China

I was hacked by the Chinese a few years ago. Security at News UK, where I was employed on the Sunday Times, told around 20 journalists that our emails had been compromised. An agency of the Chinese state was searching for information on our coverage of Chinese issues, including Beijing’s crushing of Hong Kong and the decision to sanction members of parliament. To be honest, I’d have been pretty offended if I hadn’t been on the list. Frankly, if the Chinese want to know what I know, they can take out a subscription to The Spectator, just as they could have bought a copy of the Sunday Times. But this is what you expect from the Chinese, isn’t it?

Last month, an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea was struck by a Ukrainian drone. Kyiv claimed the vessel was carrying military equipment heading toward Russia. “The regime in Tehran is a direct accomplice to Russian aggression against Ukraine, fueling Moscow’s criminal war with weapons,” Kyiv’s foreign minister said. Tehran reportedly contemplated a counterstrike on one of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, then thought better of it. But the threat of a conflagration is higher now than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Conflicts that are currently contained risk spilling out and engulfing whole regions, perhaps the world. If the Iran and Ukraine conflicts were to merge, we’d see a war that runs from Poland to the edges of India.

On July 18, Hasan Piker – a Twitch streamer who has made millions denouncing capitalism – addressed the national convention of the Democratic party’s student wing in a gray tunic suit of the kind Mao Zedong wore. Days later, a stream resurfaced in which Piker, broadcasting from China, called Mao “one of the great leaders of this world.” His clarification, that there were “a lot of excesses, let’s be real,” is the tone of a man returning a fish that a restaurant served over-salted, not of one contemplating tens of millions dead. Nobody would need to care if the socialists were losing.

It is hardly news that US relations with the rest of NATO (“rNATO” hereafter) are at an unprecedentedly low ebb. But they took a new and interesting twist last week when the US Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby, issued a curious statement via social media, opining that “middle powers” have no coherent basis for alignment independent of the United States, and that they would therefore be foolish to try. The “middle powers” in question here are erstwhile US allies with enough of their own wealth and technological capacity to pursue meaningful sovereign capabilities, but not enough to independently rival systemic great powers such as the United States (the likes of Germany, Japan, Britain, Canada, Australia and so forth). Colby is a serious strategic mind.