Tyranny Today – Episode 2

In this Article, Tomasz delves into the complexities of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and shines a light on the insidious presence of tyranny in today’s world. Through his analysis, Tomasz uncovers the troubling spread of authoritarianism in countries such as China, Taiwan, Iran, Turkey, Hungary, North Korea, and beyond, revealing the urgent need for vigilance and action against this growing threat.

This article is the transcript of a podcast done regularly by Tomasz Nadrowski. Listen to Tyranny Today. Please excuse any transcript errors in this article.

Hello, and welcome to Tyranny Today. We’re recording it on the first Wednesday of April 2023, and it feels like spring, finally. It was a Tumultus week here in New York City. First, we the visited by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and then because of the indictment by the Southern District Court of Manhattan of the former US president, the former event was more momentous than that.

President Tsai Ing-wen spoke with Taiwan American Association, Midtown, New York City, and it was a pleasure to listen to her perfect English, slightly British-accented English. She sounds a bit like those old-school Hong Kong intellectuals. Sadly, a class that is slowly departing as for the orange men I’m not sure why so many of my compatriots are in this despair over this.

When a former government official, even an elected one, is suspected of committing a crime, then he or she will be offered due process and if need be indicted, as it has been a case so many times before with top government officials. Think about Luis Inacio “lula”, Michel Temer,  Nicolas Sarkozy, and so many others.

Why do we aspire to some kind of exceptionalism here in the United States if our institutions cannot even properly vet candidates for the highest office? I do not have an answer, so I leave this as a question. Elsewhere we had an important event in Belarus, and Vladimir Pudding is planning to deploy nuclear weapons.

This doesn’t change anything militarily because Russia has already deployed nuclear weapons in the Kaliningrad ground, which is further west than Bielarus. But the decision is still rich in signaling. Putin is trying to kill three birds with one rich star first to show that he’s unhappy about American nuclear sharing.

That is the nuclear deployment in the Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey, which in his view, contra the non-proliferation 3D empty team. Secondly, he signals to the Belarusian strong. His autonomy is shrinking fast, especially following Lukashenko’s Big splash visit to Beijing last month. That’s too much freedom from Moscow’s liking, and the ruler from Mins has been summoned to Moscow today.

But the third and most important signal is that Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow was a fiasco from Russia’s perspective, not symbolically. That was a huge victory by Moscow’s strongman hot on the heels of his indictment in. Beyond the symbols, Beijing got what it most wanted, the green light to access the so-called Northeast passage through the Arctic, where Russia functions as mythological servers guarding access in hoarding its fleet of nuclear submarines.

Since China cannot use the northwest passage, which is locked up by Canada, nor it crossed the North Pole, which is still full of ice. It has to rely on Russia to be ever allowed to use this strategically vital route as a passage to Europe and has access to the land mess of the Western hemisphere, if anything, with missiles.

And guess what? Putin gave away his biggest asset and offered the green light to the Chinese presence there. In exchange for what? Well, not much. He didn’t obtain a signature on the Power of Siberia. Two pipelines from Yamal. Yamal, where the Chinese participated in the LNG terminal, but this is different from the pipeline and he most likely didn’t get China to support him militarily with equipment for the war in Ukraine.

That’s now almost certain from this nuclear announcement in Belarus that is not to Beijing’s liking given that China is not ready for nuclear perforation and Eurasia in fears. Nothing more than losing its nuclear edge over its multiple foes in the East. Now let’s get back to our main threat. The last two weeks, I focused on the ways in which Western democracies have tried to deal with revisionist power such as Russia and China.

Two weeks ago, I dealt with a somewhat hypocritical paradigm of welfare transfer, where, as they say, in German funds, and last week I reviewed the strategy of appeasement and the various types of deterrence.  Initially, I thought I’d focus today on the theory behind the fourth strategy, that is containment, but instead of delving into historical precedence and the theory, I’ve come to a conclusion then it’ll probably be more helpful to first paint the picture of where we are standing in this context of Cold War II now, and then next week, or maybe later, come back to discuss the theory and the precedence of containment precisely against this background painted now.

Okay. Ready? Let. So we say containment, but containment of what exact, of course, historically, it’s the containment of territorial expansionism to this day, as we have experienced since last year. This makes sense in the case of Russia. Russia still has this 19th-century approach to expansion. It’s hungry for territory than more territory, after all.

