ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Francesco Sisci BEIJING - The recent friction between China and the United States over flights of surveillance planes along China's coasts and Beijing's allegations of foreign meddling in the issue of the Hong Kong's elections - a thinly veiled denunciation against the US - show apparent strain in China's trust of Washington. In some ways, then bilateral ties are at a new low, possibly similar to the time in April 2001 when a Chinese plane crashed into a US EP-3 surveillance plane and the EP-3 made an emergency landing on Hainan, an island in southeast China and the country's most important submarine base. Yet before looking at the particular situation, we may want to take a broader approach to some of the issues of power and power management, starting from something dear to the hearts and minds of many, West and East: money. Napoleon said that for war you need three things: money, money, and money. For this reason, he was clear that the battle against his main e

A column of Ukrainian tanks travels in Donetsk region on September 3, 2014.(AFP Photo / Anatolii Stepanov) The Ukrainian president and the heads of the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have said they are ready to order a ceasefire if peace talks in Minsk, Belarus on Friday are successful. "At 14:00 local time (11:00GMT Friday), provided the [Minsk] meeting takes place, I will call on the General Staff to set up a bilateral ceasefire and we hope that the implementation of the peace plan will begin tomorrow," Petro Poroshenko said on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Wales on Thursday. On Wednesday, Poroshenko expressed “great hope” that the peace process in Ukraine will commence in Minsk on September 5, when representatives of Kiev, Moscow and OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) are scheduled to meet. #Ukraine war death toll: 837 soldiers, 3000+ wounded - Security Council http://t.co/4EAnNL9D5O pic.twitter.com/RJJJpRwRfp —

An east-Ukrainian rebel inspects a gun at a destroyed war memorial at Savur-Mohyla, a hill east of the city of Donetsk, August 28, 2014. (Reuters / Maxim Shemetov) The US President says it is now “provable” that "Russian combat forces and tanks" moved into Ukraine. But Kremlin says Obama’s words are in conflict with the State Department that said it has no proof of Russian troops in the area. A statement from the Russian president’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov came in response to Barack Obama’s address to the Baltic States’ leader. Speaking ahead of NATO summit, President Obama said that the US has no doubt that Russian troops are involved in the fighting in eastern Ukraine. "The Russian forces that have now moved into Ukraine aren't on a 'humanitarian' or 'peacekeeping mission.' They are Russian combat forces with Russian weapons in Russian tanks. There are Russian warheads with Russian weapons and Russian tanks. Now, these are the facts. They are prova