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Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
Entrepreneur. Previously HouseTrip (sold to TripAdvisor), now https://t.co/C4SmZQ8JaE Subscribe if you like what I write
Objectively Random (now on Mastodon) Profile picture Luca M. Sergio Profile picture Postcards of the Hanging(s) Profile picture stephen shochat Profile picture Οὖτις 94 subscribed
Apr 10 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
This is fascinating:

An Irish professor of international law - Anthony Carty - has spent considerable time looking through British and French archives, spanning from the 1880s until the late 1970s, to look at the historical understanding of sovereignty of the Spratly Islands. These are the islands in the South China Sea at the core of the present dispute between China and the Philippines.

He discovered that "the archives demonstrate, taken as a whole, that it is the view of the British and French legal experts that as a matter of the international law territory the Xisha Islands [the Paracel Islands] and the Nansha Islands [the Spratly Islands] are Chinese territory".

For instance on the Spratly islands he says: "French legal advice was that France never completed an effective occupation of the Spratlys, and they abandoned them completely in 1956. In the 1930s they recognized that these Spratlys had always been home to Chinese fisherman from Hainan Island and Guangdong. There had never been any Vietnamese or Philippine connection and French interference had only been in its own name and not that of Vietnam. It is the British who then drew a decisive conclusion, from all the French and British records available, that the Chinese were the owners of the Spratlys [the Nansha Islands], a legal position certified as part of British Cabinet records in 1974."

Fascinatingly, and immensely relevant to today's dispute between the Philippines and China, and America's involvement in the matter, he discovered "a record in the mid-1950s in the US National Archive, in which a US under secretary of state says that, while the Filipinos have no claim to the Spratlys, it is in the US interest to encourage them to make a claim anyway to keep Communist China out of the area".

His conclusion: "There is absolutely no doubt that this whole dispute is entirely about the Americans trying to make life difficult for the Chinese. The aggression that is building up against China and the scapegoating of China by the whole of the so-called democratic community of the world is appalling."globaltimes.cn/page/202404/13… Also, important reminder that the Americans told the Philippines at its independence in 1946 (the Philippines were an American colony) that the Spratlys were not Philippine territory, because the Spratlys were not part of the Philippines per the 1898 treaty Spain signed with America (in which Spain ceded the Philippines to America).Image
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Apr 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Just a couple of days ago I was warning about how the acceptance of Israel's bombing of Iran's consulate was destroying centuries-old norms around the sanctity of diplomatic facilities and... here you are 🤷‍♂️ That was my argument 👇
Mar 23 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
That's quite dishonest framing by AP, given that Russia, China (and Algeria) vetoed the US resolution for the very reason that it did NOT call for an immediate ceasefire.

Instead it merely asked to *recognize the importance* of a ceasefire, and to support American negotiation efforts towards that purpose. Which wouldn't have changed the situation on the ground one iota... That's the text of the resolution:

"(The Security Council) Determines the imperative of an immediate and sustained ceasefire to protect civilians on all sides, allow for the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance, and alleviate humanitarian suffering, and towards that end unequivocally supports ongoing international diplomatic efforts to secure such a ceasefire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages;"

As the US Think Tank Responsible Statecraft rightly writes ():

"The clause does not demand a ceasefire but determines that it is imperative. Its support is not directly for the ceasefire but for the negotiation process the U.S. has been co-leading and whose parameters the U.S. has sought to determine in favor of Israel. The text points out that this effort to secure a ceasefire is 'in connection with the release of all remaining hostages.' This is an Israeli demand that is not likely to be accepted by Hamas in return for a time-limited ceasefire rather than a permanent one. As such, the American draft endorses the Israeli position in the negotiations and indirectly conditions the ceasefire on the release of all hostages, effectively making two million civilian Gazans hostages as well."

The US systematically vetoed all resolutions that were *actually* demanding an immediate ceasefire, so it's pretty clear they don't want one. This was a way to make it look like they were asking for one for PR purposes and for headlines from dishonest journalists such as AP's.responsiblestatecraft.org/us-ceasefire-g…Image Yup that's a good one. A ransom note indeed.
Feb 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
ROC (Taiwan) coastguards killed two mainland fishermen, which I believe are the first such casualties in the Taiwan strait in many years, if not decades.


They died off the coast of the Kinmen archipelago, which belongs to the ROC but which itself is just a couple of miles away from the Chinese mainland. Kinmen was in the news recently as Taiwanese media reported the US had dispatched special forces on the archipelago on a permanent basis (), which is extraordinarily provocative.

So far PRC authorities have been extremely restrained in their response, just condemning the "malignant incident" and asking for an immediate investigation by the ROC. Which goes to show that China is NOT looking for a confrontation in the Taiwan strait, as this is the type of incident that could be a casus belli.

