#BREAKING

🇰🇵❌🇰🇷❗️ — North Korea's People's Army soldiers, again, briefly crossed the Military Demarcation Line per South Korea's Joint Chiefs Staff!

➡️ South Korean Media Yonhap News Agency reports that South Korean Army opened fire upon them, forcing North Korean soldiers to return!

❗️ This is the third incident that has occurred in the month of June 2024!

🇹🇭❤️🏳️‍🌈 — 📰 CNN: ‘Monumental step forward’: Thailand to become first Southeast Asian nation to legalize same-sex marriage

➡️ Thailand will become the first nation in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage after the kingdom’s Senate approved a marriage equality bill on Tuesday, with supporters calling it a “monumental step forward for LGBTQ+ rights.”

➡️ The Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of passing the bill following a final reading, with 130 senators voting in favor. Only four members opposed the bill.

➡️ The bill still requires endorsement from the king before marriage equality can become reality in Thailand, but this process is considered a formality. The law will then come into effect 120 days after it is published in the royal gazette.

🔗 Link
https://archive.is/0Xehj

🇺🇸 🤝 🇨🇳 ☢️ — CNBC: U.S. and China hold first informal nuclear talks in 5 years, eyeing Taiwan

➡️ Chinese representatives offered reassurances after their U.S. interlocutors raised concerns that China might use nuclear weapons if it faced defeat in a conflict over Taiwan.

➡️ The two countries briefly resumed talks over nuclear arms in November but those negotiations have since stalled, with a top U.S. official publicly expressing frustration at China's responsiveness

➡️ The U.S. Department of Defense estimated last year that Beijing has 500 operational nuclear warheads and will probably field more than 1,000 by 2030.

➡️ Since 2020, China has also modernized its arsenal, starting production of its next-generation ballistic missile submarine, testing hypersonic glide vehicle warheads and conducting regular nuclear-armed sea patrols.

➡️ A key point the U.S. side wanted to discuss, was whether China still stood by its no-first-use and minimal deterrence policies

🔗 Link
https://archive.is/OCBM6

Freelancer or Friend?

India's potential as a US ally is no secret. Geographically positioned, India is positioned to come into friction with China as India continues to become a more serious player on the world stage.

India, like Vietnam and Turkey, are on critical chokepoints of Spykman's "rimland" - territory that is critical to either the dominance of, or the containment of a Eurasian power bloc.

The recent BRICS expansion has brought in Egypt, Iran, UAE, and potentially soon Saudi Arabia into the bloc. Large oil producers like Russia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and so on paired with large manufacturing economies such as China and increasingly India is a powerful synergy - one that includes as Zoltan Pozsar dubbed in War and Interest Rates the G-SIB of commodities and G-SIB of factories.

Vietnam and India have been the subject of much attention and investment from western firms, with the likes of Apple moving over iPhone and iPad manufacturing to the two countries. However Vietnam's largest imports are still dominated by China and other Asian markets. India and Turkey are similarly dependent on China for imports and Turkey, with Turkey importing a similar volume of goods from Russia.

Each of these three countries lie on critical geopolitical chokepoints of the nascent Eurasian bloc - the Dardanelles in Turkey, Kashmir and the McMahon Line in India, the South China Sea off of Vietnam, and to a lesser extent, the Persian Gulf.

Turkey is a key partner in NATO, and has the second largest military in the alliance bested only by the US. India has a nuclear arsenal, and Vietnam is practically uninvadable.

The issue with de-globalization and containment is that globalization created productive capital outside the G7 - the jurisdictions which modern manufacturing first was cemented - and integrated these nascent industrialized economies with the global economy leading to economic specialization that placed certain economies into certain functionary roles. In the old global regime of globalism, bad actors and misbehaving regimes could be sanctioned into hellish living conditions - in theory leading to a popular overthrow of the regime. But add together a critical mass of large resilient "naughty" regimes, and markets that want to play ball with everyone are quickly boxed into a corner.

With the return of multipolarity, disentanglement becomes messy and countries caught between the two spheres cannot dispense with either without suffering economic headwinds and decreasing competitiveness. The best case scenario, and the one that that Turkey, India, and Vietnam seem to attempt to be playing, is one of balancing. This game worked well prior to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, but with waning US soft power projection and the Biden administration's search for marginal buyers of treasuries, middling powers on the fence are increasingly facing pressure to make a choice between Eurasia and the Atlantic.

🔗 further reading

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🇷🇺💥🇺🇦 Video from the strike in Odessa.

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