There is a reason why the country is so huge. This obsession is deeply anachronistic. It rings very 19th century ish when you read Russian and post-German ideologues. Most of their writings are about territory or justification of territorial expansion.

And of course, in Russia, Alexander Dugin falls into this category as well, but he’s not alone in. Even before he gained notoriety. Back in 1992, the very liberal foreign ministry of Russia Andrei Kozyrev offered the historically Catholic and Jewish regions of Western Belarus to Poland and the territory. Obsessed Russians to this day overestimate Polish territorial sentiment for

There is ethnically mixed but formerly polished terrains in today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and. For a brief period in 1991, the dying U S S R even tried to create a second polish state. In Village Chi now is the VE region of Lithuania, where much of the countryside was not only Polish speaking but also surprisingly pro-Soviet and quite reticent about Lithuania’s independence.

And today, Moscow’s propaganda is spreading the myth in Russia that Polish troops are fighting in Ukraine because of course, they’re hungry for additional layman’s home as Germans once. And the tiny, tiny suffocating country of Russia is to this day. To sum it up, containment of Russia means exactly what is being done in Ukraine, stopping its tanks, but maintaining China is a different matter because China’s ambitions are not only territorial but much, much broader ideological, economic, and technological.

Of course, there is a military aspect to this. Much of the Beijing, Moscow province is about creating a two-front dilemma for the United States, and that’s despite a litany of difficult issues over which the two eras’ powers remain at odds. It is our and Ukraine’s hope that Beijing is so dependent on European markets and on European technology.

It’ll not precipitate a two-front conflict at the cost of losing Europe beyond clear cases of its near border Obsess. To use the Russian neologist, China tends to project power with its ideology, its economy, its credit, and its technological capture. None other than Jamie Diamond. The c e o of JP Morgan Chase captured it in a surprisingly sharp anti-Chinese annual letter.

This week he wrote China using subsidies and its economic muscle to dominate batteries per herbs, semiconductors, or electric vehicles. Could eventually imperial national security by disrupting our access to these products and materials. We cannot seize these important resources and capabilities from another country, quote unquote.

All of this is fairly obvious to the listeners of today, but it is interesting coming from the c e o of a major bank last fall. Beijing, in an effort to enlist viable lobbyists in Washington, opened its internal market to the us. This move, delayed for a quarter of a century, served the dual purpose of first opening the prospects of new capital inflows at a time of heightened risk of capital flight from China.

Secondly, for the ranks of powerful China hands in the us, many manufacturers have become the solution with market access in the P R C, but something must have gone awry between November and now. If JP Morgan has lashed out against the communist, go. The economic management between the West and China is often stated as a reason why containment will not work, that the West cannot contain one of the world’s largest economies, et cetera, et cetera.

But technological decoupling is certainly possible and is already happening, and Jimmy Diamond is pointing to something more comprehensive and more global. Indeed, while Raja is predominantly focused on its presence in European decision-making and possibly on the return to a Yelta co-decision concept, or post-Napoleonic conservative superpowers, of which it was one of China’s goals, a much more wide-ranging, China seeks to reestablish not a European system, but a new world system where the so-called diversity reigns this multipolarity about which we spoke a couple of weeks ago.

Operates by isolating the US from the EU and by breaking the international sanction system, not only vis-a-vis Iran in North Korea but more recently in the case of the Syria Asad regime. So in fact, there are two arrows to Beijing’s world remodeling thrust. One is to divide the West, and the second one is to split the South from the West.

Of course, the military is one side of this, and I should learn more about this during my trip to Taiwan later this. Beyond large rearmament, Beijing seeks to achieve. Its ambitious plan with four weapons, I call them DDTT, diplomacy, debt trade and technology. Diplomatic thrust is mostly bilateral with advanced nations and more often multilateral in relations with developing nations.

The debt strategy is mostly focusing on middle-income countries and to a lesser extent, on the least developed nation. There is power in numbers here, especially when it comes to counting the pro-china levels and the un. The trading strategy, on the other hand, depends on whether the trade partners or commodity exporters or not, as China is commonly trying to register current account surpluses with all of its trade partners or trade victims but is unable to achieve this in relations with net exporters of raw materials.

Last but not least, the technological side is what Jamie Diamond alluded to in his. It encompasses a whole range of key sectors, active pharmaceutical ingredients, commodities, semiconductors, sourcing and processing of critical materials, large capacity banners, data communication, equip electric vehicles, solar infrastructure, and so on and so forth.