Just imagine for a minute the worldwide outcry if those fishermen had been from the ROC, and killed by the PRC... We just wouldn't hear the end of it.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb…
newsweek.com/american-speci… This 👇 is also an interesting coincidence, just as these fishermen were being killed...
scmp.com/news/china/dip…
Feb 2 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is quite something! This is John Lander - Australia's former ambassador to Iran and Deputy Ambassador to China - explaining what the "rules-based order" actually is.

In his words it's "a set of ever varying, constantly vacillating rules devised by the United States for the benefit of the United States and its Western allies." He points out that "one of the most difficult thing about the rules-based order is finding out what the rules are!"

Link to the whole interview at the end of the thread. On this topic I've been making the point since the beginning of Israel's war on Gaza that if one takes a step back, it's really at heart a war of the "rules-based order" against international law 👇. And I really believe that's a key prism to view the war.
Jan 30 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This is a absolutely fantastic example of data manipulation. Credit to @nikstankovic_ for spotting it (you can see his reply to @AgatheDemarais's post).

Not surprising coming from The Economist but the manipulation is still quite insane once you understand it.

Let me explain 🧵
Image So what you understand from The Economist's graph is exactly what @AgatheDemarais understood: "oh my god, Japan has been 'derisking' from China for years, their economic reliance on China is low, Germany is so behind!".

Right? Well, it's TOTALLY wrong.
Jan 30 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
This is one of the best talks I've heard in a while on China's economy, by Eric Li, a famous Chinese VC and political scientist.


I summarize the main points in a short 🧵 First of all, he argues there was a fundamental misunderstanding of China by the US. The US convinced itself China would stay in the "peripheral" forever 👇 whilst China's objective was always to move up and be part of the "core". Image
Jan 29 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Democratic" Europe... where if you express a legitimate dissenting opinion as a country - and the interests of your citizens - a revengeful EU commission will cause your economic collapse. Yup, not their first rodeo
Jan 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is huge:

Top Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth confirms Israel used the "Hannibal directive" on Oct 7th, which calls to kill Israeli hostages along with their captors.

This is the exact quote from the paper:

"At midnight on October 7, the IDF ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The order was to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is despite the fear that some of them have hostages.

It is estimated that about a thousand terrorists and infiltrators were killed in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. It is not clear at this time how many of the hostages were killed due to the activation of this command. In the week after the attack, soldiers of elite units checked about 70 vehicles that were left in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed."ynet.co.il/news/article/y… Not sure if you remember these photos of burned vehicles reported by all the media as "destroyed by Hamas" (here Reuters 👇)? Well the Yedioth Ahronoth investigation now confirms they were in fact destroyed by the IDF... Image
Jan 4 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
That's a pretty stunning illustration of the double standards at play when the US criticize China's 9-dash line, having effectively transformed the entire Pacific ocean into "the American lake". Image Credit to @Bevin83994661
Dec 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Quite a crazy story in Australia:

Prominent journalist @antoinette_news was fired by the country's main public broadcaster ABC after she wrote an article alleging that a controversial video shared by the Australian Jewish Association of antisemitic chants during a pro-Palestinian protest had likely been doctored (her article in next tweet).

What's happening to journalists around this conflict is absolutely astonishing. When they're not outright killed in Gaza (more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the war than have ever been killed in any single country over an entire year: ), they're getting cancelled left and right all over the West if they produce inconvenient reporting... Showing once more that "freedom of the press" is a principle that's easy to brandish when it produces narratives that are in your interests but quite rapidly dies down when it doesn't...canberratimes.com.au/story/8467384/…
cpj.org/2023/12/israel… That's the story she apparently got fired for
Dec 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
It's interviews like this that demonstrate how Israel is a weapon of mass destruction of the West, and of the morally superior image it tried to portray:

This is UK Minister of State Lee Rowley responding to the fact that an IDF sniper killed a Christian mother and her daughter IN A CHURCH in Gaza. An act the Pope himself called "terrorism" and that Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the most senior Catholic cleric in England, characterized as a “cold–blooded killing”.

Minister Rowley's response? This is Israel "trying to defend itself" and the "only way to end the situation in Gaza is Hamas laying down their weapons and stop using their population as human shields".

In other words to him this isn't even the IDF's responsibility, murdering women and their daughters in churches is just par for the course until the other side surrenders...

Which is something you could maybe imagine the most evil terrorist organizations saying - "we'll murder your wifes and daughters in your places of worship until you surrender, your deaths are on you!" - but now we have UK ministers essentially saying this stuff, which is absolutely insane!

