“When it comes to the region, our focus is on increasing economic ties with economic connectivity and transit at its core,” Muttaqi said while addressing a seminar here at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), an Islamabad-based think tank.

He said there is significant regional interest in economic connectivity through Afghanistan, particularly connecting Central Asia to South Asia and beyond.

The acting foreign minister noted that the region is finally able to make its decades-long aspirations of joint economic prosperity a reality not only for Afghanistan but for the entire region.

Highlighting the economic situation of Afghanistan, Muttaqi said that the country has made good progress in agriculture, mineral, health, and other sectors, adding that efforts are now underway to attract domestic and foreign investment as well as create opportunities for the technical class to find employment in Afghanistan.

He further added that the end of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan ended the corruption, different militant groups and warring parties that were present in the country.

“We seek good relations with all our neighbors and we will not allow anyone to use the territory of Afghanistan against anyone else, and we will remain committed to this pledge in the future,” according to the acting foreign minister. 

The post Afghanistan to Forge Foreign Policy of Cooperative Dialogue, Joint Interactions: Acting FM appeared first on Policy Print.

In a country where the average age of cabinet ministers is 65, where unquestioning deference to elders is still a cherished tradition, his youth – he looks far younger than his 42 years – and unabashed confidence make him stand out.

That he is, after a shock election result which put his reformist Move Forward party ahead of all the others, poised to become the youngest prime minister in 78 years, has stunned the conservative political establishment which has dominated Thailand for much of the modern era.

Difficult negotiations are now under way to form a coalition government with Pheu Thai, the second largest party, which has won every election held in Thailand since 2001, and had been expected to win the latest, held on 14 May.

Both Pheu Thai and Move Forward consider themselves to be progressive, opposed to military interference in politics like the 2014 coup, which deposed a Pheu Thai administration.

But the young activists of Move Forward outmanoeuvred the older party, and beat many of its candidates, with an imaginative, social media-based campaign offering voters a complete break with the past, and a different kind of political leadership.

“I’m different,” Pita tells me. “We are not getting into a coalition to pursue a quick fix, or to get me the prime ministership. I’m in government for the people. The world has changed.

“You don’t have to be a strong man, with toxic masculinity, to make sure ‘people have to listen to me, and I have to be the one in the spotlight all the time’.

“I don’t have to be perfect all the time. I can just be like a regular human being here in Thailand, riding motorcycles, eating on the streets like any other people.”

Pita Limjaroenrat was born into a wealthy Thai family.

He cites being sent to school as a teenager in New Zealand, the time he lived in the United States doing postgraduate study, and his experience working in the family rice-bran business, and then as an executive with the ride-hailing company Grab, as formative influences.

He admires down-to-earth leaders like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Uruguay’s José “Pepe” Mujica.

Move Forward has the most ambitious reform agenda of any party in Thailand’s electoral history.

Among the 300 policies in its manifesto are equal marriage for LGBTQ Thais, ending military conscription, tackling business monopolies, and overhauling the education system to make it fit for a 21st Century economy.

The party plans to scrap the military-drafted constitution, and bring the army’s many business interests under the Ministry of Finance.

“It is time to end the cycle of military coups, and time to end the corruption in politics which opens the door to coups,” Pita says.

But the party’s most controversial proposal is to amend the lèse majesté law, which imposes long jail sentences on those convicted of insulting the royal family, and to begin a conversation about the relationship between the monarchy and the Thai people.

Many of the 250 senators, who were appointed by the previous military government, and who are required to join the parliamentary vote for the next prime minister, say they will block Move Forward from taking office over this issue.

“The sentiment of the era has changed,” says Pita.

“I think we now have the maturity and tolerance to speak about the monarchy. Even conservatives understand what the role of a constitutional monarchy should be in the 21st Century.

“We won the votes of 14 million people. And they understood – it was clear, it was transparent – that this was one of the agendas we wanted to push.”

The Move Forward leader believes that his coalition, which currently holds 312 out of the 500 seats in the lower house of parliament, will get the necessary backing of 64 senators to give them the super-majority they need.