Let us start with the first weapon deployed by Beijing, which is China’s diplomacy. Beijing’s immediate goal is to export this ideology and make this unelected governance system globally acceptable. As I have mentioned, there are two facets to it, one bilateral and one multilateral. On a bilateral basis, China always seeks to exploit weaknesses.

Let’s take the example of Russia as described in my conclusions from the Shein meeting in Moscow. China is now exploiting Russia. The country has been sinking into the Don. What looks on the surface as a give-and-take is really just a take-and-take with Chinese characteristics. The give that is giving, putting face by visiting him in Moscow, just China.

Nothing other than maybe image problems in Europe, but Xi clearly thinks that he can take that risk. As mentioned before, China wants Arctic access. It also wants direct access to minerals which is a problem because it would undermine the oligarch system where Ole Deca controls an aluminum nickel.

Vladimir Potanin controls nickel and palladium, Suleyman Kerimov and Marina Mordashova controlled gold, Roman Abramovich which controls steel, and Vena controls copper, zinc, coal, and silver. Alexia Mordoff controls INR and steel Endometry Mazen controls potash. That’s the. Putin would have to do a lot of reshuffling to open some space for the Chinese here, and it is not clear if he has that room ever a year before the elections.

But remember, Russia is not negotiating with China. In the spirit of give and take from the Chinese perspective, it always takes and takes as I personally experienced multiple times working there in the 1990s. So as much as we focus on China’s military shipments to Russia, why don’t we focus on the other direction, Russia’s shipments?

After all, Russia’s armed forces are dented on land and in terms of surface to first missiles maybe, but its navy, its submarine fleet and much of its surf force. Not to mention the strategic forces have been barely scratched by the conflict with Ukraine, if at all. And China also wants Russia’s submarine technology.

It wants 90% enriched uranium for submarine fuel. It wants the Russian king to hypersonic air-launched ballistic missiles. Wants Russia to stop selling weapons to Pasky India and Pasky Vina. And it wants Russia’s reduced role in Central Asia, in particular in Kazakhstan, where Chinese banks are present at Asan International Financial Center.

All this long list in exchange for what? For Beijing’s, continued diplomatic and propaganda backing for Russia worldwide. But, well, Russia is in a hurry. Beijing has all its time. This is a good position to be in the take-and-take. Of course, it’s not just Russia to price its case globally. China operates the largest network of diplomatic missions in the world.

Having recently edged out Taiwan from Honduras, the P R C runs a hundred 70 embassies or high commissions, several more than the us. It also has a record number of nearly 200 consulates, more than France and Turkey, which are respectively number two and three countries in this rank. China’s multilateral agenda, on the other.

On the fertile ground of unquote anti-imperialism. Anti-imperialism was an important element of the Cold War Communist ideology at some point, even more, important than anti-capitalism historian Stephen Kalin reminds us he’s correct. Since Russia’s and China’s imperialism was successful among nations, completely gagged and completely cut off from the outside world, such as Ukraine, the bet the Baltic countries Eastern Tostan or arm.

It was the countries that gained independence from the Western imperialists, mostly from the UK and France, but also from the Netherlands, Belgium, and later Portugal, that were most sensitive to the message emanating from Moscow, from Beijing, and from the Non-aligned nations. Led by Belgrade Aro New Delhi Jakarta in Accra.

China today is stepping into this tradition, incorporating it into the Asia-African crowd. Many of the South American countries that were not present during the heyday of the anti-Western onslaught of Cold War I back then, south American nations were run with some exceptions by right-wing or military dictatorships and were broadly aligned through emerge of convenience with the United States supporting, for example, Chanka Shack in the United Nations, at least until 1971.

Today, many of these nations are very open to Chinese propaganda. Given the mythology of the. According to this, the Alien West exploited the Latin American nations’ first centuries, generating kuta and TRAs of indigenous people. As I was once told in Guatemala,

it’s a beautiful country. So if you have not visited, I strongly recommend, oh, by the way, that means the Spaniards took our gold, it took our silver, and what we got in exchange were just little mirrors. So how does Beijing leverage this tradition of anti-western propaganda? Following the slow demise of the Overindebted Belt world initiative, Beijing has shown, decided its checkbook and instead pulled out its fork tone, lapping the lingo and up to historically from the non-aligned movement.

