• 1 Post
  • 55 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • BrokebackHampton@kbin.socialtoworldnews@lemmy.world•EU freezes aid payments for Palestinians after Hamas attack on Israel
    33·
    1 year ago

    The EU should be ashamed of how incredibly hypocritical its diplomacy and foreign policy is showing itself to be in the last few months of international events.

    It’s been like that for far longer but now it’s harder for people not to realize how low is to do all this grandstanding about evil Hamas killing those poor Israeli civilians while looking the other way and letting Azerbaijan do just whatever the fuck they want in Nagorno-Karabakh because we so desperately need their gas.
    Where was all this “the scale of terror and brutality makes it so there can be no business as usual” energy then? Are we going to start calling Armenians terrorists in order to justify that one too?

    Europe has deciduous morals with a shelf life of half a Truss.

  • BrokebackHampton@kbin.socialtoNews@lemmy.world•US expects to upgrade Vietnam ties, risks China anger
    11·
    1 year ago

    Nobody seems to have pointed out the obvious historical angle where China and Vietnam have been long-time enemies.

    The issue goes back to the Cold War era and the Sino-Soviet split and it’s kinda hard to synthesize in a few short paragraphs, you can read more on the wiki article about it, but these sections could be a good summary:

    Vietnam was an ideological battleground during the 1960s Sino-Soviet split. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping secretly promised the North Vietnamese 1 billion yuan in military and economic aid if they refused all Soviet aid.

    During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese and the Chinese had agreed to defer tackling their territorial issues until South Vietnam was defeated. Those issues included the lack of delineation of Vietnam’s territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin and the question of sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

    And also:

    In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Cambodian–Vietnamese War caused tensions with China, which had allied itself with Democratic Kampuchea. That and Vietnam’s close ties to the Soviet Union made China consider Vietnam to be a threat to its regional sphere of influence. Tensions were heightened in the 1970s by the Vietnamese government’s oppression of the Hoa minority (Vietnamese of Chinese ethnicity) and the invasion of Khmer Rouge-held Cambodia. At the same time, Vietnam expressed its disapproval with China strengthening ties with the United States since the Nixon-Mao Summit of 1972.