Sources inside the senate, though, say this will be difficult to achieve so long as Move Forward remains committed to amending the lèse majesté law; but that at least some of the senators, who only have a year left of their unelected terms, do feel uneasy about opposing a coalition which won a clear majority in the election.

Pita Limjaroenrat is promising a new foreign policy as well.

Under the military-backed governments of the past decade Thailand is widely viewed as having punched below its weight in international affairs, with Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha taking little interest in foreign policy.

“Definitely we need to engage the international community more,” Pita says.

“We have to rebalance. We have to speak out more, and we have to side with the rules-based world order. No words, no weight in foreign policy.

“And a lot of our problems, whether its economic, it’s air pollution, it’s the price of fertiliser, come from the rest of the world.”

His government, he says, would work more closely with Thailand’s Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbours to seek a solution to the civil war in Myanmar, and he would try to channel more humanitarian aid across the Thai-Myanmar border.

The challenges still confronting this young prime minister-in-waiting are daunting.

There is the sceptical senate, and the need to hammer out a deal with Pheu Thai, which won only ten seats fewer than Move Forward and has more experienced negotiators in its team.

Pheu Thai has been demanding top ministries, and the powerful parliamentary speaker position, which Pita views as a priority to get his many new bills tabled.

His party is made up mainly of first-time MPs, some too young to pass the 35 years age threshold to be a minister, some still facing serious criminal charges from their past political activism.

Ideologically more flexible, and taking a hands-off approach to the monarchy, Pheu Thai has the option of joining an alternative coalition which includes parties in the outgoing administration.

Move Forward has ruled out such a compromise, having won many of its votes through its promise not to do deals with the generals.

Pita Limjaroenrat believes neither party can abandon what he is calling a coalition of dreams and hope, because of the damage it would do to their reputations.

He wears the weight of these responsibilities lightly, still making time to spend with his family, and breezily optimistic that things will work out.

“I don’t want to be like those other Thai politicians still fighting for positions well into their 70s and 80s,” he tells me.

“I want to keep doing this for maybe another ten years, and then it will be time for something else.”

The post Pita Limjaroenrat: Thai Election Upstart Who Vows To Be Different appeared first on Policy Print.

According to him, the European Union is looking for ways to transfer the frozen funds to Ukraine.

On February 15, the European Union announced the creation of a working group to confiscate frozen Russian assets to support the reconstruction of Ukraine. Foreign assets of the Central Bank in the amount of $300 billion have been frozen since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine.

The post EU Freezes $21.5 Billion in Assets of Russian Individuals, Legal Entities appeared first on Policy Print.

In the context of current American China policy, what Freeman told Xinhua in February looked perfectly reasonable.

Envious of China’s peaceful progress over the past decades, some U.S. politicians are becoming restless, thinking that the U.S. global hegemony is under threat. They hype up the “China threat” theory and make containment of China their top priority.

However, their China policy, being antagonistic and anti-intellectual, will only accelerate the decline of Washington’s hegemony and ultimately harm U.S. own interests.

Photo taken on Nov. 14, 2022 shows the national flags of China and the United States in Bali, Indonesia. (Xinhua)

INSTIGATING “NEW COLD WAR”

For years, Washington has been playing the “Taiwan card” to contain China, creating tension in the South China Sea, and peddling lies about China’s human rights conditions in Xinjiang and Tibet. It has left America’s domestic problems unsolved while creating turmoil around the world.

“Small yard, high fence,” “decoupling,” “delinking,” “democracy and authoritarianism” … words with Cold War overtones now appear frequently in U.S. policy papers and think tank reports on China.

 Diego Pautasso, a Brazilian scholar of international politics, told Xinhua that “the United States represses China in various fields, such as politics, economics and technology.”

“Washington’s willingness to re-enact a new Cold War seems very clear to me, both from an ideological point of view and from a military and technological point of view,” he said.

“America is too scared of the multipolar world,” Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor of international relations, wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy in March.

