roll back the NATO presence in Eastern Europe, Mr. Putin said in December.
As best analysts can tell, it is the demand that NATO offer some kind of formal assurances not to expand eastward and to cease military cooperation with Ukraine that is now most important for Mr. Putin.
This comment was infuriating to Russia. The Foreign Ministry responded:
"If Anthony Blinken loves history lessons so much, then he should take the following into account: when Americans are in your house, it can be difficult to stay alive and not be robbed or raped."
I don't want to mischaracterize the interview, but that seems to be the vibe from the @TaraCopp write up. Taiwan is framed as an "early test" of the "diplomacy-first" model of "integrated deterrence."
That's pretty different than denying the invasion by militarily defeating it.
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” William J. Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and current CIA director,
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said getting out of the Iran nuclear agreement with the JCPOA was "one of the worst decisions made in American foreign policy in the last decade," in his end-of-year address on Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/ggoEijluTA
Larry Hu, China economist at Macquarie Group, an Australian investment bank, estimates the total value of China’s urban housing to be around the equivalent of $55 trillion. A national property-tax rate of 1% would thus bring in the equivalent of about $550 billion in annual government revenue—only 40% of revenues from land sales.
President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, introduced a series of aggressive initiatives aimed at expanding China’s political and economic clout on a global scale. He launched the Belt and Road Initiative to construct infrastructure around the world, financed by Chinese banks and built by Chinese companies. A new industrial program known as “Made in China 2025” marshaled heavy state aid to accelerate the development of homegrown technology and national corporate champions in sectors from electric cars to robotics.
Whether or not China ever surpasses it, the US has been bereaved of its 1990s unipolarity. It copes with the trauma by dwelling on what could have been done about it. If only China had not been waved into the World Trade Organization 20 Decembers ago. If only successive White Houses had not been so credulous in their dealings with Beijing. The recriminations go back to 1949, when, as some Republicans still fancy, the US “lost” China to communism.
西方从来就没有阻止中国重新崛起的能力（崛起并不一定要“超越美国”），美国和西方只是在做梦
Second, doing so would have somehow only stymied China, and not the west, even though American and other companies gorged on low-wage labour there ever after.
If this were just academically wrong, it need not detain us. But there are political consequences to this fantasy. One theme that Donald Trump rode to the White House was that US elites were derelict and even complicit in China’s rise. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama are still held to have sold out industrial America (but not credited for the cheap consumer goods that flowed into many of the same households from a trading China). The premise that a mighty China is some kind of aberration, and not just a regression to the historic mean, props up a lot of US populism.
Beijing’s charm offensive to preach equality and fairer growth faces scepticism
but
there are nonetheless important lessons that America should take from China’s efforts to do so — in particular, the focus on quality over quantity in terms of growth.
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The evangelists of free exchange insisted that unregulated capitalism and liberal democracy were symbiotic. A half century later, it is getting harder to find people who still think that is true.
But his indictment misses the ways in which the expansion of the market economy has often produced precisely the kinds of changes he seeks. For all the skepticism of the market on the left, it remains an important tool.
If capitalism has this force that commodifies politics (thought Schumpeter had that idea), it's a corrupting force. It has 2b regulated, but it always resists any control. In this sense capitalism is doomed in internal contradiction (self destruction) & will be in constant crisis. Globalization brings
Sherrilyn Ifill
Manchin is Manchin. But what kind of healthy democracy is structured in a way that can allow one man elected by 290,000 voters in one of the least populous states to thwart the agenda of his party and the President who was elected with 81 million votes. We need structural change.
A growing number of U.S. observers conclude that competition with China could not only impart renewed clarity to a U.S. foreign policy that, they contend, has been adrift since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also mitigate America’s political infighting. Rigorously interrogating the latter supposition, Myrick finds “little evidence that foreign threats systematically reduce domestic polarization in the American context.”
At a certain point, Russia came to fear that Ukraine, in its accumulation of NATO weapons systems, was becoming the equivalent of an unofficial member state
“But that doesn’t mean they don’t take very seriously the importance of insuring Ukraine’s neutral status, which, as they see it, means it cannot host any NATO military infrastructure,” L
“From the perspective of the West, the end of the Cold War gave way to the rise of a certain geopolitical order, with which everyone more or less agrees—except Russia, which every now and then gets upset for seemingly no reason,” Lukyanov told me. Only that’s not the view in Moscow, he explained. “The issue is not so much Ukraine but the underlying principle: if a military alliance seeks to expand, it has to consider the interests of those who are opposed.” Russia, in other words, can’t be expected to remain a passive observer of actions that it believes violate its core security concerns. “That’s the red line, and, if crossed, Russia will respond,” Lukyanov said.
Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs and a respected voice in Moscow foreign-policy circles
For the first two decades of his rule, Putin saw his own geopolitical maneuvering as essentially reactive, a response to what he and the Russian policy élite viewed as long-standing Western efforts to weaken Russia. “In Putin’s reality, Russia was encircled and under threat, and was required to defend itself,” Tatiana Stanovaya, head of the analysis firm R.Politik,
忍了二十年，是可忍孰不可忍，你们还要逼？
“He made clear that Russia will no longer stand around whining and complaining about the injustices of the world,” Stanovaya said. “It is ready to act, to use force to stand up for its position. This is a principally different Putin, and a different Russia.”
赵立坚：我们强烈谴责，坚决反对
He also said Russia will deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe if NATO does not agree to return to treaty talks over banning such weapons. “This path must be traversed quickly,” Ryabkov said. One element of the U.S. position that somewhat buoyed hopes in Moscow is Biden’s promise to Putin that he would assemble a meeting of major NATO allies to address Russia’s concerns
In a wide-ranging essay on Russia’s new, more assertive foreign policy, the analyst and columnist Vladimir Frolov wrote, “The threat of the use of force against Ukraine cannot be infinitely convincing (and effective for achieving political goals) without actually using force.” Frolov wryly quoted a line attributed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “Superpowers don’t bluff.”
As Peter Beinart recently noted, the United States has repeatedly declared the Western Hemisphere to be off-limits to other great powers and has threatened or used force on numerous occasions to make that declaration stick
officials in Europe and the United States never seemed to have asked themselves whether Russia might object to this outcome or what it might do to derail it. As a result, they were blindsided when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the seizure of Crimea
US and German strategists had given “very clear signals” that Nato would not expand farther eastward if Germany were allowed to reunite. But this sphere of influence commitment was quickly dropped in the 1990s and early part of the 2000s as Russia struggled as an independent country and a string of eastern bloc countries joined Nato and the EU.
欺负当时的俄国和卖国贼叶利钦（虽然他也大骂，但被美国操纵上台的，有什么用？）
has provided $2.5bn in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, s
首先他说乌克兰历史上一直是俄国的一部分，分离出去只是历史上少数脱俄入欧的人，但他们很多时候占据上风，使得乌克兰跟着折腾，这一说法用在台湾上肯定恰当。他说的，有时觉得跟普京说的差不多，也许两人说的是同一个意思。普京不久前曾经写过论述，也是讲述乌克兰如何是俄罗斯“不可分割的一部分”，现在完全“吞并”是难点，但杜金通过“两种乌克兰人”的方式，和亲西方的那些“异类”属于纳粹份子，是屠杀其他乌克兰人的暴徒，“当莫斯科软弱，并且任由白痴或西方势力的直接代理人统治时，俄罗斯就失去了乌克兰，让乌克兰落入了那些立即被西方选中的极端民族主义政客手中”，他暗示现在的局面“只能有一个解决方案：将乌克兰分成两部分，承认两个政治主权——西部的右岸乌克兰（Western Right Bank Ukraine ）和新俄罗斯（Novorossiya）”。他把这一切归咎于“新一轮的升级自从拜登上台开始，白宫里出现了一群极端的全球主义者、大西洋主义者、新保守主义者和不惜任何代价挽回单极世界的支持者”，与中国、台湾的状况何其相似。
all of the Western anxiety and hand-wringing about the crisis seems to be clouding people’s ability to listen to what the Kremlin is actually saying. Until now, there has been surprisingly little Western acknowledgement that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being much blunter about what he wants in Ukraine and the lengths to which he is prepared to go to obtain it
Putin has said that he wants a deal to prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO. He also wants a Western promise never to deploy NATO military infrastructure in Ukraine. Putin cited U.S. MK-41 missile launchers now in Romania to illustrate what he’s worried about: “I will repeat once again that the issue concerns the possible deployment in the territory of Ukraine of strike systems with the flight time of 7–10 minutes to Moscow, or 5 minutes in the case of hypersonic systems. Just imagine that.”
Rather it is aimed at persuading the West that Russia is prepared to start a full-scale war over Ukraine unless something is done about the existing and (in Putin’s eyes, at least) completely unacceptable state of affairs.
First, Russia attaches paramount importance to Ukraine. Second, its patience with the status quo is running thin
It wants to prevent the European Union from linking flows of Russian natural gas to Europe to the Ukrainian conflict.
这些美国西方直接说相反的，俄国都提出来了
But it wants to convince the United States that it is prepared to bear those costs because of the importance of Ukraine for Russian national interests.
Putin is also seeking to persuade Washington that unlike Russia, it has little to lose from compromising over Ukraine. The country’s fate is hardly a U.S. vital interest worth going to war over
