The ongoing race to capture The White House in the US is significant for many reasons for many different actors. Many in the US are interested in it because of the fundamental shifts in the domestic arena that they expect to see happening in case of the Republican candidate winning the election.

If the core purpose of Washington’s sanctions on Iran was to force a regime change in Tehran and cripple its ability to affect geopolitics in the Middle East, none of this has happened. In fact, recent events show Iran behaving as a country that sounds neither deterred by Israel nor under immense pressure, both economic and military, from Washington. In response to Israel’s killing of Ismael Haniyeh in Iran, Acting Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri said that Iran will “make the aggressor Israeli regime pay the price for its aggression in a legitimate and decisive action”.

With Joe Biden, all set to exit the White House later this year, his one-term presidency has begun to come under increasing scrutiny to determine his legacy. What sort of President Biden is/was? To what extent was he able to achieve his foreign policy goals? What characterizes his era? Unlike Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and subsequent US “exit” from the Middle East and America’s “forever wars” in Afghanistan, Biden’s main legacy is his interventionist foreign policy. These interventions, however, were unlike the direct military interventions of the Bush and the Obama administrations.

The Israeli strike that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh pushed the Middle East a lot closer to a wider war than it was before July 31^st. Because Haniyeh was killed on Iranian soil during an official visit, Tehran promised military retaliation. The latter sees this as necessary to punish Israel to counterbalance the humiliation it suffered for failing to protect an official guest. But, thanks to Russia’s intervention and proactive diplomacy, clouds of a wider war have begun to disappear.

For the past several years, the Middle East has been China’s key trading hub, not least because of more than 70 per cent of the oil that Beijing imports from here. Between 2017 and 2022, China’s bilateral trade with this region jumped from US$262 billion to US$507 billion. In 2022 alone, the region saw its trade with China jumping by more than 27 per cent. This was the largest increase in China’s trade compared with other regions, such as the ASEAN.

In popular parlance, the US President Joe Biden is already known as ‘Genocide Biden’ – a title that unmistakably highlights the role Biden has been playing, since October 2023, in facilitating Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. With Biden now all set to not contest in the upcoming presidential elections in the US in November this year, the question of whether the new president – Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump – bring any change to the US policy towards Israel?

Shaped by the existing geopolitical dynamics, the Arctic region is coming under a lot of pressure from global powers. Russia and China, on the one hand, are seeking to integrate this region via what China calls a “Polar Silk Road” – something that would make the region’s fossil fuels accessible worldwide. But the US is increasingly worried about these developments. It primarily sees these developments from a zero-sum perspective, with any gains that the Russia-China duo makes directly…

Despite Washington’s concerns – and even warnings of consequences – it has not been able to wean New Delhi away from Russia. Instead, India has decided to deepen its ties with Russia. On the one hand, India’s alliance with Russia not only allows the former to maintain a balance between Russia and the US, but an alliance with Russia also comes with another critical benefit. With Russia being a vocal supporter of multipolarity and India being an ambitious global player itself, a multipolar world is a system that can meaningfully accommodate India, the world’s most populous state now. This was most clearly evident during the recent visit of India’s Prime Minister Modi to Russia.

NATO’s plans to establish a foothold in Asia to counter China better is nothing more than a sure recipe for disaster. Coming to Asia and beating war drums against a country that has not attacked anyone is akin to pushing it to take any and all necessary steps to protect its interests. NATO, thus, is pushing China to shun its regionally focused pacificism in favour of a more belligerent stance. A more aggressive China will, in NATO’s calculation, push Asian countries to move more towards the US out of their common fear of Beijing as the hegemon…

European leaders dead worried about the return of Donald Trump to the White House later this year and the possibility of him moving the US away from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to accomplish his “Make American Great Again” goals, the former is taking steps to expand NATO to Asia to keep it relevant. Donald Trump has vowed more than once to counter China. He has also expressed optimism to use diplomacy to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Combined with his disdain for NATO, the resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict could erode NATO’s credibility and legitimacy.

The ongoing upgrades to the US-Japan military cooperation signals new regional developments. In reality, however, this upgrade is a continuation of the US strategy in the Pacific to build military outposts so that China can be deterred and tackled. On the one hand, it is militarizing Japan. On the other hand, the sale of weapons keeps bringing money to the US military-industrial complex. Ultimately, this alliance will do little to serve the purpose of ‘containing’ China.

The Saudi decision not to renew the 50-year-old petrodollar system is both a symptom of the gradual erosion of the US-led and US-centred global financial order and indicates the imminent arrival of alternative systems of financial transactions in currencies other than the USD. This is, at one and the same time, both a collapse of the existing world order and the establishment of a new, alternative, multipolar world order.