Here comes the alphabet soup of China’s global initiatives, respectively, GDI, GSI, and now G C I, the first one, GDI. Global Development Initiative was launched on September 21st, 2021 when Xi Jinping addressed the 76 sessions of the UN General Assembly. This attempt to Chinese lingo into the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development by quote unquote revitalizing global development partnerships and promoting stronger, greener and healthier global development.

Coming from the world’s largest polluter, it’s cute. It’s also beautifully verbose, charmingly lofty, and delusively beguiling. In its highfaluting Hollowness Xi Jinping’s speech was entitled Bolstering Confidence and Jointly Overcoming Difficulties to Build a Better World. In June of last year, Xi Jinping chaired the high-level dialogue on global development under the.

A global development partnership or a new era to jointly implement the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. It’s a mouth fly now, but by October 2022, more than a hundred countries’ international organization have expressed their support for the initiative. And 68 countries joined the group of friends of the G D I in the un.

Also, last year, Xi Jinping announced a global security initiative for Cho an. This one has so far failed to gain traction at the multilateral level of the un. It reads more like a dictators in security, paranoia, but since there are plenty of dictators around the world and also many would be autocrats, it gets some following.

Beijing itemizes here six commitments, which sound even more hollow than the GDI. I. First, stay committed to the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security with a holistic approach to maintaining security in both traditional and non-traditional domains. And, since security governance is in a coordinated way, bringing about security through political, elegant, peaceful negotiation and pursuit of sustainable duty.

Not here. Very interesting expansion of the concept of security. Now open to new domains. There is no end to dictators in security, so expect the list to be further extended in future versions. The same stilted Leninist language continues in 0.2, which says, Stay committed to respecting the sovereignty of all countries, inequality and non-international basic principles, international law, and most fundamental governing contemporary international relations.

As we know from the examples of Tibet and now Ukraine, through careful reading of China’s 12-point Visa initiative for Ukraine. Once the territory has been captured by China’s talent, territorial integrity is Sac Sec, not before. So stay tuned. South Korea 0.3. Stay committed to abiding by the purposes and principles of the UN charter.

The purposes and principles of the UN Charter embody the deep reflection by people around the world on the better lessons of the world there is humanity, institutional design for collective SEC, and stink peace. And yet China so far refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though it blatantly while as the UN chart point.

Stay to take the legitimate security concerns of all countries. Real slate. Humanity is invisible. Security from unity. Security in one country should not come at the expense of that of others. We uphold. Of invisible security and vacating the invisibility between individual security and common security between traditional security, non-traditional security, between security rights and security obligations, and between security.

This dual concept of legitimate concerns and indivisible security has been borrowed by China from Moscow’s. And it’s the only truly new addition to the vocabulary developed in the 1960s by the Nonaligned movement. Interestingly, this fourth GSI commitment includes a misguiding senti. We believe all countries are equal in terms of security interests.

Well, not sure who defines them, though. For example, Beijing has been trying to define security terms for several in a recent repa prompted by an approaching between Japan and the South. China criticized South Korea’s plans to proactively accelerate its participation in the defense PAC Quad, and the Chinese foreign ministry said that the country’s concern should do more that is conducive to original peace and enhancing mutual trust rather than confrontation and engaging in smalls.

Number five, stake two. Peaceful resolving differences and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation. Or sanctions are no fundamental solution to disputes. Only dialogue and consultation are effective in resolving differences. Abusing mutant lateral sanctions and long-harm jurisdiction does not solve a problem but only creates more difficulties and complication seasons.

This one is very interesting in that it betrays Chinese economic insecurity and its vulnerability to Western sanctions. Which Putin’s pedestal is to kinetic wars? It’s very revealing. Finally, 0.6. Bear with me. Stay culminated in maintaining security in both traditional and no traditional goals in today’s world.

Both the intention of security are broadening securities more interconnected, transnational, and I. Again, return to this question that threats to dictatorships could emerge anywhere at any time. We have to be vigilant, and a curiously global is almost Trotsky’s idea. The reason for this GSI is that Beijing’s sense of insecurity is real.

Some Chinese analysts genuinely fear that the Ukraine war was provoked by the west to finish of Russia, and that once Russia has defeated China will be next. Hence, Beijing’s commitment to Russia with a commitment that carries a very high price tag, as we have seen. Interestingly, among the GSI implementation ideas, ERC itemizes Geographic areas of interest, and these appear in the apparent hierarchical order.

