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Navigating the Vortex

Navigating the Vortex

Auteur(s): Lucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff
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 We live in a complex and ever-changing world. To navigate the vortex we must adapt to change quickly, think critically, and make sound decisions. Lucy Marcus & Stefan Wolff talk about business, politics, society, culture, and what it all means.

www.navigatingthevortex.comLucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff Politique Sciences politiques Économie
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  • China’s plans for a new world order are built on a fragile consensus

    China’s plans for a new world order are built on a fragile consensus
    Sep 4 2025
    China’s president, Xi Jinping, has been busy on the diplomatic front. China has just hosted the largest annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), followed by an impressive military parade to mark the defeat of Japan in the second world war — all accompanied by key bilateral meetings with heads of state from like-minded countries. You could be forgiven for thinking Beijing is now the diplomatic capital of the world.But look behind the facade of bonhomie on display in the Chinese capital, and the unity underpinning a new China-led global order looks a lot more fragile than Xi Jinping would have you believe.The most important result of the SCO summit on August 31 and September 1 was not the fact that leaders adopted a lengthy communique and more than 20 joint statements on issues as diverse as artificial intelligence, green industries, and international trade. What mattered most was the attendance of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the rapprochement between New Delhi and Beijing.This was Modi’s first visit to China in seven years. That his country’s relations with China continue to improve was made clear by Modi’s positive assessment of his bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping as “fruitful”. The Indian prime minister also emphasised that the bilateral relationship with China is based on “mutual respect, mutual interest and mutual sensitivity”, thereby acknowledging that not all of the issues between the two countries are resolved.One of these issues is the relationship with Pakistan. But as an obvious indicator of China trying to pull India closer into the SCO fold, Xi Jinping pushed for the unequivocal condemnation of the terror attacks in Pahalgam in Kashmir in April 2025 in the SCO’s summit declaration. China’s earlier failure to do so, as well as its support for Pakistan in the military confrontation between New Delhi and Islamabad, had soured relations with India and prevented India’s defence minister from signing a similar communique at a meeting of SCO defence ministers in June.Modi’s attendance also provided the opportunity for him and Xi Jinping to demonstrate their continuing support for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. As far as alliances go, one between China, Russia, and India would be a formidable factor in the remaking of the international order. But while there was an impressive display of solidarity between the three leaders, they are united by little more than their opposition to the current US-dominated order.There was plenty of talk from Xi Jinping at the SCO summit about reforming the current system of international affairs — the latest blueprint of which is his Global Governance Initiative, which aims to transform the UN into a Beijing-led instrument. But the prospects of rapid change are limited.China and India are both deeply integrated into the current international financial and economic system — as are most other SCO member states and partner countries. They may all resent the current dismantling of trade relations by US tariff policies but — with the partial exception of China’s dominance of the global rare-earth trade — they have little leverage.Another problem for Xi Jinping is the fact his various forays into reshaping the international system are at best complementary and at worst contradictory. There is some overlap between the SCO and his other signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But while the BRI is global and primarily aims to extend China’s influence by economic means, the SCO is much more regional in outlook and focused on security.Add to that the Brics group — with China, Russia, and India plus Brazil and South Africa at its core, and another five recent joiners primarily from the Middle East and Africa — and China’s approach to remaking the international system begins to look less like a coherent strategy. It resembles more a series of trial balloons — with even Xi Jinping unsure which of them will eventually pave the way to China’s global leadership role.A final issue for Xi Jinping is that he is limited in his choice of partners. At the SCO summit in Tianjin, it was all about relations between China, Russia, and India. China and Russia then proceeded to finalise their long-overdue agreement on the Power of Siberia II pipeline as part of their bilateral relationship-building. At the victory parade in Beijing, the fledgling alliance between China, Russia, and North Korea seemed to take centre stage. The absence of Modi from the latter two is telling: on the one hand, relations between Moscow and Beijing are at a different level than their individual bilateral ties with New Delhi and rather exclusive; while India, on the other hand, does not want to be too closely associated with North Korea.Clearly, Xi Jinping has different options in how he pursues his challenge to the current world order — but some are mutually exclusive. Not everyone in his orbit is comfortable...
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    8 min
  • Xi, Putin, and Modi will showcase their unity at the SCO summit in Tianjin

