Salman Rafi Sheikh

When the US President Joe Biden announced, on March 8, his decision to ban imports of Russian oil and gas to the US, he opened up a potential business opportunity for the US LNG gas business to expand further into Europe and beyond. While Biden’s decision does not automatically apply to Europe, given how Europe is mindlessly following the US in its footsteps…

Expansionism knows no bounds. After taking Europe to the verge of a major war by pushing for NATO’s expansion further into Eastern Europe to encircle Russia, the US is now increasingly focusing on Taiwan for what the US officials have been, for over a year now, calling an ‘increasing possibility’ of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. There is a flurry of activity going on around Taiwan to prevent it from suffering…

After keeping it under direct occupation, destroying the country for 20 years – and failing to militarily defeat the Taliban (banned in Russia) – Joe Biden’s executive order to simply seize half of Afghanistan’s little over US$7 billion to use it to pay to the victims of 9/11 is just a mockery of the “values” that the US always claims to hold. With the world’s richest…

For more than many weeks now, many Western leaders have been calling for blocking Russia out of the SWFIT payment system. The UK’s Boris Johnson thinks that this is a potentially good way of ‘punishing’ Russia. But the US/EU have not blocked Russia out of this global payments system yet. There are two reasons for this ‘reluctnace.’ First, even if the West decides…

For the past 4 years – especially since the US ‘trade war’ on China started by the Trump administration in 2017 – Washington has been seeking ways to contain, roll-back on its gains and encircle China. The US ‘trade war’ was not something entirely new; in fact, it was a continuation of the Obama administration’s ‘Asia Pivot’ that focused on shifting…

While the recent meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi in Beijing may not in itself be an extra-ordinary event, its significance against the backdrop of the on-going tussle between Russia and the US/NATO is quite unmistakable – not only for Russia itself, but for the US/NATO as well. Even though Russia does not really need China’s help to defend…

Soon after releasing the new anti-China Indo-Pacific strategy, the US secretary of state Antony Blinken embarked upon a significant tour to countries in Asia and the Pacific to reassure these countries of the US commitment – and ability – to protect and defend them against an ‘aggressive’ China. Even though US officials have been saying…

The Joe Biden administration’s ‘new’ Indo-Pacific strategy document contains nothing ‘new’ insofar as the cardinal objective of this strategy is concerned i.e., ‘encircling China.’ Interestingly enough, the strategy has been revealed despite the Biden administration’s various rhetorical claims that the administration is not seeking to build up a global coalition against China, or that…

When the US decided to withdraw its military forces from Afghanistan in mid-2021, Joe Biden assured his Afghan counterpart, Ashraf Ghani, of full US support against the Taliban (banned in Russia) to preserve the so-called “democratic” gains the country made during twenty years of US occupation. Evidence that we have previously examined clearly indicates that the US…

Given how the US withdrawal from the Middle East has impacted Washington’s ties with the Gulf countries, an opportunity certainly exists for the latter to pursue their ties with Beijing more freely than was the earlier the case. There is, in fact, already signs that China and the Gulf may well be taking concrete steps towards the China-Gulf Coopertaion Council…

If NATO were to become irrelevant, the US would lose its influence on Europe. If Europe were to become an independent player in world politics, it will effectively defeat the US plan to prevent the systemic shift to multipolarity. Preventing both of these eventualities requires, from Washington’s perspective, a constant external threat to Europe that it cannot tackle on its own…

On August 29, 2021 when the US launched an air strike in Kabul supposedly on an ISIS hideout, it killed 10 innocent civilians. Victims included Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for a US-based aid organisation, and nine members of his family, including seven children. While the US officials back then were quick to affirm that the strike followed “solid intelligence…