Valdai Club

US President Joe Biden signed an executive order to launch the first phase of the "U.S.-Taiwan Trade Initiative for the 21st century”, a trade agreement between the US and Taiwan. This will change the status quo that has developed over the past 70 years around the self-governing island. The United States is willing to take risks for many reasons, but it will lead to nothing but a new round of escalation of the conflict with China.

Sanctions have caused damage and continue to distort normal market relations, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Ivan Timofeev. But business continues to find alternative ways. The regime of Western sanctions against Russia is likely to continue for decades. Therefore, investing in diversification is in many ways a non-alternative strategy.

The banking and financial relations between Iran and Russia have developed significantly in recent years under the influence of several factors, which is unprecedented in the history of relations between the two countries, Vali Kaleji writes.

Russia is extremely interested in making education accessible to Africans. Today, according to various estimates, about 35,000 students from Africa study at Russian universities. In order to make education in Russia more accessible to students from Africa, the Russian-African Network University was created in August 2021, in which 12 Russian universities participate, Konstantin Pantserev writes.

BRICS no longer exists: the time of BRICS+ has come. But to make this informal forum into a structured reality, one capable of withstanding bumps and games, a radical rethinking of its purposes and its current skeleton is needed, writes Emanuel Pietrobon.

The geographical balance of the new additions to BRICS clearly illustrates this intention. However, just like the original group and the currently expanded BRICS+, they present heterogeneities and asymmetries that will likely pose challenges in the future for consensus-building, Andrés Serbin writes.

Erdoğan and his supporters will have to seriously prepare for the municipal elections in the spring of 2024, in which the AKP plans to regain control of the largest cities – the capitals Ankara and Istanbul, as well as Antalya. The municipal elections scheduled for March 2024 will be another major electoral test for Erdoğan. The president considers them “decisive” and regards them as a kind of vote of confidence, Pavel Shlykov writes.

The Americans left, but faith in their myths about the prospects for economic development and expectations of corresponding projects from foreigners have remained. In terms of belief in these American myths, the Taliban is no different from the leaders of the previous pro-American government. Moreover, the Taliban tends to ask their regional neighbours for the implementation of American myths, Ivan Safranchuk writes.

Given that the adoption of the decisions of the Second Russia-Africa Summit was accompanied by the development of a mechanism for their implementation, and in light of the high professional level of the leaders and employees of the Russian Foreign Ministry who were called upon to coordinate it, there is every reason to believe that these decisions will be implemented, and that Russia’s cooperation with African countries in many areas will yield new prospects, writes Vladimir Shubin.

A radical reform of the "juristocracy" is possible only in conditions of an acute political crisis, the probability of which, according to the author, is quite high.