    Xi, Putin, and Modi will showcase their unity at the SCO summit in Tianjin
    Aug 27 2025
    The upcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Tianjin, China, from August 31 to September 1, 2025, will be the organisation’s largest gathering of heads of state to date. It comes at a time when the existing liberal international order is rapidly disintegrating — but rather than offering a concrete new order, the SCO demonstrates the persistent difficulties that anti-liberal powers, such as China and Russia, have in agreeing and implementing a credible alternative.Founded in Shanghai in 2001 with just six members — Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan — the SCO has grown rapidly over the past decade. India and Pakistan joined in 2017, Iran in 2023, and Belarus in 2024. Beyond these now ten member states, the SCO also has two observers — Afghanistan and Mongolia — and 14 dialogue partners, including Turkey, Egypt, Armenia and Azerbaijan, several of the Gulf states, and a number of other Asian states. If measured by the population of its core member states, it is the world’s largest regional security organisation.Size clearly matters, but in the case of the SCO it creates problems instead of contributing to their resolution. The organisation did little in response to escalating tensions between India and Pakistan in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Kashmir that brought the two long-standing rivals to the brink of nuclear confrontation. It took US mediation to de-escalate the violence.The SCO’s subsequent failure to condemn cross-border terrorism explicitly in a joint statement of the meeting of defence ministers at the end of June led to India refusing to sign it.When Israel attacked Iran, the SCO issued a strongly-worded condemnation of the attacks. But India distanced itself officially from the SCO statement.These and other simmering tensions, such as between India and China over a new dam project in Tibet, are likely going to be papered over at the SCO summit in Tianjin. China’s president, Xi Jinping, will be keen to demonstrate Chinese leadership of a large coalition of like-minded countries who oppose the hitherto US-led liberal international order.The theme of this year’s summit — “Upholding the Shanghai Spirit: SCO on the Move” — sounds more like an aspirational plea to member states, observers, and dialogue partners rather than a concrete plan for action. The so-called Shanghai spirit — a hazy mixture of standard Chinese talking points about mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation — is little more than empty rhetoric. It is also very fragile. Two member states — India and Pakistan — have recently gone to war with each other. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been involved in several full-scale violent confrontations since they became dialogue partners almost a decade ago. And if they have now embraced the Shanghai spirit, they did so, ironically, in Washington and after both their relations with Russia significantly soured.Nor does the SCO have much of a track record of constructive involvement in internal conflicts in its member states and dialogue partners, such as Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar. This is even more obvious in the case of Afghanistan where Russia’s recent official recognition of the Taliban government poses yet another challenge to the SCO. China has cautiously welcomed Russia’s recognition but not followed suit, while several Central Asian member states of the SCO already have a wide range of economic ties with Afghanistan. But Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states remain deeply ambivalent about the Taliban regime.It is also worth noting that the SCO’s very selective commitment to the Shanghai spirit does not extend to relations between the organisation and non-member states. That much is evident from the SCO’s lack of condemnation of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Previous summits in 2022, 2023 and 2024 produced lengthy declarations of intent — but little follow-through. It is, therefore, difficult to see where the SCO will move.The marked difference to these previous summits is, of course, Donald Trump’s return to the White House. On the one hand, Trump has demonstrated the near-irrelevance of the SCO as a security player compared to the indispensability of the United States when it comes to managing crises, such as those between India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Cambodia and Thailand.On the other hand, Trump’s weaponisation of trade has created a new dynamic within the SCO that might see the organisation’s most powerful countries — China, Russia and India — align more closely against the United States. Sanctions against Russia, however unlikely they may be to be fully implemented by Trump, are still on the table. Heavy tariffs have now been imposed on India for continuing to buy Russian oil. And the US trade war with China is only paused but not settled.For their own sake, and even more so for the sake of their actual and potential ...
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    7 min
  • Transatlantic unity at the White House disguises lack of progress towards just peace for Ukraine

