Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

• • Watching Asia-Pacific leaders mingle with their European counterparts at the annual NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week, U.S. strategists might well have lit up celebratory cigars.
  • While the media attention in Vilnius inevitably focused on the war in Ukraine, the fate of Sweden’s bid to join and other matters closer to home, the representation of major East Asian democracies at the Western military alliance gathering heralds a major shift, a sign of the rising unity of the U.S.-allied democracies on both flanks of the Eurasian landmass.
  • For the second straight year, leaders of the Asia-Pacific 4 (“AP4”) — Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea — turned up at NATO’s annual summit. The Japanese and South Korean militaries both rank in the world’s top 10 in the latest Global Firepower’s 2023 survey.
  • NATO leaders, in their final summit communique, wrote: “The Indo-Pacific is important for NATO, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security. … We welcome the contribution of our partners in … the region. We will further strengthen our dialogue and cooperation to tackle our shared security challenges.”
  • In a bit of diplomatic irony, it was the warming ties between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that helped accelerate the East-West coalition building against them.
  • “With China and Russia announcing a ‘no-limits partnership’ shortly before the invasion [of Ukraine]…the balancing coalitions at either end of Eurasia became strongly linked together,” said Joel Atkinson, an international politics professor at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

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