MINXIN PEI: China’s Deepening Geopolitical Hole.

China is fast losing friends just when it needs them most. In the last few months alone, China’s relations with India have suffered a devastating blow after a bloody border clash left at least 20 Indian soldiers (and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers) dead. To punish Australia for daring to call for an international investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, China imposed tariffs on Australian barley and threatened other punitive measures. On July 14, China’s foreign ministry denounced Japan’s recent Defense White Paper in unusually harsh language, raising doubts about the rapprochement Xi has been trying to engineer with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Chinese leaders have only themselves to blame for their growing international isolation. With an inflated sense of their power, they have overplayed a weak hand and driven friendly or neutral countries such as the UK, Canada, India, and Australia into the arms of the US, now China’s principal geopolitical adversary.

Read the whole thing.

I wrote here and at VodkaPundit years ago that China’s neighbors in East and South Asia and the Pacific would naturally gravitate towards the US as Beijing’s power grew — but that was an exceptionally easy call.

What was impossible to see ten years ago was that Xi’s haste and ruthlessness would frighten countries as distant from Beijing as the UK and Canada.