标签： Asia

A landmark development in cross-strait diplomatic tensions has forced Taiwan leader Lai Ching-te to scrap a planned overseas trip to Eswatini, marking the first publicly recorded instance of a Taiwanese leader abandoning a foreign journey after multiple countries revoked required overflight access.

Lai was scheduled to travel to the southern African nation, Taiwan’s only remaining diplomatic ally on the continent, to participate in celebrations marking 40 years of King Mswati III’s reign. According to senior Taiwanese officials, three island nations in the Indian Ocean — Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar — withdrew their previously granted overflight permissions following what Taipei describes as “intense pressure” and economic coercion from Beijing.

In a public statement posted to the social platform X, Lai pushed back against Beijing’s actions, framing the permit revocations as clear examples of authoritarian coercion that highlight broader threats to global international order. “No amount of threats or coercion will shake Taiwan’s resolve to engage with the world,” Lai wrote.

For its part, Beijing has rejected accusations of coercion, instead praising the three African countries for upholding the long-standing one-China principle, which forms the foundation of Beijing’s territorial claim to the self-governing island. In official comments, a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office expressed “high appreciation” for the position taken by Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs went further, reiterating that no official title of “President of the Republic of China” holds any international recognition, in a direct rebuke of Lai’s status. Both Seychelles and Madagascar have publicly confirmed their decision to revoke permits stems from their non-recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state, aligning with Beijing’s position.

Eswatini’s government has expressed regret over the canceled visit but emphasized that the disruption will not alter the long-standing bilateral diplomatic ties between the two nations. Currently, only 12 United Nations member states around the world recognize Taiwan diplomatically, most of them small island nations in Latin America and the Pacific.

Cross-strait relations have remained strained since Lai took office, with Beijing repeatedly labeling Lai a “troublemaker” who threatens cross-strait peace. Beijing maintains that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory, a position it has defended for decades, and has not ruled out the use of military force to bring the island under its control. Most of the international community, including the United Nations, recognizes the one-China principle, though many Western nations maintain unofficial economic and cultural ties with Taiwan.

The cancellation has already drawn criticism from U.S. political leaders. The majority staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement on X affirming that it “stood with Taiwan against this blatant coercion.” U.S. Senator Ted Cruz also publicly condemned Mauritius’s decision, claiming the country was “determined to ally with the Chinese Communist Party.”

Hours before a two-week U.S.-Iran ceasefire was scheduled to expire on Tuesday, former U.S. President Donald Trump announced a vague extension of the truce, throwing the future of planned bilateral peace talks into deep uncertainty.

In an official White House statement, Trump explained his decision to extend the ceasefire came at a formal request from Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. He argued that Iran’s ruling government is “seriously fractured” and requires additional time to coalesce around a unified negotiating position to present to U.S. mediators. As part of the extension, Trump confirmed he has ordered U.S. military forces to maintain the ongoing naval blockade of Iran, with the truce remaining in place until Iran submits its formal proposal.

The two-week initial ceasefire has largely held across the region, bringing a much-needed reprieve to both sides. For Iran, which has endured heavy airstrikes from the U.S., Israel, and U.S.-aligned Gulf Arab allies, the truce halted widespread destructive attacks. For oil-rich Gulf states, which faced thousands of incoming Iranian ballistic missile and drone strikes in preceding weeks, the ceasefire similarly ended persistent security threats.

Instead of continuing offensive strikes, Trump adopted a strategy of naval blockade, framed as a response to Tehran’s seizure of partial control over the Strait of Hormuz and its selective permission for commercial vessels to transit the critical waterway. On Tuesday, the U.S. military carried out its first high-profile action under the blockade: U.S. troops boarded the crude oil tanker *Tifani* in the Indian Ocean via helicopter, seizing the vessel that had already been sanctioned for transporting Iranian crude oil to China. The U.S. Department of War published official footage of the operation to the public.

Speaking to CNBC on Tuesday, Trump asserted that the blockade was delivering successful results, claiming “We totally control the Strait, just so you understand, for all the fake news out there.” However, his claim directly contradicts reporting from independent maritime intelligence groups, which confirm Iranian commercial vessels continue to transit the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman – areas where U.S. naval forces are concentrated. Leading maritime publication Lloyd’s List reported that at least 26 vessels have successfully bypassed the U.S. blockade to date, including 11 tankers carrying Iranian oil cargo.

This conflicting account is just the latest example of inconsistent messaging from the Trump administration on its Iran policy. The collapse of planned talks has further muddied the outlook: just this week, global attention was focused on Vice President JD Vance, who was widely expected to travel to Pakistan for a second round of direct negotiations with Iranian delegates. CNN later reported Tuesday afternoon that Vance remained at the White House alongside Trump, joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for emergency consultations.

Iran has already ruled out participation in the planned talks, blaming excessive U.S. demands for the breakdown. Semi-official Iranian news agency Tasnim reported Tuesday that Tehran had already canceled plans to send a negotiating delegation to Islamabad, arguing that engaging with U.S. mediators would be a waste of time while Washington continues to obstruct any mutually acceptable agreement.

