As they say, you can't make this up. In the course of just over a week, China and Russia reaffirmed their friendship and military ties, the Iranian regime proxies lashed out with rockets at US forces in neighbouring Syria, North Korea shot off a few more missiles, France was rocked by serious rioting, all to the backdrop of what could well be a global banking crisis sending financial shockwaves from Silicon Valley to Switzerland.
If this was part of an author's pitch for a thriller novel, most publishers would scoff saying, "It's too far-fetched!"
Let's lead with the geopolitically tectonic Chinese/Russian rapprochement. China's President Xi Jinping visited Moscow and met with the increasingly isolated Vladimir Putin during a Kremlin summit making his ninth visit to Russia since he became president in 2013. Traditionally one of the key objectives of US foreign policy was keeping to the two Eurasian continental giants from getting too close. Yet for a few years now, both Beijing and Moscow have been emboldened and exploiting the perceived power vacuum of the Biden administration's policies.
