China-Netherlands Relations:: How China Made the Netherlands Question the Free Market - by Diederik Baazil

When the Dutch government invested in home-grown chipmaker Smart Photonics this summer, it was a departure for a country with a hands-off approach to business.

A small company with big plans, Smart Photonics was struggling to attract financing to scale up production of its next-generation chips, whose applications include self-driving cars and datacenters.

Smart’s chief technology officer, said in an interview at the company’s offices outside Eindhoven, in the southern Netherlands. “The most serious interest came from Asia,” specifically Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and from China, he said.

In late June, just as it looked like Smart Photonics was about to be lured to Asia, the Dutch government stepped in with 20 million euros ($23.7 million). A similar sum came from a consortium including a government-backed agency, PhotonDelta, whose chief executive, Ewit Roos, raised the alarm at the Ministry of Economic Affairs as soon as he learned of the company’s predicament. “The government acted swiftly and decisively,” Roos said by phone.

he Dutch government says that its decision was taken to retain key technology and wasn’t driven by concerns over China. Even so, its investment was just the latest example of a more defensive economic stance that has accompanied a hardening of the country’s attitude to Beijing.

The shift has “been very noticeable, because the Netherlands has always been that kind of small, open, free-market economy that wanted nothing to be touched and everything to be open,” said Agatha Kratz, an associate director at Rhodium Group in Paris.

Beijing still regards the Netherlands as an important trade partner and investment destination, even though the Netherlands is getting “harsher” toward China, said a researcher with the government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who asked not to be identified due to rules for speaking with media. One reason for that change is China is becoming more competitive economically with Europe, the researcher said.

On the political front, the Netherlands angered Beijing this year by changing the name of its representation in Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province. That prompted the Chinese embassy in The Hague to request clarification from the government. Taiwan’s president pointedly tweeted her gratitude to the representation’s outgoing head.

Read more at:
How China Made the Netherlands Question the Free Market - Bloomberg

EU-US Relations: Europe is abandoning Trump on the world stage as it turns away from the US toward China

President Donald Trump is presiding over the deterioration of the US’s position on the world stage as European countries increasingly look toward China as a future global leader.

This shift is apparent in a series of recent opinion polls that found European sentiment toward the US to be in decline since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Recent polling suggests Europeans are turning away from the US under President Donald Trump’s leadership.

Public opinion toward America has declined in major European countries since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Seventy-six percent of Germans in a new poll said their view of America had deteriorated since the start of the crisis.

Roughly equal numbers of Germans in the poll favored maintaining close relationships with China and the US over the other.

One poll last week found that just 2% of French people trusted Trump to provide world leadership.

China is exerting growing political, diplomatic, and financial power across Europe.

Read more at:
Europe is abandoning Trump on the world stage as it turns away from the US toward China

China-US ties on the brink of a complete breakdown: by Stephen S Roach

In his article "The end of the US-China relationship," Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, describes new shifts in the China-US relationship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He wrote, "After 48 years of painstaking progress, a major rupture of the US-China relationship is at hand. This is a tragic outcome for both sides - and for the world." How should both countries manage the economic and geopolitical risks of a full rupture? Is it still possible for the two great powers to regain the trust and cooperate in the fight against the novel coronavirus pandemic? Roach shared his views with Global Times (GT) reporters Hu Yuwei and Zhao Juecheng.

GT：How will the current pandemic reshape China-US relations? Will it drag the two countries into a new cold war?

Roach: My basic conclusion is that the relationship between the US and China right now is the worst that I have seen in my career, and I've been following this relationship for 25 years closely. I think it started with the trade war in 2018. It's now moved into disputes over the novel coronavirus. And public opinion in the US, as measured by a Pew Research survey conducted very recently, shows bipartisan sentiment against China is as bad as it has ever been since the survey was conducted.

Also, there has been a leak of the Republican Party's political strategy that was written up by some consultants for the presidential campaign. I've read this 57-page strategy document very carefully. Its basic premise on the politics of the novel coronavirus - Do not defend Trump, but attack China. Republican strategy in the upcoming presidential election campaign is very much focused on attacking China.

Many new policies are being floated consistent with this approach: Bringing back supply chains from China, renewed or increased tariffs, or the most ridiculous of all, a threat of withholding debt payments on Chinese holdings of US treasury securities.