Does this reflect something that was always there, only hidden under a veneer of pretense morality? Or is it the product of a more recent degradation of morality in the West? At the end of the day it doesn't matter, fact is I can't see how there's any recovery possible from this for a long, long time. The whole world sees this kind of talk which is pervasive among almost all Western leaders. And they just won't forget, we're looking at a future where any talk of "values", "principles", "respect of rules", etc. by the West will be met by laughter and ridicule by the rest of the world for decades to come. This is what he is asked to react about 👇
Dec 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
This might be the best explanation I heard for "why Oct 7" and, surprisingly, it comes from Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, Israel's secret service, and commander-in-chief of the Navy.

Here what he says (this is the first video, there are a couple more below which you'll really want to watch):

He says the "most important cause [of Oct 7]" was "the political paradigm", whereby Israel's policy was "divide and rule", meaning Israel "had to make sure Palestinians would not have a unified leadership" and could therefore always say "nobody to talk with, nothing to talk about". Concretely "in order to do it [Israel] had to make sure Hamas would go on controlling Gaza and the Palestinian authority the West bank", and incite them to "fight each other". This is why Israel "enhanced and assisted Hamas, transferred money, etc."

As a result of all this Hamas "got the Palestinians' support" because "they became the only administration who fought against the Israeli occupation and for the purpose of Palestinian freedom" while Fatah and the Palestinian authority became perceived as "Israeli collaborators". In his assessment "between 70 to 80% of the Palestinians are supporting Hamas, only because Hamas is perceived as the one who fight for [their] freedom."

He says Israel completely misunderstood the situation before Oct 7 because it measures "hardware" whilst Hamas measures "software", meaning that after every fight between Israel and the Palestinians, success for Israel is measured in "losses in human life, in military installations, in military infrastructure" whereas what Hamas measures is "the support of the people." As an illustration he says that in May 2021 - when there was fighting during 2 weeks and around 300 Palestinians were killed (to 17 on the Israeli side) - Israel thought that Hamas "suffered a huge loss and a huge military defeat" but from Hamas's standpoint it was "a huge victory" because this led to Hamas, for the first time, getting "more than 50% of the support from the Palestinian people." He says another key cause was "the new Middle-East [plan] presented by Biden" because "Palestinians were not mentioned".

To him this was a major mistake because "the Palestinians see themselves as a people, a nation" and this made them "feel alone and abandoned". As a result the Palestinians "chose the Samson option" because "they felt that they had nothing to lose and this was the only way for them to show to the world 'you will not be able to create stability in this region if you will bypass Palestinians.'" He concludes: "the tragedy is that they succeeded".
Nov 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
My favorite Kissinger video was when he introduced his wife to Mao, who got his mind absolutely blown by the height difference 😅 Kissinger was immensely impressed with Mao, as he later wrote: "There were no trappings that could account for the sense of power Mao conveyed. Mao emanated vibrations of strength and power and will. In his presence even Chou [Zhou Enlai] seemed a secondary figure." Image
Nov 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There you go, China obviously displeased.

And I suspect simply dumbfounded: "why would you ask us over to improve the relationship and publicly insult us?" It makes no sense.

It's also terrible for the US's image in the world, highlights they just can't do diplomacy anymore. Blinken obviously immediately understood this 😅
Nov 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Macron's list of continuous flip flops on Gaza is due another update after his more recent declarations so here it goes (proving how utterly confusing France's foreign policy has become):

- 12th of October: France bans all pro-Palestinian protests (the French, as they do, don't care and protest anyhow)

- 24th of October: Macron goes to Israel and even propose France joins the fight against Hamas (!)

- 28th of October (4 days later!): France was one of the very rare Western nations that voted the UN resolution for a "humanitarian truce".

- 2nd of October (another 4 days later): Benjamin Haddad, the spokesperson for Macron's party, says he isn't for a ceasefire.

- 11th November: Macron now says he's for a ceasefire and tells the BBC that he "urges Israel to stop" because "there is no reason and no legitimacy [for killing civilians"

- 13th of November (today): Macron now declares he "unequivocally supports Israel and its right to self-defense."

Again, Macron's most singular political strategy is the "en même temps", trying to stand on all sides of all issues at the same time. Resulting in this: France ends up being led on a road to nowhere and no-one understand where it stands.
12th of October, France bans all pro-Palestinian protests
Sep 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
This is so profoundly true and everyone needs to understand that. This is a 2011 video of James Peck, Professor of History at NYU, author of "Ideal Illusions, How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights" and one of the keenest observers of China in the U.S.

He explains that actually, when it comes to "human rights" in China, Western backing of the various individuals and movements is "a serious mistake".

