In a series of four articles, we at Shared-an-Ambassador will attempt to shed light on the generally darkening geopolitical horizon in the Asia-Pacific region in order to provide interested parties with a basis for assessing the risks of their economic activities. Xi Jinping’s China is the main contributor to the gloom. India is making economic…

A bit under the shadow of the war in Ukraine and the increasing tensions between the US vs. China, some remarkable developments have started in the Middle East. Main developments Iran and Saudi Arabia have resumed diplomatic relations, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria has been officially rehabilitated and Arab autocrats appear to govern with renewed vigour, brutality…

India’s most conspicuous political move of late is certainly its refusal to join the West’s condemnation of Russia’s war against the Ukraine and to comply with its sanctions against the aggressor. India has even, together with China, become Russia’s main buyer of oil and is, thus, indirectly funding Putin’s war. India may not be known…

As the Ukraine disaster shows, an internally undisputed autocrat’s words have to be taken seriously. This goes for Putin – the demise of the USSR as ‘the biggest disaster of the 20th Century’, thus his fight to restore it – as it does for Xi Jinping. The latter’s rhetoric, political initiatives and actions since his…

Throughout 2023, India will play a prominent role in world politics. It will be chairing the G-20, the grouping of the world’s 20 largest economies. The G-20 is not an international organisation, nor a group sharing common values, and even less an alliance, but it is a setting in which the world’s most important economic,…

Mutual agreements between the UK and Switzerland are an attempt to overcome the evident disadvantage of not being a formal participant in the European single market. But the Swiss case cannot be a template for the UK to overcome its Brexit woes. A mutual recognition agreement (MRA) in the financial sector, ‘aimed at facilitating or…

India’s refusal to adhere to Western sanctions against Russia as a consequence of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is in stark contrast to its recent repeated confirmations of unequivocally siding with its QUAD partners US, Japan and Australia against China’s expansion and its joining the newly created quadrilateral forum I2U2, a grouping comprising India,…