RT — Serbia's president tells RT a 'Pandora's box' was opened when EU recognized Kosovo, not by attempt to mend ties

"How can we open a Pandora’s Box?! Who opened this Pandora’s Box in 2008 having accepted, acknowledged and recognized the unilaterally proclaimed independence of Kosovo?!" Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze.

This has been as influential in influencing the world order as the expansion of NATO toward the borders of Russia and the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine, a coup that was immediately ratified by the West. But Kosovo was arguably the beginning of the break down of the post-WWII (neo)liberal world order. 

The world has been witnessing the only beginning stages of the turmoil involved in the unfolding of a new world order that reduces the influence of the West to its proportional size, replacing the outsized role it has played for half a millennium. The drums of war are beating louder.

RT
Serbia's president tells RT a 'Pandora's box' was opened when EU recognized Kosovo, not by attempt to mend ties

Pepe Escobar — From the Caucasus to the Balkans, China’s Silk Roads are rising

 With its focus on Central Asia and Eastern Europe, the Belt and Road Initiative can be seen as fulfilling a strategy of challenging the West that can be traced back to Mao….

In the midst of this frenzy of connectivity, it’s easy to overlook a significant historical point: that it was all anticipated by Mao Zedong.

Scholar Chen Gang has stressed how most BRI-participating nations are not as developed, economically, as China. And they are “not just limited to the Eurasian continent, but will eventually cover all the ‘middle zone’ and ‘third world’ put forward by Mao in his ‘Three Worlds Theory.’”

Flashback to 1974. That’s when Mao described the world as being divided between superpowers (the US and USSR); intermediate powers (Japan, Europe, Canada); and exploited nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia, which Mao praised as constituting the forces against First World hegemony. Mao placed China in the third world – as Deng Xiaoping told the UN.

What’s fascinating is how Chen Gang interprets BRI not only as a sequel to China’s historical ties with the Third World, but also as opening a “new era of China’s Third World strategy.” He correctly states that US and EU elites worry that BRI will bring about “the erosion of their global influence and overseas interests.”

Chen Gang’s analysis touches on what, by now, is obvious: “The international game around BRI has just begun.” And it goes almost without saying that Beijing’s BRI-driven foreign policy strategy, by turbo-charging China’s cooperation with the ‘Global South,’ is leaving the US, at best, marginalized.

Of course, the Atlanticists are not going to just sit by and watch this happen to them.

It's game on.

Asia Times
From the Caucasus to the Balkans, China’s Silk Roads are rising
Pepe Escobar