For instance he makes the stunning claim that before the 1989 Tiananmen events he went to "a soirée" at the American embassy and "it was filled with the people who later became very prominent in Tiananmen." He remarks that the way to understand this is to "imagine a comparable contrast in this country where Americans were busily associating with people in a foreign embassy" and then attempting a revolution...

I have zero doubt in my mind that if China or Russia made interference efforts in the US similar to those the US makes in their countries, the US would undoubtedly become an incredibly more dystopian surveillance and security state than it is today, and much more "authoritarian" than China or Russia have ever been.

In way, this is what the PRC has always been telling the world: "no foreign interference". But we've always doubled down in this profound mistake, which in the end helps absolutely no-one.

We always comes back to the all-important golden rule: "Do not do unto others what you wouldn't like done unto you".
He also had a fantastic response to a halfwit question about human rights in China: "you are speaking in a country [the US] that has the largest prison population in the planet, bigger than China's [...] You sometimes say 'we should follow the American model'. What's the American model? Well, find a continent that only has Indians on it that you can get rid of, develop it, become incredibly wealthy, not have foreign powers on your borders and... have the American model!"
Sep 10, 2023 • 28 tweets • 14 min read
I get asked this all the time, so I am reposting my famous thread of all the top strategic thinkers - from Kissinger to Chomsky - who warned for years that war was coming if we pursued NATO expansion, yet had their advice ignored (which begs the question: why?). The first one is George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy. As soon as 1998 he warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia". Image
Sep 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
The more I think about it, the more the I realize how huge this news actually is, how big a win it is for China, and how big a loss for the US.

In one simple move, China basically proved that the enormous years-long efforts the US put to destroy both Huawei and the Chinese semiconductor industry have been defeated.

In typical Chinese fashion - words are cheap in China, you prove yourself with deeds - they didn't make any announcements about it. Huawei didn't even communicate on the product launch, the phone just showed up in their store. And that was coincidentally on exactly the same day as the visit of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who had vowed to "slow China's innovation rate". Talk about symbolism!

People had to look inside the phone to find out it is equipped with Huawei’s in-house Kirin 9000s processor, which is apparently made by Chinese semiconductor firm SMIC using a 2nd generation 7nm-class fabrication process. Less than one year ago, when the US introduced its sweeping set of sanctions against the Chinese semiconductors industry, "experts" vowed it would kill the industry or at least freeze its technological progress at the 28 nm chips China were at back then. Fast forward to now: China can evidently mass-produce 2nd generation 7nm chips entirely indigenously. The iPhone 14 Pro has 4nm chips so China is now almost on par, maybe just 1 or 2 years behind but catching up at an insane speed.

So what has the US managed to do? They've transformed Huawei into an incredibly more resilient company and have made China build an entirely indigenous semiconductors ecosystem, which wasn't the case at all before the sanctions, and which I am sure will prove to be a formidable competitor to other semiconductor companies out there.

Because other countries have been paying attention here. They now know that it's super dangerous to source semiconductors with Western firms as the US won't hesitate to weaponize the industry for geopolitical ends. So they'll turn to Chinese firms...

What about Huawei's new phone? You can absolutely bet Huawei will end up eating a significant market share from Apple - as was the case before the sanctions. Especially in China where patriotic Chinese will undoubtedly rush to buy the phone, now a symbol of China's technological might.

So it's lose, lose, lose for the US. Much more loss than if they hadn't done any of their aggressive actions against Huawei or China's chip sector.

Which again goes to show just how utterly pointless this new "cold war" is. Had the US decided to remain in engagement mode instead of "extreme competition" mode (as they call it), they'd have been much better off.

In a word: hubris.
Image And this 👇 Of course. For many Western chip-related firms China was 40-50% of their revenue. Let me tell you: their future market share in China isn't looking too good for them right now, and that's the understatement of the century...
Aug 31, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Ask yourself why they want to forbid you to travel to Xinjiang...

Because it destroys the narrative - it has to becomes "what you're seeing isn't real" - as argued in this article: "[you] only [see] a Uyghur identity permitted by the Chinese state" 🤦
theguardian.com/world/2023/aug… It's also incredibly insulting: you're apparently way too stupid to be trusted with your own eyes...

And ironically Orwellian: 'The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.'
Aug 27, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
I’ve seen this article 👇 on “The Qing Conception of Strategic Space” authored by historian James Millward make the rounds on China Twitter so I decided to take a look. Link here:

And boy oh boy, what an insane piece of historical revisionism!

A short 🧵 strategicspace.nbr.org/the-qing-conce…
Image One of craziest claims, central to the author’s thesis, is that “since the 19th century, Han settlers, with state backing, have colonized as much territory as Europeans did in forming the United States, often displacing native peoples in much the same way as white Americans did.”