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In other places I've done my best to follow the Sri Lankan economic crisis, particularly since it could be more geopolitically relevant than people realize as it simultaneously flushes out the roles of regional powers like China and India.
... and here we are with China taking the lead on restructuring the absolutely massive Sri Lankan debt:
The IMF bailout process made slow progress due to the need to restructure Sri Lanka’s nearly 50 billion dollar external debt.A previous Chinese letter giving a two-year moratorium on debt repayment had been deemed inadequate by the IMF. Wickremesinghe said the IMF programme which will be there for over the next four years would be different from all of the previous 16 programmes with the Washington-based global lender. He said the government has to take many hard economic decisions in order to stabilise the economy and work towards growth. The government measures to order tax hikes, raise utility tariffs and end fuel subsidies had triggered political protests. “I would like to apologise to the people for the hardships”, he said. The IMF in September last year approved Sri Lanka a 2.9 billion dollar bailout package over 4 years pending Sri Lanka's ability to restructure its debt with creditors -- both bilateral and sovereign bondholders.
China owns about 20% of the Sri Lankan debt, so them having a big stay in how it is restructured makes sense.
China will be able to have Sri Lanka by the horns for the indefinite future, and maybe it is even the case that the Sri Lankans will get loans next time from the Chinese (and it'll be in Yuan!).
This is how you grow an empire.
India missed out on an opportunity to exercise more control over a nation traditionally in her sphere of influence - why they did that, I do not know.
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Azerbaijan will continue to try to fight Armenia and be a thorn in the side of Christians in the Middle East.
They are, of course, bad faith actors, and it's an undemocratic regime with an even worse trajectory.
Naturally, they are willing to cooperate with the Israelis, and to undermine the Iranians if it allows them to continue to wage their conflict with Armenia & build their military assets:
Israel has had a strategic alliance with Azerbaijan for the past two decades, and Israel sells the…country weapons worth billions of dollars – and in return, Azerbaijan, per sources, supplies Israel with oil and access to Iran.According to foreign media reports, Azerbaijan has allowed the Mossad to set up a forward branch to monitor what is happening in Iran, Azerbaijan’s neighbor to the south, and has even prepared an airfield intended to aid Israel in case it decides to attack Iranian nuclear sites. Reports from two years ago stated that the Mossad agents who stole the Iranian nuclear archive smuggled it to Israel via Azerbaijan. According to official reports from Azerbaijan, over the years Israel has sold it the most advanced weapons systems, including ballistic missiles, air defense and electronic warfare systems, kamikaze drones and more.
You also got to love this:
These Silk Way aircraft (and others) have landed at Ovda almost 100 times since the permit was issued. The data expose an increasing pace of flights to Baku especially in the middle of 2016, in late 2020 and at the end of 2021 – which coincide with periods of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh….
In the midst of fighting in Armenia, the Israelis are more active, as they are all about the money.
This effectively means that the United States is undermining the Armenians to empower the Azerbaijanis.
