Are ‘like-minded countries' now more diverse than ever?
In recent years, the term 'like-minded countries' has often been used as a shorthand to mean the
United States and its allies. But lately, the definition appears to have been expanded to include simply those with similar interests – even if they stand at opposing sides of the spectrum.
Used by commentators and academics to describe 'the West', 'like-minded countries' refers to states that share similar values such as democracy, human rights, the rule of law and a rules-based international order.
During the
Joe Biden administration, Washington frequently invoked the phrase to refer to preferred partners for international collaboration.
These include close allies and partners such as
Canada , the
United Kingdom , Australia, Japan and South Korea, Nato states which share democratic values and security concerns, as well as important Asia-Pacific partners such as India,
the Philippines
Vietnam and
Singapore
'The term is used as a less historically and geographically fraught synonym for the grouping that might otherwise be called 'the West',' Lowy Institute's Melissa Conley Tyler and Megan Vu wrote last year.
Jens Stoltenberg (right) shakes hands with the new Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels on October 1, last year. Photo: ReutersY
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
2 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
In Los Angeles, Asian-Americans call for solidarity with Latinos against ICE raids
The Asian immigrants being targeted were generally people who were convicted of a crime after arriving in the US, making them subject to deportation after their release from jail or prison. In most cases, ICE never followed through because the immigrants had lived in the US long enough that their home countries no longer recognised them as citizens. In recent months, a number of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants whose deportation orders had been stayed in some cases for decades have been told that those orders would now be enforced. Dozens of Southeast Asian immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange counties whose deportation orders had been on indefinite hold have been detained after showing up for routine check-ins at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, according to immigration lawyers and advocacy groups. Organisers say many Asian immigrants have already been affected by the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants working in the country without documentation. As federal immigration raids continue to upend life in Los Angeles, Asian-American leaders were rallying their communities to raise their voices in support of Latinos, who have been the primary targets of the enforcement sweeps, warning that neighbourhoods frequented by Asian immigrants could be next. 'Our community is much more silent, but we are being detained in really high numbers,' said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. 'There's such a stigma and fear that, unlike the Latinx community that wants to fight and speak out about the injustices, our community's first reaction is to go down and get more and more hidden.' On Thursday, more than a half-dozen leaders representing Thai, Japanese and South Asian communities held a news conference in Little Tokyo urging community members to stand together and denounce the federal action as an overreach. President Donald Trump came into office in January vowing to target violent criminals for deportation. But amid pressure to raise deportation numbers, administration officials in recent months have shifted their focus to farmworkers, landscapers, street vendors and other day labourers, many of whom have been working in the country for decades. While an estimated 79 per cent of undocumented residents in LA County were natives of Mexico and Central America, Asian immigrants make up the second-largest group, constituting 16 per cent of people in the county without legal authorisation, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Across the US, Indians make up the third-largest group of undocumented residents, behind Mexicans and Salvadoreans. A sign on a boarded-up restaurant in the Little Tokyo neighbourhood on June 19. Photo: AFP According to the Pew Research Centre, the LA metropolitan area was home to the largest populations of Cambodian, Korean, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese people in the US. So far, the highest-profile raids in Southern California have centred on Latino neighbourhoods, targeting car washes, restaurants, home improvement stores, churches and other locales where undocumented residents gather and work. But Asian businesses have not been immune. A raid outside a Home Depot in Hollywood happened near Thai Town, where organisers have seen ICE agents patrolling the streets. In late May, Department of Homeland Security agents raided a Los Angeles-area nightclub, arresting 36 people they said were Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in the country without authorisation. In Little Bangladesh, immigration agents recently detained 16 people outside a grocery store, said Manjusha P. Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 community-based organisations. 'They will come for us even more in the coming days and weeks,' Kulkarni said. 'So we are only protected when we're in solidarity with our fellow Angelenos.' From June 1 to 10, at the start of the federal sweeps, ICE data show that 722 people were arrested in the Los Angeles region. The figures were obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a repository of enforcement data at UC Berkeley Law. A couple visits Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, California. Photo: AFP A Los Angeles Times analysis found that 69 per cent of those arrested during that period had no criminal convictions. Nearly 48 per cent were Mexican, 16 per cent were from Guatemala and 8 per cent from El Salvador. Forty-seven of the 722 individuals detained – or about 6 per cent – were from Asian countries. 'We know the fear is widespread and it is deep,' said assemblymember Mike Fong, a Democrat whose district takes in Monterey Park and west San Gabriel Valley, areas with large Asian immigrant populations. Los Angeles City Council members Nithya Raman and Ysabel Jurado spoke of the repercussions the raids were having on immigrant communities. Raman is Indian-American, and Jurado is Filipino-American. Jurado said undocumented Filipinos make up a sizeable portion of the region's carers, tending to elderly people and young children. 'Their work reflects the deepest values of our communities: compassion, service and interdependence,' Jurado said. 'Their labour is essential, and their humanity must be honoured.' Jurado and Raman called on the federal government to end the raids. 'This is such an important moment to speak out and to ensure that the Latino community does not feel alone,' Raman said. 'I also want to make it clear to every single person who is Asian-American, these aren't just raids on others. They're raids on us.' Advertisement
Asia Times
2 hours ago
- Asia Times
NATO summit shows Europe and US no longer have a common enemy
