Connecting the Dots: Brinkmanship

摘要

The UN General Assembly's 75th birthday this week was less a celebration and more a (virtual) platform for rising US-China tensions. US President Donald Trump declared the world must hold China "accountable" for having "unleashed this plague." Chinese President Xi Jinping took aim against the US' isolationism, also setting out a target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, even as coal is making a comeback under Beijing's post-Covid-19 stimulus spending (pi). UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the world "cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe in a great fracture," in which "a technological and economic divide risks inevitably turning into a geostrategic and military divide."