First, ASEAN. ASEAN, which is loaded for ASEAN’s way of consensus building, including non-traditional security areas. The capture of a ACN has been a longstanding objective of Beijing, and Jakarta’s recent Pro Chinese tilt, unseen since the late Sukarno era is a good testimony. It’s also very threatening to Southwest specifically and to Australia in particular.

So Asan first. Second, the Middle East. The Middle East, including advocating mutual respect and upholding equity and justice. Establish a new security framework in the Middle East with the support of the League of Arab States. Now, there’s not much love here for Iran as it speaks about non-life. Or for Israel because it refers to a two-state solution to the Palestinian question.

So this Middle Eastern point carries a very clear, strong, pro-Arab band because, ultimately, Iran is already hostile to the US. So there’s not much to gain from wooing it, and Israel cannot be realistically split away from the US, and it’s all about oil anyway. Three African countries, the African Union, and the sub-regional organizations resolve regional.

And the conflicts that I mentioned here are hotspots in the Horn of Africa, the Saha, the Great Lakes region, and other areas that could be managed through China, the horn of Africa, peace Governance and Development Conference. In fact, much of the security export by China began here in North and East Africa to provide a diplomatic framework for incidents such as China’s evacuation from Libya in 2011.

And its anti icy emissions around the horn of. Beijing coined the term constructive interferences, so it all started healing. Number four, Latin American and Caribbean countries inactively fulfilling commitments stated in the proclamation of Latin American and Caribbean as a zone of peace. Now the efforts here go possibly toward subverting the United States’ position in the region.

The current term in South American politics. This finds some fertile ground here with Argentina already knocking on Brick’s door alongside Iran, which after all, was accused of standing behind a terrorist who bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires 31 years ago. And number five, where this anti-US inclination is also visible in the mention of the special situation and legitimate concern of Pacific Island countries in regard to climate change, natural disasters, and public health here.

China’s leapfrogging strategy over the first chain has been a tried and tested strategy for several years now. Now, last month, in addition to this alphabet soup of GDI and gsi, XP pitched a new initiative that is gci, the Global Civilization Initiative for Chok. Still, the vague policy that sees appears aimed at challenging the Western concept of universal values.

China State Council. People need to refrain from imposing their own values or models on others. What Beijing is trying to achieve here is a wholesale transformation of the signifying that pertains to the way we describe the international system, the system necessary to uphold our values of democracy, the rule of law, and accountability that is open, that is non-hierarchical, that is voluntary and sovereignty enhancing, and which would be displaced by Beijing’s efforts to build a sphere of ideological influence that is coercive and hierarchical.

Would it be voluntary? Well, only until the stage of capture, whether it’s dead capture, technological capture, or ideological capture. If you don’t believe it, try to send an email to your friend. In China, we’re worried about IWAN or Tibet or Sinja, whatever. It’ll never get there. Or watch the editing battles on Wikipedia between open source and the Chinese wma, or try to communicate on WeChat about any of the topics deemed by the CCP as sensitive.

Well, good. Once you have adopted a Huawei system, a WeChat app, or an Alipay paying app, and maybe even a c TL battery in your electric vehicle, you are captured, and your participation in the system is no longer voluntary. So listen to Jimmy Di China’s argument, which should promote in this new G C I is that modernization does not have to equal Western.

Failure and frustration of many developing countries to modernize pushes them naturally to the viewpoint. Hence, as discussed previously on term today, a huge role for Japan and South Korea to abolish the myth. Yes, you can modernize with only a marginal level of your country’s cultural westernization, and yet you can embed all the basic freedoms, which are the core of modernization and which were the founding values of the international system, starting with the United Nations.

Unfortunately, I have noticed among my friends in Latin America since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overall sentiment to voice beijing’s diplomatic overtures is generally positive, but there are other reasons for it. An article by Chinese Communist Party official last year said that Beijing had already approved 22 billion of 35 billion in lending earmark for the countries in the region, which brings us to the second arm of China’s expansionism that is China debt and that work.

When Xi J announced in 2013, the Belt Road Initiative, it looked initially as a nifti means to export China’s construction over capacity accumulated, in particular, following the extraordinary fiscal effort to infuse 850 billion US into the Chinese economy to protect it against the hurricane of the great financial crisis in 2008.