    Transatlantic unity at the White House disguises lack of progress towards just peace for Ukraine
    Aug 19 2025
    At a high-stakes meeting in the White House on August 18, the US president, Donald Trump, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, hammered out the broad contours of a potential peace agreement with Russia. Their encounter was in marked contrast to their last joint press conference in Washington back in February which ended with Zelensky’s humiliation by Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance.The outcomes of the American and Ukrainian presidential get-together, and the subsequent, expanded meeting with leaders of the European coalition of the willing, was also a much more professional affair than Trump’s summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on August 15. What’s more, the results of the meetings in the White House, while not perfect, are a much better response to the reality in which Ukrainians have lived for the past more than three-and-a-half years than what transpired during and after the brief press conference in Alaska.This relatively positive outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Over the weekend, Trump put out a statement on his Truth Social platform that “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately” — provided that he would accept Ukraine’s loss of Crimea to Russia and forego his country’s future Nato membership. This, and similar ideas of land swaps between Russia and Ukraine, were roundly rejected by Zelensky. Importantly, Kyiv’s position was fully backed by Ukraine’s European allies, with leaders of the coalition of the willing issuing a joint statement on August 16 to the effect that any territorial concessions were Ukraine’s to make or refuse.On Nato membership, the statement was more equivocal. European leaders asserted that Russia should not be allowed to have a veto on Ukraine’s choices. But with Nato membership often used as a shorthand for credible security guarantees for Ukraine as part of any future peace agreement, the reiteration of the commitment that the coalition of the willing as “ready to play an active role” opened up a pathway to Trump offering “Article 5-like protections” for Ukraine against future Russian aggression and promising “a lot of help when it comes to security”. A possibly emerging deal – some territorial concessions by Ukraine in exchange for peace and joint US and European security guarantees – became more certain during the televised meeting between Trump and his visitors before their closed-door discussions. In different ways, each of the European guests acknowledged the progress that Trump had made towards a settlement and they all emphasised the importance of a joint approach to Russia to make sure that any agreement would bring a just and lasting peace.As an indication that his guests were unwilling to simply accept whatever deal he had brought back with him from his meeting with Putin in Alaska, the US president then interrupted the discussions in the White House to call the Russian president. By then, signals from Russia were far from promising, with Moscow rejecting any Nato troop deployments to Ukraine and singling out Britain as allegedly seeking to undermine the US-Russia peace effort.When the meeting concluded and the different leaders offered their interpretations of what had been agreed two things became clear. First, the Ukrainian side had not folded under pressure from the US, and European leaders, while going out of their way to flatter Trump, held their ground as well. Importantly, Trump had not walked away from the process either but appeared to want to remain engaged.Second, Russia had not given any ground. According to remarks by Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, posted on the Kremlin’s official website, Russia would consider “the possibility of raising the level of representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian parties”. This statement falls short of, but does not rule out, the possibility of the Zelensky-Putin summit, which Trump announced as a major success after the discussions in the White House yesterday.Such a meeting was seen as the next logical step towards peace by all the participants of the White House meeting and would be followed, according to Trump, by what he called “a Trilat” of the Ukrainian, Russian and American presidents. The lack of clear confirmation by Russia that such meetings would indeed happen raises more doubts about the Kremlin’s sincerity.But the fact that a peace process – if it can be called that – remains somewhat intact is a far cry from an actual peace agreement. Little if anything was said in the aftermath of the White House meeting on territorial issues. Pressure on Russia only came up briefly in comments by European leaders, whose ambitions to become formally involved in actual peace negotiations remain a pipe dream for the time being. And despite the initial optimism about security guarantees, no firm commitments were made, with Zelensky only noting “the important signal...
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    7 min
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