Tensions have further escalated amid new Iranian threats. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned Tuesday that it would shut down all oil production across the Persian Gulf if any new attacks against Iran are launched from Gulf Arab states. “The southern neighbours should know that if their geography and facilities are used in the service of the enemies to attack the Iranian nation, they should bid farewell to oil production in the Middle East,” Fars News Agency quoted IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Majid Mousavi as saying.

The breakdown of talks has sent a shockwave through the Middle East, reintroducing widespread uncertainty across the region just one week after rising diplomatic optimism. Last week, hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough grew significantly after the Trump administration announced a ceasefire in Lebanon, a core precondition Iran had set for advancing negotiations.

This report was originally compiled by Middle East Eye, an independent outlet specializing in coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.

A sudden diplomatic reversal following recent US-Iran talks in Islamabad has laid bare the dramatic new power dynamic reshaping Iran in the wake of six weeks of coordinated US-Israeli military strikes. On April 17, Iranian foreign minister and lead nuclear negotiator Abbas Araghchi took to the social platform X to announce that the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz was “completely open,” a signal that Tehran was prepared to show flexibility on two sticking points in negotiations: uranium enrichment limits and Iranian support for regional proxy armed groups.

Within days, however, that public outreach was completely reversed following backlash from Iran’s most powerful institution. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander newly appointed as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, filed a formal complaint criticizing Araghchi for deviating from the negotiating mandate set by the IRGC leadership. The entire Iranian negotiating delegation was recalled to Tehran, state-run media launched scathing attacks on Araghchi, warning that his public statement had handed then-US President Donald Trump a political opening to falsely declare victory in the conflict, and the Iranian government issued a new declaration that the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

This high-profile public clash is not an isolated misstep, argues King’s College London defense studies associate professor Andreas Krieg in analysis shared via The Conversation. It is the clearest visible indicator of a permanent power shift that has transformed Iran’s political order: the IRGC now holds total control over all state decision-making, while civilian and traditional religious institutions have been reduced to little more than a ceremonial facade.

The decapitation strikes that opened the US-Israeli military campaign eliminated decades of entrenched Iranian leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening day attack, alongside dozens of his most senior colleagues. Where Iran was once described as a sovereign state with an exceptionally powerful militia, Krieg argues the new reality is the opposite: Iran is now a powerful militia with a state, structured entirely around the IRGC as its core governing authority.

Traditional centers of Iranian power, including the elected civilian government and the senior Shia clergy, have been pushed to the margins as mere front organizations. Even the newly appointed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the late Ali Khamenei, functions only as a symbolic legitimizing figure. Multiple reports confirm Mojtaba Khamenei sustained severe injuries in the strike that killed his father, and he plays no active role in governing the country.

The undisputed holder of power in contemporary Iran is IRGC leader Ahmad Vahidi, a founding member of the corps with decades of experience in Iranian security and politics. The IRGC was founded immediately after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his allies distrusted the existing conventional military and state bureaucracy to protect the new revolutionary order. Over the subsequent 47 years, the IRGC expanded far beyond its original mandate as guardians of the revolution, evolving into an all-encompassing network that spans every sector of Iranian life: it operates a conventional military force, a domestic intelligence apparatus, a multi-billion dollar transnational economic conglomerate, and a regional expeditionary network that projects Iranian power across the Middle East.

Its domestic arm, the Basij militia, enables mass social control across Iran’s population, while the elite Quds Force manages the IRGC’s network of proxy armed groups across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other regional states. Far from dismantling this network, decades of international sanctions against Iran actually strengthened it: sanctions pushed the IRGC to build a sprawling web of front companies for illicit trade and patronage networks that enriched IRGC-aligned elites, creating a parallel state that gradually outgrew the formal civilian government in both power and influence.

The IRGC’s organizational structure is built around a “mosaic defense doctrine,” a decentralized network design with a centralized core that sets strategic direction, surrounded by semi-autonomous cells that can continue operating even after decapitation strikes that eliminate top leadership. This structure was explicitly designed to allow the IRGC to keep functioning even when facing large-scale military attacks targeting its command structure, a design that has been vindicated by recent events.

After IRGC chief Mohammad Pakpour was killed on the opening day of the conflict, Vahidi— a former Iranian interior minister and founding IRGC figure— stepped into the top role in an emergency appointment. He has since consolidated full control over Iranian governance as civilian institutions have been hollowed out by war losses. With the new supreme leader incapacitated and the clergy sidelined, Vahidi and his coalition of hardline IRGC commanders and security council allies, including Ali Akbar Ahmadian and Zolghadr, now set all negotiating mandates and red lines for ongoing ceasefire and nuclear talks with the United States.

The IRGC’s non-negotiable red lines are well-defined: it will not abandon its uranium enrichment program entirely, it will preserve its ballistic missile program and its regional network of proxy groups (known as the “axis of resistance”), it demands full lifting of international sanctions and the unfreezing of billions of dollars in Iranian overseas assets. Only narrow technical details, such as enrichment level limits, sanctions lifting timelines, and the formal language of any final agreement, are open to negotiation.