He said U.S. leaders prefer the expansive opportunities and gratifying status that come with being an indispensable power, and they have been reluctant to abandon a position of unchallenged primacy.

It turns out that there is no way Washington can tell right from wrong. Despite the fact that a recent China-brokered rapprochement deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran has set a widely acclaimed example for other countries to settle disputes through dialogue and negotiation, CIA Director William Burns reportedly aired Washington’s frustration over Riyadh’s rapprochement with Tehran during his unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia.

“America’s unipolar status has corrupted the country’s foreign policy elite. Our foreign policy is all too often an exercise in making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort made to understand the other side’s views or actually negotiate,” CNN anchor and political commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post.

“Our foreign policy is run by an insular elite that operates by mouthing rhetoric to please domestic constituencies — and seems unable to sense that the world out there is changing, and fast,” said Zakaria.

Protesters gather during the anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., the United States, March 18, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

“CHINA POLICY NOT WORKING”

For years, U.S. politicians have been hyping up the so-called “China threat,” attempting to divert public dissatisfaction on domestic affairs. For them, it would be extremely difficult to actually address social issues such as wealth gaps and racial discrimination, so they turn to a “blame China” game instead.

“Congress does not have a lot of incentive to do the ‘right thing’ unless it is likely to boost their poll standing or bring in more campaign funds,” Greg Cusack, a former member of the Iowa House of Representatives, told Xinhua. For U.S. politicians who crave political gains, blaming China and accusing opponents of “caving to China” is a convenient choice.

The “spy balloon” rhetoric, as well as the “China virus” conspiracy, stemmed partly from such political calculations.

“Apparently we are politically paralyzed in the United States and prevented from taking any initiative” to create conditions for talks with China and manage the bilateral relationship, Freeman told Xinhua.

“In the run-up to an election, there is a lot of demagoguery and populist rhetoric. And this makes it very difficult to take the sort of initiative that I think is necessary” for managing the relationship, he said.

Instead of crafting a rational China policy, the U.S. government has — in the name of protecting national security and safeguarding so-called democratic values — imposed trade restrictions and a technology blockade on China.

Such measures, which some observers believe are aimed at stifling China’s growth, have failed to achieve its policy goals.

Although the United States has been levying additional tariffs on Chinese products since 2018, the bilateral trade volume in 2022 hit nearly 760 billion U.S. dollars, reaching a new high and defying talks of decoupling.

Despite the United States cracking down on Chinese companies in the high-tech sector, a report released in November 2022 showed that China had secured a top spot in terms of global patent filings in 2021, highlighting its strong impetus in innovation.

“Washington risks pushing against economic gravity,” former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in an opinion piece on Foreign Affairs earlier this year, noting that efforts to shut out China on advanced technologies will also hurt the United States.

“American businesses are put at a huge competitive disadvantage, the U.S. consumers pay the price,” said Paulson in the article titled “America’s China Policy is not working.”

A paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) published in December said that growing U.S. hostility to trade in recent years risks reversing decades of hugely successful policy, and a more protectionist United States would undermine the global economy.

Photo taken on June 17, 2019 shows anti-tariff posters on a fishing rod in Washington D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

SLOWING DOWN CHINA, OR U.S. ITSELF?

Washington’s China policy, designed to slacken the pace of China’s growth, is nothing but a mirage. In fact, the more the United States toughens its stance on China, the stronger the backlash it gets.

A report released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s China Center in partnership with Rhodium Group showed that if 25-percent tariffs were expanded to cover all two-way trade, the United States would forgo 190 billion dollars in GDP annually by 2025.

If decoupling leads to the sale of half of the U.S. foreign direct investment stock in China, U.S. investors will lose 25 billion dollars per year in capital gains, and models point to one-time GDP losses of up to 500 billion dollars, showed the report titled “Understanding U.S.-China Decoupling: Macro Trends and Industry Impacts.”

