Gas crisis in Europe: winter is coming

After an earthquake caused an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany would shut down its final three nuclear power plants by the end of the year. However, the foundation for this decision had already been laid by the previous Social Democrat-Green coalition government in 2000. In order to reach carbon reduction goals, it also intends to stop using coal power by 2038 at the latest, and preferably by 2035. Renewable energy source development, which surged at the beginning of the 2010s, has slowed down recently. Very recently, Germany, one of the biggest vocals of renewable and green energy, started firing up coal power plants. However, it was just the last year when Germany agreed to provide €237 million as soft loan for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in Bangladesh, exclusively aimed at limiting the number and operation of traditional coal-based power plants.

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Categories: Eastern Europe and Russia / America / Western Europe

Why should Bangladesh be reticent of borrowing money from the IMF and the World Bank?

Is the nation and society merely a slave labor camp, a source of raw materials, and a captive market for the economies of the west, where the populace consumes goods, they do not produce? If not, society, the economy, and the politics must be built up to foster and direct everyone’s efforts toward a different set of objectives and the institutions that may help them be achieved. Before interacting with the economies of the west, Bangladesh, a big part of eastern civilizations, must also figure out how to group its competitive advantages, turn them into a market strength, and connect them regionally. New options must be dotted upon, to circumvent unfair and unjustified US-led western sanctions. If necessary, bilateral and multilateral trade must be carried through alternative currencies.

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Categories: South Asia / America / Indo-Pacific regions / Western Europe

Putin’s Iran visit and its geopolitical implications

Moscow is searching for new venues now that its connections to Europe have been severed, and the huge region of Middle East, with all of its intricacies, presents a welcome chance. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Algeria, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia before the trips of the Russian President, where he also had meetings with peers from the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council. At this time, it appears that Russia’s relations with the West, specifically Europe, are beyond repair, and Moscow appears to have undertaken a clear and decisive pivot eastward and southern, toward Asia. More importantly, Russia is acting as a guarantor to maintain the balance between Turkey, Iran and the Arab world. And for a proper balance, all parties are pursuing a strategy that can be described as compartmentalized policies for each country in order to achieve a greater collective result that satisfies domestic objectives.

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Categories: Middle East / America / Eastern Europe and Russia / Indo-Pacific regions

With sheer hypocrisy, USA picks its ‘human rights report’ to demonize the government of Bangladesh

The west led by the USA acts as the world’s police and courts. In the banner of “human rights stand superior to state sovereignty,” they always want to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations and will even go to war to achieve this. Many people’s human rights have been gravely abused by such actions all around the world. Tens of thousands of people have died and tens of thousands more have been hurt or made homeless in the Iraq War alone. Still, some western nations are willing to lecture others on human rights issues and criticize other nations they don’t agree with since they market themselves as “developed” and “democracy.”These western nations, who fought two world wars and arming to the teeth for the third, view “human rights” as their own concept and believe that it can only be established in accordance with their norms. Their hypocrisy, in the name of ‘human rights’, will have terrible effects on the global human rights movement and the implementation of Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Categories: South Asia / America / Indo-Pacific regions

The future of Japan and Bangladesh cooperation against the backdrop of a major power rivalry

However, Japan’s alignment with Quad and rising friction with China, a strategic partner of Bangladesh, is raising the chance of future complications for Bangladesh. Jolted by the Ukraine war and China’s assertiveness, Japan is looking to boost its defense capability, which is embraced a pacifist outlook after its defeat in the Second World War. Public opinion polls and commentators have found that since the end of the Ukraine conflict, the Japanese people have been steadily turning away from pacifism. While the world’s attention is on the situation in Russia and Ukraine, U.S. and NATO hostilities with China and North Korea are escalating substantially halfway across the globe in the Pacific Ocean, thus leading to the state of unease in Japan. Since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia,” which was created in part to divert attention away from the decision to surge troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the failed U.S. war strategies in the Middle East, the U.S. military’s naval and air presence in the Western Pacific has steadily increased.

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Categories: South Asia / Indo-Pacific regions

Is there any exit route for impending energy crisis in Bangladesh amidst geopolitical turbulence?

More than 1.8 billion people who reside in South Asia need economic solvency, improvement in social indicators and peace through political stability. Development is being impeded by the intensifying geopolitical competition, particularly between and among China, Russia, and the United States. This “great power competition,” which includes the dispute over the South China Sea, is…

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Categories: South Asia / Indo-Pacific regions

Is the war in Ukraine to blame for the global food crisis?

In 2021, over 193 million people in 53 countries/territories faced acute food insecurity (IPC/CH Phase 3-5; see Chart 1), according to the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2022). In comparison to the already record numbers of 2020, this is an almost 40 million increase. Over half a million people (570,000) in Ethiopia, southern Madagascar, South Sudan, and Yemen were identified as being in the most critical phase of acute food insecurity (IPC/CH Phase 5; see Chart 1) and required immediate assistance to avoid widespread livelihood collapse, famine, and death. The number of people encountering crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or higher; see Chart 1) approximately doubled between 2016 and 2021 when looking at the same 39 countries/territories represented in all editions of the report, with persistent increases each year since 2017.

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Categories: Africa / America / Central Asia / Eastern Europe and Russia / Indo-Pacific regions / Middle East / South Asia / Western Europe

No respite for EU and UK, despite Boris Johnson’s exit

European leaders and politicians reacted to the political turmoil in the UK following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation as head of his party with everything from a sigh of relief to worry about future relations. As Johnson and his administration strive to unilaterally disregard provisions of the Brexit treaty that pertain to Northern Ireland — known as the Northern Ireland Protocol — relations between the bloc and its former member have reached a low point.

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Categories: Western Europe

Sri Lanka: how a South Asian country came under chaos

There is little doubt that a combination of internal and external forces contributed to Sri Lanka’s growth from a middle-to-high income country in South Asia to where it is today in just a few short years. For many years, Sri Lanka’s government has struggled with recurring budget deficits that have forced it to borrow frequently from both local and international markets, adding to the nation’s public debt. According to the breakdown of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt as of April 2021 is provided by the Sri Lankan Department of Foreign Resources, Sri Lanka’s international borrowing made up of 47% from the capital markets, 13% from the Asian Development Bank, 10% from China, 10% from Japan, 9% from the World Bank, 2% from India, and 9% from others. Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is owed to multilateral financial organizations and commercial creditors from Western nations. They sold the loan to ‘vulture funds,’ who actually took advantage of Sri Lanka’s every cent.

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Categories: Indo-Pacific regions / South Asia