Good morning, and welcome to the Global Situation Report for Wednesday, 21 August 2024.
- PACIFIC ADVERSARIES DIPLOMATICALLY TARGET INDONESIA: Indonesia’s President-elect Prabowo Subianto and Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese entered talks this week to finalize a Defense Cooperation Agreement. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s Foreign Affairs Minister will be in China from tomorrow through Saturday to continue deepening bilateral cooperation.
Why It Matters: Indonesia is geographically significant as it runs through the West’s supply chains from Australia to the Northern Pacific. In the event of a war, Indonesia could operate similarly to Turkey, declaring that no one will use their territorial waters or airspace to conduct any sort of wartime operation. This would undo much of the West’s efforts to mitigate the tyranny of distance. – J.V.
- Global Rollup
- The Spokesman for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps gave a press conference where he stated, “We have control over time, and the period of waiting for that response may lengthen. The Zionists have to remain in a state of imbalance for now, as Iran’s response may not be a repetition of the previous operations.”
- Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Taiwan’s government held a meeting in Tokyo to reaffirm Japan’s commitment to defending Taiwan and “the importance of coordination” in response to China’s military build-up. (Japanese media described the meeting as an informal 2+2 meeting between parliamentarians in the foreign affairs and defense departments. This is likely meant to fly under China’s radar as Japan’s official 2+2 with India is dominating their foreign affairs news cycle. – J.V.)
- The Biden administration reoriented the nuclear policy to be able to face China, Russia, and North Korean nuclear threats simultaneously, according to the New York Times. China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry responded by calling for the U.S. “to fulfill its special and primary obligation of nuclear disarmament by further making drastic and substantive cuts to its nuclear arsenal, and stop nuclear sharing, extended deterrence, expanding nuclear alliance, and other negative moves that undermine global and regional peace and stability.”
- Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry announced the nation’s formal application to BRICS.
THAT’S A WRAP: This does it for today’s edition. Thank you for reading. If you know folks who would also like to receive this email, would you please forward it to them? We appreciate you spreading the word. – M.S.