In other words, under the previous premier, when. China tried to pivot its economic system from the overreliance on experts to the West, which was bolstered after China’s accession to W T O in 2001, over to reliance on public financing channeled through the so-called policy banks, predominantly the big four state-owned banks, bank of China, I C B C, China Construction Bank, and Agricultural Bank of.

The problem was that the construction boom unleashed by that program represented 20% of the G D P and was simply too large for what was back then a four-and-a-half trillion economy, still smaller than Japan’s at that time, five years later, the resulting overcapacity in construction and infrastructure buildup was quite evident, and the idea was to export this capacity capital technology and labor to developing nations.

This was, as usual, a scheme to achieve many things at the same. It was a scheme to gain political leverage, first and foremost, to develop new expert connections in those smaller markets for Chinese products and to open up new strategically secure pathways connecting PRC to key markets. In the West, in particular, those were the rich petrol the Middle East and Europe.

The secure meaning here is unaffected by the Crutcher oceanic pathways that are still dominated by the potentially hostile US Navy, in particular, the United States Fifth Fleet based in mana in Bahrain, and capable of blocking both the hormone straits and maybe even the Matras. And, of course, the recipients of all these construction large s could not fund such humongous infrastructure projects, whether hydroelectric, road rail, transportation, or.

So credit provided again by China’s policy banks was an integral part of this strategy. And here’s the problem. When in the depth of the global financial crisis, I visited some policy banks in Beijing. I was stunned by the missing creature in their lending policies, a complete lack of risk management capability for a highly leveraged economy.

It was quite astounding. Maybe that’s what explains the term policy banks. They simply executed. Were directed by S P C. That is the State Planning Commission back in the 1990s or later by N D R C, National Development and Reform Commission. This is directed landing, but one thing is to direct landing to privilege projects inside the country, as was the case throughout the 1990s and later intensified post-2008 in quite another would provide credit overseas to non-credit worthy partners that typically find it difficult to clinch credit lines from the I M F and from the Western commercial.

It’s much, much tougher if you have insufficient risk management capability. It’s now 10 years since the advent of this policy, so what has happened since then? Some useful projects were built. Many others were completely wasted as the famed hydroelectric dam in Ecuador, built on the slope of an active volcano, or an equally infamous road to now in our Montro.

Altogether, some 591 billion worth of construction projects and 371 billion in other investments were deployed. Of course, objective number one was to achieve political leverage. And indeed, many of China’s state-owned construction firms maintained full order books and employment as Chinese workers were routinely employed at these projects from Central Asia to South Asia to West Africa, but influence ebbs and flows while projects are eventually final.

And the other enduring legacy of the spending binges is debt. China routinely helped finance the projects executed by its own state-owned companies with debt and interest rates set at commercial levels on average 3.5%. By comparison, the Japanese landing was done on a concession basis of about half a percent, and you’re either a policy lender, there was a loan shark, communist.

China has tried to be both the outbound credit peaked in 2015 at 57. And then shrank to a mere 3 billion last year when net flows reversed from interest paid on the investment. But the inevitable inability of debt is to repay. The credit lines have now put Chinese lenders in jeopardy, and as Carmen Reinhart recently revealed in a fascinating paper, she author, author of several others.

China is now frantically trying to bail out the borrowers and save its own. The trouble is that price at 5%, because of these short-term bailouts, is even higher than the original debt. This is more than twice what IMF charges for a workaround. China’s reluctance to engineer a long-term solution to the plight of the deeply indebted recipients is in jeopardy, and the entire global lending system to developing nations.

Historically, the private Paris Club would work on deal restructuring and, over decades, accumulate much experience in doing just. Sometimes with a political subtext. This was the case with the communist-era Polish debt that was simply written off in the 1990s or with the suspension of some of the Ukrainian debt.

More recently, given that the productivity of the recipients of Chinese loans has not increased from many of those new infrastructure projects, and the return on investment is generally below the three-and-a-half percent cost of the projects and counting the economic viability of the entire Belt and Row initiative is now in question.

Scheme to subjugate a large number of countries politically and render them dependent on Beijing’s goodwill. It may still work. So we went through two levers of China’s expansionists that allude to simple containment. One is diplomacy, and the other one is predatory credit export. The third is the trading account and currency regime, and the fourth is technology.

I will continue this series next week. Have a great week.