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In recent weeks the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda and disinformation blitz around COVID-19 has drawn increasing attention, and with good reason. In addition to promoting a narrative about Beijing’s global leadership around the pandemic, the Chinese government has adopted Russian disinformation tactics in promoting conspiracy theories purporting that COVID-19 originated in Europe, the United States, and beyond to distract from its failed initial response to contain the outbreak from spreading beyond Wuhan.
In a series of speeches this summer, senior officials in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump have cast the United States and China as antagonists in a new Cold War. Speaking to the Arizona Commerce Authority in June, U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien compared Chinese President Xi Jinping directly to the Soviet dictator in power when the actual Cold War began: “Let us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor.”
Mounting tensions between the United States and China is increasingly testing Europe’s resilience. Both powers are stepping up pressure on European countries on issues and policies they consider vital to their strategic interests. This is particularly noteworthy regarding the role of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in providing 5G networks to European countries. In July, US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, met with his European counterparts in Paris to urge the exclusion of Huawei from European 5G networks. Equally, the Chinese government has stepped up pressure on European countries, particularly Germany, not to exclude the Chinese operator from the development of the next generation of mobile internet. Earlier in the year, Chancellor Angela Merkel had resisted calls to exclude Huawei but is coming under increasing pressure within her cabinet to consider European suppliers.
China, sensing America’s internal political difficulties amidst social justice protests and a poor COVID-19 response, is taking off the gloves: Beijing is said to be in the final stages of approving a $400 billion economic and security deal with Tehran. In addition to massive infrastructure investments, the agreement envisions closer cooperation on defense and intelligence sharing, and is rumored to include discounts for Iranian oil. If finalized, the PRC would gain massive influence in this geopolitically critical region, and simultaneously throw a lifeline to the embattled Mullah Regime.
Coronavirus does not care about ideology or geopolitics, and yet the pandemic has long been a catalyst for the rivalry between the major powers, throwing the complex geopolitical situation into sharp relief. The U.S., already in retreat, is mainly preoccupied with itself. Meanwhile, China is taking a tougher stance and is driving its global agenda forward with determination. This has brought home all the more clearly the fact that Europe must become more resilient and that it urgently requires a clear compass, also in terms of its approach to China.
In mid-July, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were hijacked by a small group of hackers, apparently led by a teenager in central Florida. They were able to take over some of the social media service’s most prominent handles—including those of Kanye West, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—and use them to scam hundreds of people out of a combined $118,000 in bitcoin. It was the biggest security breach in Twitter’s history, and a stunning embarrassment for the company.
When the U.S. president used his power to target immigrants, the press, and his political opponents, the sheer overreach of his actions shocked many citizens. Tensions among the country’s political leaders had been escalating for years. Embroiled in one intense conflict after another, both sides had grown increasingly distrustful of each other. Every action by one camp provoked a greater counterreaction from the other, sometimes straining the limits of the Constitution. Fights and mob violence often followed.
The foreign policy apparatus of the United States has a significant issue of hubris. It also has a structural problem. The two are deeply intertwined. While a lot can still happen in the next three months, it looks like Joe Biden’s team will win the presidency in November. Such a victory would signal not just consent for Biden and the Democratic party, but exhaustion at the last four years of endless dramas and politicization. That wellspring of exhaustion isn’t just from Trump, but from the American political system, and a key challenge for Biden will be to demonstrate at the outset he is different. One way to do that is to show that government actually works, and rely on careerists to fill a much larger portion of the foreign policy key positions at the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, both domestically and at embassies abroad. 
Covid-19 has shone a spotlight on another, potentially global, threat: biological warfare. By highlighting the dangers and consequences of pandemic disease, Covid-19 raises questions about what it would mean if a virus like this were used deliberately as a weapon. While there is a long-standing fear that actors would use bioweapons, biological warfare has frequently struggled to find a place on the political agenda. The reason for this lies in what we know about the threat – or rather, what we don’t.
On March 30, 2001, US President George W. Bush announced the United States was leaving the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Eventually, this move signalized the regime’s end. On July 7, 2020, President Donald Trump notified the United Nations that the US was leaving the World Health Organization during the COVID-19 epidemic (by then, with more than 10 million infections worldwide, 3 million-plus in the US). The move could further weaken an organization under fire since the announcement of an international health emergency earlier that year on January 30. Within days, the WHO launched an independent investigation on its handling of the epidemic, after admitting delays in releasing critical data and reviewing the possibility of airborne contagion. Across the two decades that set apart Kyoto’s demise from a new disease from Wuhan, international relations experienced a steady institutional retreat. The zeitgeist of a new century shows a reversal of the late-1990s hopes spurred by the end of the Cold War and Berlin Wall’s fall. In this sense, COVID-19 was no game-changer. It built upon already established trends.
China's rapid pace of dam constructions that includes at least eight new ones on the Brahmaputra River in Tibet has sparked concerns about the Chinese attempting to tame India's water supply. The proposed dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet are close to the Indian border in Arunachal Pradesh.
On the evening of August 6, President Trump issued a pair of executive orders involving Chinese companies operating in the United States, one targeting TikTok and another targeting WeChat. As any teenager can tell you, some form of action against TikTok has been anticipated for a while. Indeed, I wrote a primer on the potentially-relevant legal frameworks for Lawfare on Sunday, August 2. Consider this a sequel, picking up the story where the primer left off.
Here are things that have happened, so far, in 2020. The Earth recorded its hottest January ever. Australia burned. A pandemic killed more than half a million people and left their funerals unattended. Tens of millions of people, perhaps the largest social movement in U.S. history, took to the streets — and transformed, in the process, America’s perception of itself. Then, there were the murder hornets.