In his State of the Union address in 2002, then-US president George W. Bush used the expression “axis of evil” to describe Iran, North Korea and Iraq. The phrase was a deliberate evocation of the Axis powers of World War II — Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan — whose actions eviscerated the peace of the period between the two world wars and plunged the world into another conflagration.
The expression drew significant criticism in the US and abroad. Critics said that the three countries were not sufficiently aligned to be an “axis.”
However, hindsight shows that the Bush administration was half right. An axis of evil was forming, but the shock of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, distorted US foreign policy and diverted attention from the key protagonists: China and Russia.
Today, China’s rapid militarization, neo-imperialist foreign policy and Han-Chinese ultra-nationalism are well-documented, but it has taken Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to rouse the international foreign policy establishment from its intellectual torpor over his similarly nefarious designs and revanchist foreign policy.
Perhaps nothing typifies the myopic nature of Western foreign policy over the past few decades more than former US president Barack Obama’s ridicule of then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during a televised debate in 2012. Mocking Romney for warning that Russia posed the greatest geopolitical threat to the US, Obama said: “The 1980s are calling. They want their foreign policy back. The Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Since his 2002 address, the Bush administration’s warnings over Iran and North Korea have been vindicated. Iranian leaders and the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps have repeatedly vowed to “eradicate Israel off the face of the Earth,” while its scientists are on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, North Korea continues to develop its nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile technology, while its leadership appears increasingly unpredictable.
However, by declaring a “war on terror,” the US and its allies threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Middle East in a fruitless search for “weapons of mass destruction” and regime change. Their tunnel vision over al-Qaeda and terrorism afforded Beijing the space to engage, virtually unchallenged, in an unprecedented peacetime military buildup.
Having spent decades remodeling itself to fight a terrorist insurgency in the desserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military — and those of its allies — are unprepared to fight a state-on-state war.
There are concerning signs that China and Russia have formed an alliance of convenience. Many analysts suspect that when Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met face-to-face prior to the Beijing Winter Olympics, they agreed to “scratch each other’s backs,” with China turning a blind eye toward Ukraine and Russia reciprocating as China invaded Taiwan. The cozy “bromance” between Putin and Xi might be turning into something more.
A CNN report said that a US diplomatic cable shared intelligence with Washington’s allies in Europe and Asia that showed the Kremlin approached Beijing for assistance in its invasion of Ukraine. The provision of military assistance from China to Russia would raise the prospect of a Cold War-style proxy conflict in Ukraine, akin to the wars in Vietnam and on the Korean Peninsula, with East ranged against West, democracies pitted against autocracies.
The globe appears to be dividing into two geopolitical hemispheres, with Taiwan, the US, European countries, India, Japan and South Korea on one side and an authoritarian bloc — China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea — on the other.
As the world unwinds from a historically unprecedented period of peace, Taiwan finds itself on a new geostrategic fault line, and on the front line against the real “axis of evil.”
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past