The NATO summit is over, and the war in Europe begins? China and the United States are also fighting a war without gunsmoke! China-Australia reconciliation has encountered obstacles again, China has repeatedly released sincerity, but Australia has bitten China back. Endangering mankind and being criticized by China in person, but Japan is very unconvinced!
NATO has already entered the war? Russia asserts that a war in Europe has begun
According to Russia's TASS news agency on July 14, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zakharova said in a program on the same day that her impression of the just-concluded NATO summit was that NATO announced the decision to "start a war in Europe". Zakharova said that NATO is already engaged in a hybrid war with Russia, and the Kyiv regime is only a tool for this war.
Earlier, on July 11, Zakharova had said that although NATO repeatedly claimed that it did not seek conflict with Russia, the reality was that NATO had already participated in the conflict with Russia. Zakharova explained more about the matter, saying that the war is accompanied by economic extortion and illegal sanctions against Russia and many other countries by Anglo-Saxon countries, and the North Atlantic Bloc is providing intelligence to Kiev and developing a combat operation program to support the war between Ukraine and Russia.
Zakharova believes that the logic of Western countries is that military assistance to Ukraine will make the "solution" come faster, but Russia will never accept this logic; Western countries are not interested in ending this war, because Western countries are benefiting from the ongoing crisis in the European space security system; Zakharova also said in the end that no military and economic assistance from Western countries to Ukraine can change Russia's resolve, and the goals of the special military operation will definitely be achieved.
As a war in Europe, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has an impact and shock on the European land, which can be seen from Zakharova's speech. At present, this war has a clear trend of long-term, and Russia has no desire to rush to end the war because it has a slight upper hand on the battlefield; On the Ukrainian side, due to Zelensky's government for political considerations, it is also unwilling to end the war, even in the face of persuasion from Western countries to promote peace, it will put forward a series of demands that are impossible to achieve at present to undermine the peace talks.
Based on the premise that neither Russia nor Ukraine has a real willingness to negotiate peace, European countries now have two trends: Eastern European countries firmly support Ukraine against Russia because of their long-standing anti-Russian traditions; Western and Southern European countries, on the other hand, have repeatedly jumped between practical interests and political correctness, wanting to end the war as expected by mainstream Western ideology, knowing that the world is material and will not shape themselves exactly according to the wishes of Western countries, so they can do something feasible from a rational point of view; Then these feasible things will be forcibly interrupted by Eastern European countries and the United States by buttoning hats and wearing small shoes, forcing Western and Southern European countries to continue to participate in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, rather than hoping to end the war.
From this point of view, Zakharova's statement that "the war in Europe has begun" is not a mistake. Although there are elements of coercion and coercion in it, Europe is indeed standing on Russia's hostile position, and it has previously been reported that the troops of Poland and the United Kingdom have participated in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the name of volunteers, which objectively constitutes the premise of "NATO troops fighting with the Russian army", if Russia does not have enough nuclear weapons to reverse the situation, then NATO will definitely use this as a reason to send troops to Russia. However, from the perspective of today's situation in Russia and Ukraine, if the war becomes long-term, to a length that no party has expected, then NATO sends troops and Europe breaks out a war that is really declaring war, which is almost inevitable.
China and the United States are fighting a "mineral war" without gunsmoke
If a war breaks out in Europe, the culprit must be the United States. Using wars in other parts of the world for its own benefit was already a common American operation in World War I and World War II. Whether it is two world wars, or perennial wars in Africa, or wars in the Middle East, the United States has made a lot of money.
Today, in addition to the Ukrainian battlefield, there is another region in the world that also has the possibility of allowing the United States to use the war to make a lot of money, this region is the Taiwan Strait and China. It is precisely because the United States has always wanted to provoke a war in the Taiwan Strait and use the war to harvest China, so China is also countering the United States in its own way, and a war between China and the United States without gunsmoke has begun.
The British magazine "The Economist" mentioned in an article a few days ago that before the visit of US Treasury Secretary Yellen's visit to China, China announced that it will impose export controls on gallium and germanium, two metals and their related products, from August 1. The smelting of gallium and its related products basically relies on the reuse of the residue of bauxite after the completion of refining, because the current international production capacity of aluminum and its related products is extremely excessive, and the United States and the West itself deindustrialization is serious, so although the United States itself has considerable gallium and germanium reserves, but does not have the ability to carry out large-scale refining, in most cases need to rely on China's industrial processing capacity to obtain gallium and germanium. Because these two metals are involved in many military-related fields, The Economist believes that this is China's "mineral war" against the United States, just like China's control of rare earth exports a decade ago.
The fundamental reason why China wants to launch a "mineral war" against the United States is that the United States has imposed many illegal unilateral sanctions on China, the most concerned of which is semiconductor sanctions. Previously, the United States has imposed sanctions on a number of Chinese semiconductor companies, trying to trap and starve China's semiconductor industry in this way, so as to facilitate the US semiconductor industry to monopolize the Chinese market and prevent the development of China's own high-tech industry. According to Reuters, Bloomberg and other US Democratic official media reported on July 15, US President Biden plans to launch a new round of semiconductor sanctions against China in the near future, giving the reason that the chips obtained by China may be used in the military field. In other words, the reason given by the United States for sanctions is to reduce China's military capabilities; Needless to say, why the United States wants to reduce China's military capabilities is to use its military capabilities to give China another taste of the humiliation of the invasion of China by the great powers a hundred years ago.