Mark Rutte had an unenviable task at the Hague summit this week. The NATO secretary-general had to work with diverging American and European views of current security threats. After Rutte made extraordinary efforts at highly deferential, overt flattery of Donald Trump to secure crucial outcomes for the alliance, he seems to have succeeded for now. But what this meeting and the run-up have made increasingly clear is that the US and Europe no longer perceive themselves as having a single common enemy. NATO was established in 1949 as a defensive alliance against the acknowledged threat from the USSR. This defined the alliance through the Cold War until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, NATO has focused on Moscow as the major threat to international peace. But the increasingly bellicose China is demanding more attention from the US. There are some symbolic moves that signal how things are changing. Every NATO summit declaration since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has used the same form of words: 'We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and are committed to upholding the rules-based international order.' The declaration published during the Hague summit on June 25 conspicuously does not mention either. Indeed, in a departure from recent declarations, the five paragraphs of the Hague summit declaration are brutally short and focused entirely on portraying the alliance solely in terms of military capability and economic investment to sustain that. No mention of international law and order this time. This appears to be a carefully orchestrated output of a deliberately shortened summit designed to contain Trump's unpredictable interventions. This also seems symptomatic of a widening division between the American strategic trajectory and the security interests perceived by Canada and the European members of NATO. That this declaration was so short, and so focused on such a narrow range of issues suggests there were unusually entrenched differences that could not be surmounted. Since the onslaught of the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the NATO allies have been united in their criticism of Russia and support for Ukraine; until now. Since January, the Trump administration has not authorized any military aid to Ukraine and significantly reduced material support to Ukraine and criticism of Russia. Trump has sought to end the war rapidly on terms effectively capitulating to Russian aggression; his proposal suggests recognizing Russia's control over Crimea and de facto control over some other occupied territories (Luhansk, parts of Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Kherson) He has also suggested Ukraine would not join NATO but might receive security guarantees and the right to join the EU. Meanwhile, European allies have sought to fund and support Ukraine's defensive efforts, increasing aid and military support, and continuing to ramp up sanctions. Another sign of the differing priorities of Europe and Canada versus the US was the decision by Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense, to step back from leadership of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an ad-hoc coalition of states worldwide providing military support to Ukraine. Hegseth also symbolically failed to attend the group's pre-summit meeting in June. Trump has long been adamant that NATO members should meet their 2014 commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defense, and Rutte recognized that. In 2018, Trump suggested that this should be increased to 4 or 5% but this was dismissed as unreasonable. Now, in a decision which indicates increasing concern about both Russia as a threat and US support, NATO members (except for Spain) have agreed to increase spending to 5% of GDP on defense over the next 10 years. NATO's Article 3 requires states to maintain and develop their capacity to resist attack. However, since 2022, it has become increasingly apparent that many NATO members are unprepared for any major military engagement. At the same time, they are increasingly feeling that Russia is more of a threat on their doorsteps. There has been recognition, particularly among the Baltic states, Germany, France and the UK, that they need to increase their military spending and preparedness. For the US to focus more on China, US forces will shift a greater percentage of the US Navy to the Pacific. It will also assign its most capable new ships and aircraft to the region and increase general presence operations, training and developmental exercises, and engagement and cooperation with allied and other navies in the western Pacific. To do this US forces will need to reduce commitments in Europe, and European allies must replace those capabilities in order to sustain deterrence against Russia. The bedrock of the NATO treaty, Article 5, is commonly paraphrased as 'an attack on one is an attack on all.' On his way to the Hague summit, Trump seemed unsure about the US commitment to NATO. Asked to clarify this at the summit, he stated: 'I stand with it [Article 5]. That's why I'm here. If I didn't stand with it, I wouldn't be here.' Lord Ismay, the first secretary-general of NATO, famously (if apocryphally) suggested that the purpose of the alliance was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. Germany is now an integral part of NATO, and the Americans are in, if distracted. But there are cracks, and Rutte will have his hands full managing Trump's declining interest in protecting Europe if he is to keep the Russians at bay. Andrew Corbett is a senior lecturer in defense studies at King's College London. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
South China Morning Post
3 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
US-China rare earth agreement, Xi set to miss Brics summit: SCMP's 7 highlights
We have selected seven stories from the SCMP's coverage over the past week that resonated with our readers and shed light on topical issues. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing The United States and China reached a 'framework' agreement on how to facilitate rare earth shipments, implementing a deal based on bilateral trade talks that started last month in Geneva, Switzerland, the White House said. Confirmation of the agreement came shortly after US President Donald Trump said the US had signed a trade deal with Beijing a day earlier, offering no further details. People celebrate the ceasefire between Iran and Israel at Enghelab Square in Tehran, Iran, on June 24. The ceasefire was declared on Tuesday. Photo: Xinhua A frustrated US President Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday that the ceasefire between Iran and Israel remains 'in effect', even as he rebuked both nations for violating it. This public warning followed his earlier castigation of Iran, but particularly close US ally Israel, for launching attacks after the ceasefire, which he had originally announced late Monday. Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend next week's Brics summit in Rio de Janeiro, marking his first-ever absence from the gathering of leading emerging economies, the Post learned from multiple sources on Tuesday.
