China Is Still Rising | Stuck in Gaza | Confronting the Anti-Israel Narrative-Industrial Complex, and more

China Is Gaslighting the Developing World  (Robert A. Manning, Foreign Policy)
When Hanoi declared its support for China’s proposed “community of shared destiny” during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Vietnam last December, it was hailed by Beijing. China wants a post-American world order of its own design, and though Xi’s vision is as ambitious as it is fuzzy, Beijing is building its project largely on the cachet of public goods, including $1 trillion in now-precarious loans.
Since taking power, Xi has built off existing, if still sometimes nascent, Sino-centric organizations: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and now four other states; and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), a Eurasian talk shop. Over the past three years, still more initiatives have been added to this alphabet soup of projects: the Global Security Initiative (GSI), the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), and the Global Development Initiative (GDI).
But while many of these programs may be appealing to the global south, it’s unclear whether these countries really want a post-American future—let alone a Beijing-dominated one. China’s vision of multilateralism is camouflage for its own hegemonic ambitions, not a sincere goal.
The current U.S.-led system is fracturing. G-7 GDP, based on purchasing power parity, has declined to about 30 percent of global GDP, slightly smaller than that of BRICS, and many pledges, from climate to poverty reduction, have failed. That has left countries receptive to China’s overtures, which claim to foster a sensibility of “democratic multilateralism,” or cooperation based on the antithesis of the U.S.-led order. Military alliances are rejected as Cold War relics; human rights are economic-centered, and political rights, minority rights, an independent judiciary, and free speech are restricted as a result. Beijing claims to offer a non-Western path to development, suggesting China’s state-driven model as an alternative. The incipient Chinese displacement of U.S. stewardship is, not coincidentally, absent from the imagined faux utopia that Beijing’s initiatives paint.
Yet so far, all of this is aspirational. While the SCO, BRICS, and CICA serve as talking shops, they have no major achievements. When there was a crisis in Kazakhstan, it was Russia that intervened, not the SCO. When Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Beijing ignored the violation of its purported core principles of sovereignty and noninterference.

China Is Still Rising  (Nicholas R. Lardy, Foreign Affairs)
For over two decades, China’s phenomenal economic performance impressed and alarmed much of the world, including the United States, its top trading partner. But since 2019, China’s sluggish growth has led many observers to conclude that China has already peaked as an economic power. President Joe Biden said as much in his State of the Union address in March: “For years, I’ve heard many of my Republican and Democratic friends say that China is on the rise and America is falling behind. They’ve got it backwards.”

Stuck in Gaza  (Daniel Byman, Foreign Affairs)
Six months after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Israel seems stuck. Its war in Gaza has inflicted grievous blows on Hamas, and the group is unlikely to be able to carry out another comparable attack for some time, if ever. The price for this success is high, however, both in terms of Palestinian lives and Israel’s reputation. Israel remains far from its goal of destroying Hamas, and it seems trapped in a military campaign that is likely to make only incremental progress at huge cost.
After October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swore to “destroy Hamas” by killing its leaders, shattering its military forces, and demolishing its infrastructure. He has vowed to prevent another such attack and promised to seek the return of the hostages Hamas took, including the bodies of those who are dead. And he has made clear that he wants to ensure that Israel’s other enemies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, are deterred from attacking.
Although Israel has hit Hamas hard, it has failed to set the stage for a new, successful government in Gaza, a prerequisite for keeping Hamas down in the long run. And despite pressure from Washington, Israel appears to be doubling down on its current short-term approach, planning a major operation in the city of Rafah that would offer only marginal military gains but would exacerbate Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and further diminish Israel’s reputation. Because Israel’s current leaders don’t seem to care about answering the question of who will govern Gaza, the best one can hope for in the next six months is that Israel dials down the intensity of its violence in Gaza while dialing up the amount of aid flowing in. But this approach will satisfy neither Israelis nor Palestinians.

The United States and Israel Are Coming Apart  (Hussein Ibish, The Atlantic)
A rift has opened between Israel and the United States. No breach between the two countries has been as wide or as deep since the mid-1950s, when the Eisenhower administration compelled Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. President Joe Biden expressed grave displeasure with Israel this week over the strike that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, and a phone call between him and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday was reportedly tense. But those are just the surface-level fissures that emanate from a much more profound split.
Washington and Tel Aviv don’t just differ over tactics, nor even just over plans for the medium term. For the first time in modern memory, the two countries are also at odds over long-term visions and goals, as Israel’s territorial ambitions are coming into ever-greater and more direct conflict with U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East.

Australian Neo-Nazis Must Be Monitored Better, Senate Inquiry Told  (Josh Butler, Guardian)
Some Australian extremists “have become leading voices in the decentralized online neo-Nazi sphere”, according to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a global anti-terror group and non-profit. It has warned a parliamentary inquiry into rightwing extremism that some such groups in Australia may seek to promote combat sports and self-defense clubs as an “evasion tactic” to avoid police attention, as has been seen overseas. “Active clubs claim to simply promote political street activism, a ‘nationalist’ lifestyle, and combat sports training for white nationalists for self-defense purposes. However, it appears that active clubs in the US are not about peaceful activism and sports,” CEP said in its submission to the inquiry. “There is increasing evidence suggesting that the network’s main objective is instead the creation of shadow militias that can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises.”