South East Asia

Wang Yi’s visit added two new partners for the BRI, among other agreements. Over the weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi concluded his tour to five countries in Africa, upholding a 30-plus year tradition of China’s top diplomat starting the new year with the first international visit to the continent. …

[M]uch of the world is organizing to roadblock China’s march to dominance in 5G telecommunications. That is, to get China’s spying out of our system – although we are far from done, there is a lot of 2020 to build on in 2021.

“It is a massive strategic blunder at a time when President Biden will be seeking to put together an international partnership of liberal democracies to deal with the bullying loutish behavior and assault on our international rules by Chinese Communists.” — Former Hong Kong Governor Lord Patten, Daily Mail, January …

A senior Indonesian MP has said that his country will never normalise relations with Israel, confirming that the US offered it $2 billion to make such a move, Shehab news agency reported yesterday.

As Iran commemorates one year since the assassination of Quds Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani on Sunday, the IDF prepares for a possible attack by Tehran, a senior military source told The Jerusalem Post. The military is bracing for an attack not only by Iran itself but from its proxies, …

China has called on the United States to stop interfering in its internal affairs after outgoing US President Donald Trump signed into law acts aimed to further enhance support for Taiwan and Tibet.

Japan’s deputy defense minister has taken a tough stance against “aggressive” China, declaring Taiwan’s safety a “red line” and calling on US president-elect Joe Biden to “be strong” in backing the island territory claimed by Beijing in the face of a Chinese aggression.

The war in Afghanistan — the world’s deadliest ongoing conflict — enters a crucial phase in 2021. The United States is set to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by May as part of a deal with the Taliban aimed at ending the 19-year war.

Tensions between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) once again came to a head when an improvised explosive device (IED) laid by the PKK in the Amedi district of Duhok killed one KDP-affiliated Peshmerga and injured at least one more.

As the U.S. military scrambles to meet a mid-January deadline to draw down to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, a milestone in the conflict has passed almost unremarked: The combined NATO force on the ground now outnumbers the U.S. contingent. About 13,000 U.S. troops were deployed to Afghanistan as of the …