However, this reason is not a real reason, or only a partial reason. Today's semiconductors are widely used in all aspects of human life, to borrow the official media of the Democratic Party in the United States: from bread machines to new energy vehicles, from mobile phone knives to credit cards, semiconductors are needed. Gregory Allen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said that the goal of the new illegal sanctions planned by the Biden administration is not only to prevent China from making progress in semiconductor technology, but also to make China's semiconductor industry regress significantly. The purpose of this approach is to prevent the progress of China's generation, to prevent the development of China's economy, and to cause China to collapse like the Soviet Union due to economic stagnation.
However, the giants of the semiconductor industry in the United States have generally expressed opposition to this. Reuters, the official media of the US Democratic Party, mentioned in a report that the CEOs of the three major US chip giants Intel, Qualcomm and NVIDIA plan to travel to Washington next Monday to lobby the Biden administration to abandon the latest illegal sanctions on Chinese chips. The three companies believe that cutting ties to China, the world's largest chip market, will hurt their ability to invest in developing their own semiconductor technology, and ultimately lead to the weakening and shaking of U.S. leadership in semiconductors.
WTO sues China, Australia wants to bite back?
In addition to sanctioning China in the chip field, the United States is also actively promoting the "decoupling" of countries around the world from China, with the same purpose of trapping and starving China's industry and weakening China's ability to resist US hegemony. There are many countries that actively respond to this policy of the United States, such as Australia.
After the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, China-Australia relations deteriorated rapidly because Australian Prime Minister Morrison, then a member of the Alliance Party, took the lead in detaining the black pot of the epidemic to China, and the trade conflict between China and Australia followed. China has imposed targeted tariff penalties on many of Australia's dumped goods, and Australia has responded by appealing to the WTO.
Ironically, because the United States has repeatedly violated the relevant provisions of the WTO and has been required by the WTO to revoke all kinds of illegal foreign sanctions and tariffs, in order to maintain these illegal sanctions and tariffs, the United States has used its special position to boycott the change of WTO leadership, thus paralyzing the functions of the WTO because of the retirement of the relevant responsible persons at the age and the delay in taking office of the successor who has been opposed by the United States. Australia appealed to the WTO, which may have the intention to accept the appeal, but because it was paralyzed, it did not have the capacity to deal with and arbitrate.
Since the arbitrator is unable to perform the arbitration function because the United States is selfish, disputes between China and Australia can only change with changes in China-Australia relations. In the previous Australian election, Albanese, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, who was considered to be a knowledgeable party, defeated Morrison and came to power, which was once considered a turning point in China-Australia relations.
However, after nearly a year of contact, despite China's repeated goodwill, the relationship between China and Australia has not changed significantly. Australian Prime Minister Albanese has been slow to start his visit to China, and it is currently reported that he plans to postpone his visit to China until 2024, and the reason is not difficult to guess, naturally due to pressure from the United States; Even Australia has bitten back at China, trying to block China's accession to the CPTPP. In stark contrast, Australia warmly welcomed the CPTPP, another country now fully in the arms of the United States, and hailed Britain, which has a bad track record in foreign trade, as "an example of WTO compliance."
Naturally, the trade conflict between China and Australia will not be completely ended by the change of government in Australia. Australia's expectation of seeing China take the initiative to lift tariff sanctions on Australian dumped goods also came to an end with China's announcement to Australia that it had decided to postpone the cancellation of tariffs on Australian barley for one month. In a month's time, the BRICS summit will be held, there will be more changes in the situation in Russia and Ukraine, there will be new progress in the game between China and the United States, everything is possible - it seems.
The discharge of nuclear-contaminated water was angrily criticized by China, and Japan was very unconvinced
Countries in a similar situation to Australia include Japan, after China announced gallium and germanium export controls, and domestic public opinion in Japan unanimously believes that this is not against the United States, but against Japan; At the same time, due to Japan's decision to discharge Fukushima's contaminated water indiscriminately without regard for the well-being of all mankind, China and Japan have engaged in many rounds of confrontation in the diplomatic field, and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently vigorously funded relevant public intellectuals in China to wash the ground for Japan's wrong behavior and try to rationalize Japan's decision to discharge nuclear wastewater by distorting reality.
At the just-concluded meeting of the foreign ministers of ASEAN and China, Japan and South Korea, China and Japan engaged in a war of words on this matter. Director Wang Yi pointed out that Fukushima's treated water is nuclear-contaminated water, and the discharge of nuclear-contaminated water will affect the lives and health of all mankind, requiring Japan to think twice. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi argued that China's claim has no scientific basis, has long served the United States and the West, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is only nominally an international organization, has endorsed Japan's plan to discharge nuclear wastewater.
It should be pointed out that the Japanese side is very unconvinced by China's investigation of the discharge of nuclear contaminated water into the sea. The Japanese government has successfully deceived its own citizens and the people of Western countries by renaming the contaminated water to treated water, using political influence and bribery to get through the IAEA, and using the rising anti-China sentiment in the United States to obtain the tacit approval of the United States. To borrow the words of Pan Nini, an associate professor at East China Normal University, Japan is now in such a state: I myself understand my own wrong behavior, why can't you understand, forgive and accept China in China?
This attitude of self-deception and anger at other countries pointing out the truth is generally called "breaking defenses" in China and "the emperor's new clothes" in the West.
The reason why the Japanese government is not convinced, at best, is that it cannot hold on to its face, and at worst, under an international order that is still dominated by US hegemony, Japan, as the biggest beneficiary of this order, has actually been challenged by countries hostile to the United States, which is unacceptable in Japan's view, because it is equivalent to the survival of US hegemony, which has not experienced any war reckoning and is still responsible for war crimes, to survive and evade the trial of historical crimes. The challenge of the current international order that evades punishment by the injured State. Once this challenge succeeds, the right-wing forces and war criminals who are now active in Japanese politics will be able to escape with their lives, and naturally, these vested interests will find it difficult to accept opposition from China.