This strategy - after a trade war and after blaming China for the coronavirus itself - leads me to believe that the relationship is on the brink of what I would call a rupture, a complete breakdown. And I don't expect things to improve between now and the election. This is a tragedy. It did not have to happen this way. In US politics, sometimes things go in unfortunate directions. This is one of those times.

Read more at: China-US ties on the brink of a complete breakdown: Roach - Global Times

Turkey summons U.S. ambassador after U.S. House recognizes Armenian genocide

Turkey on Wednesday condemned two resolutions passed by the U.S. House of Representatives that symbolize deteriorating Turkish-American relations.

Read more at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/turkey-summons-us-ambassador-1.5340614

Britain - Brexit: PR image of Britain getting worse by the day

Read more at:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/06/britain-foolish-decline-boris-johnson?CMP=fb_gu

EU -Israel Relations: Netanyahu lashes at ‘hostile’ EU, but finds friends on Bulgaria trip

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised the EU’s “hypocritical and hostile attitude” on Thursday (1 November) as he left for talks with four eastern European leaders in Bulgaria.

Netanyahu has regularly made such comments against the European Union, which is critical of Israel’s occupation of and settlement building in the West Bank.

To counter such criticism, he has sought alliances with sympathetic EU countries including Hungary, whose nationalist stance has been a thorn in Brussels’ side.

Read more: Netanyahu lashes at ‘hostile’ EU, but finds friends on Bulgaria trip – EURACTIV.com

EU And US: A Relationship Of Concern (a conservative viewpoint)- by George Handlery

Much to their detriment, Americans like to ignore the world. Accordingly, they do not appreciate reminders that, like it or not, the rest of the world is out there. Worse, some of its “leading leaders” have rabies and “bite”. Aware of the provocation, Duly Noted has often indulged in its own version of “globalism”. In doing so, the European Union had received much attention.

If by your unearned luck you are an American reader, you wonder why the EU should be of concern to you. The evolvement of the Union will determine the quality of that entity and thereby its worth as a major ally. A federation might emerge that will, in a future crisis, be “neutral against the USA”. If some of this is true, the way Europe’s content will develop is of geopolitical significance.

Be reminded that Europe is a major world player. However, by its choice, it punches well under its weight class. With 500 million inhabitants and members rated as leading economies and with three of them listed among the great powers –England, France and Germany- Europe matters. It also counts as it had generated the forces that made the modern world. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, modern science, from rocketry to cybernetics is, besides some key components of democracy, Europe’s contribution to the present. At the same time, two world wars and some of destructive systems of mass murder - Fascism, National Socialism and Communism- are also European products. 

Viewed globally, Europe’s achievements - rounded out by the contribution of her overseas extensions- have made it a culture of reference. However, the caveats of that evaluation counsel to caution.

By the 20th century, the highs achieved in the arts, science, medicine, economics, have been unmatched by the Continent’s political performance. Staging the world wars expresses that. Europe’s efforts to protect past achievements and to project these into the future have been less than satisfactory. This holds especially true in the post WW2 period when the independence of Western Europe had to be maintained –even after the post-war recovery- by an extra-European power.

Europe’s weakness is caused by an amalgam. Its components are failing vision, misjudged threats, unfounded assumptions about security, and an unwillingness to sacrifice to protect values declared non-negotiable.

An adjunct is to be added. Politicians are inclined to underrate threats, so they promise to voters that should know better that there are no enemies, and that the proclaimed intentions of these are not meant seriously. The notion of “security for free” is a drug. Its lulling consumption is difficult to cut when illusions dissipate and resistance is called for.

Disturbing trends emerge once the Union’s development is examined. To begin: the analogy of the United States of America and the United States of Europe is misleading. America’s union project –even if there might have been an emerging Southern nation- has not encountered functioning, historical and conscious national entities. The Civil War has determined that America would not continue to develop as a confederation. Given “federalism’s” practice, the components of an expanding USA could live with that result.

East or West, Europe is peacefully and consensually not unifiable the way “United” in “United States” suggests. To create a unitary state here, one needs to weld together what does not wish to fit together. Europe’s states are not administrative conveniences but the products of diverging traditions and languages. Since Europe is an entity without a matching people, any plan to unite it administratively while also upholding liberty and identities, implies a commitment to contradictory concepts. This testifies to ignorance, to the pursuit of a hidden agenda –or both.

Read more: EU And US: A Relationship Of Concern | The Brussels Journal