In an article titled “America’s Zero-Sum Economics Doesn’t Add Up” published recently by Foreign Policy, Adam Posen, president of the PIIE, said Washington’s policy approach is based on such profound analytic fallacies that self-sufficiency is attainable, that more subsidies are better, and that local production is what matters.

Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at U.S. Cornell University, warned about the costs to Americans of many of the policies ostensibly designed to protect the United States.

“My big concern is that efforts that we are taking to slow Beijing down are slowing ourselves down in the process,” she said.

Meanwhile, more countries are seeing Washington’s hegemonistic pursuits through its overbearing China policy, and have refused to comply.

“There are virtually no U.S. allies that are really all-in on the idea of a cold war with China,” Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer was quoted as saying by Politico. “The politics around the China relationship — which is incredibly toxic and hostile in the United States — that’s generally not true (for) really any ally.”

French President Emmanuel Macron has stressed on different occasions that Europeans should not be followers of the United States in crises that Europe has nothing to do with, and “must be able to choose our partners and shape our own destiny.”

Similarly, European Council President Charles Michel said “there is indeed a great attachment that remains present … But if this alliance with the United States would suppose that we blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States on all issues, no.”

In the meantime, many developing countries are expecting a fairer and more equitable international order, instead of being forced to take sides or becoming pawns for the United States to contain China.

For example, earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Iran, two arch-rivals in the Middle East, agreed to resume diplomatic relations under China’s mediation. Saudi Arabia has also remained in contact with Russia concerning oil prices.

Washington’s strategy of “attempting to organize a coalition of like-minded countries to counterbalance and pressure China” is not working, said Paulson.

“It hurts the United States as well as China, and over the long term, is likely to hurt Americans more than Chinese people,” said Paulson.  

The post World Insights: America’s Antagonistic China Policy Doomed to Boomerang appeared first on Policy Print.

US natural gas futures gained about 3% on Friday after falling to a one-month low in the prior session on forecasts confirming the weather will remain mostly colder than normal for the next two weeks, keeping heating demand higher than usual through early April.

That price increase also came on expectations the amount of gas flowing to liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plants would hit a record high during the month of March after Freeport LNG’s export plant in Texas exited an eight-month outage in February. It shut in a fire in June 2022.

Front-month gas futures for April delivery rose 6 cents, or 2.8%, to $2.214 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) at 7:59 a.m. EDT (1159 GMT). On Thursday, the contract closed at its lowest since Feb. 21 when it settled at a 29-month low of $2.073.

For the week, the front-month was down about 5%, putting it down for a third week in a row for the first time since early February.

Freeport LNG’s export plant was on track to pull in about 1.6 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of gas on Friday, up from 1.5 bcfd on Thursday, according to Refinitiv data. Freeport LNG said on March 8 that it anticipated feedgas flows would rise and fall as the plant returns to full production over the “next few weeks.”

Sources familiar with the plant, however, said Freeport LNG was canceling some cargoes due to issues with one of the plant’s three liquefaction trains and could take longer than the company expects to return to full service. Liquefaction trains turn gas into LNG for export.

When operating at full power, Freeport LNG can turn about 2.1 bcfd of gas into LNG for export. Total gas flows to all seven of the big US LNG export plants rose to an average of 13.1 bcfd so far in March from 12.8 bcfd in February.

That would top the monthly record of 12.9 bcfd in March 2022, before the Freeport LNG facility shut. The seven big US LNG export plants, including Freeport LNG, can turn about 13.8 bcfd of gas into LNG.

Refinitiv said average gas output in the US Lower 48 states rose to 98.4 bcfd so far in March, from 98.1 bcfd in February. That compares with a monthly record of 99.9 bcfd in November 2022.

Analysts said production declined earlier this year due in part to gas price falls of 40% in January and 35% in December that persuaded several energy firms to reduce the number of rigs they were using to drill for gas.

In addition, extreme cold in early February and late December cut gas output as some oil and gas wells in several producing basins froze.

Source : Brecorder

The post US Natgas Up on Forecasts for Colder Weather appeared first on Policy Print.