The decimation of pragmatic Iranian political figures in Israeli strikes has cleared the last remaining obstacles to IRGC control. Former Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, a leading pragmatic voice, was killed by an Israeli strike on March 16, leaving no prominent opposition to the IRGC’s hardline agenda. While the war accelerated the IRGC’s consolidation of power, Krieg notes this shift was decades in the making: the IRGC spent generations entrenching its influence across Iranian institutions, capturing economic assets, and building up its coercive capacity. The war only provided the final opportunity to eliminate competing power centers, most notably the senior clergy, and solidify total control.

This new power structure has profound implications for ongoing US-Iran negotiations. US negotiators are not bargaining with independent civilian diplomats; every Iranian negotiator operates on a short leash held directly by the IRGC leadership. Any progress in talks cannot be measured by public statements from Iranian diplomats, but only by what the IRGC is actually willing to implement in practice.

The US-Israeli decapitation strategy failed to break the IRGC’s structure, and the hardline network now finds itself emboldened, as it recognizes the White House is desperate to secure a diplomatic exit from the conflict. Krieg argues that assumptions the IRGC will quickly capitulate to US demands are unfounded wishful thinking.

Recent events have confirmed that the IRGC now governs Iran as a militia with a state, using the formal civilian and religious institutions of the Islamic Republic as a public outer layer. While there remains space for negotiation to reach a mutually acceptable agreement, the US administration must approach talks with a clear-eyed understanding of the IRGC’s non-negotiable red lines, and the resilience of a hardened network that has repeatedly demonstrated it can absorb severe punishment and maintain control.

On Tuesday, two connected moves by the Japanese government sparked sharp condemnation from China and drew criticism from both domestic and international peace advocates, with observers warning that Tokyo’s accelerating remilitarization trajectory demands heightened global vigilance against resurgent Japanese neo-militarism.

Early this week, Japan’s cabinet officially approved revisions to the country’s Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology, along with associated implementation guidelines. The policy change clears legal and procedural barriers for the export of lethal weaponry, eliminating the longstanding requirement for prior parliamentary approval before such shipments can move forward.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun emphasized that this latest policy shift, paired with a string of other destabilizing developments in Japan’s military and security sphere, directly contradicts Tokyo’s repeated public claims of commitment to peace and its stated adherence to an exclusively defense-oriented national security policy. He recalled that Japan’s brutal wartime aggression and atrocities committed against China and other Asian nations gave rise to a series of binding international postwar legal frameworks, including the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation, and Japan’s own Instrument of Surrender. These documents explicitly require that Japan be completely disarmed and barred from maintaining industrial capacity that could enable large-scale rearmament. Furthermore, Japan’s own post-war Constitution imposes strict limits on the country’s military strength, its right to engage in belligerency, and its right to wage offensive war. For decades after World War II, Japan maintained tight restrictions on military expansion and arms exports under its exclusively defense-oriented principle, with a 1976 official policy stance committing the peaceful nation to strict caution on all arms exports.

Guo noted that a growing community of experts and analysts share deep concerns that Japan is actively rebuilding its wartime military infrastructure and positioning itself to become a global exporter of lethal arms, with tangible steps toward accelerated remilitarization already well underway. In recent years alone, Japan has dramatically expanded its annual military budget, deployed intermediate-range offensive missiles, systematically rolled back arms export restrictions, proposed sweeping amendments to its pacifist post-war Constitution, and pushed to abandon its longstanding three non-nuclear principles.

Lyu Yaodong, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that Tokyo’s primary justification for the new arms export rule changes — a claimed need to counter a so-called “China threat” — has no basis in fact. Lyu explained that the actual goals of the policy shift are twofold: to steadily erode the legal constraints imposed by Japan’s pacifist Constitution, and to open up new economic opportunities for Japanese defense contractors amid long-running domestic economic stagnation.

Atsushi Koketsu, professor emeritus at Yamaguchi University, echoed these concerns, noting that Japan’s national security policy is increasingly being restructured around the misleading framing of “preparing for war in the name of peace”. For decades, the prospect of a remilitarized Japan has been a core source of concern for China and other Asian nations that suffered from Japanese wartime aggression, and that long-feared outcome is now becoming a tangible reality, Koketsu added.

Even within Japan, opposition to the policy change remains strong. On Tuesday, hundreds of Japanese citizens who oppose constitutional revision gathered outside Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s official office, holding protest signs reading “Do not let Japan become a war merchant” and “No to exporting lethal weapons”.

In a second provocative move that drew harsh Chinese condemnation on the same day, Prime Minister Takaichi sent a ritual offering to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, the iconic symbolic center of Japanese wartime militarism and aggression that honors 14 convicted Class-A World War II war criminals.

Guo confirmed that Beijing has formally lodged solemn diplomatic representations with Tokyo over the offering, stating that Japan’s repeated provocative actions tied to the Yasukuni Shrine amount to a deliberate attempt to evade accountability for wartime atrocities, an affront to global justice, a direct provocation to the millions of people victimized by Japanese aggression, and a fundamental challenge to the internationally recognized outcome of World War II. These actions, Guo added, have been consistently condemned and rejected by the international community.

Guo stressed that Japan now faces a clear choice: it can either allow the specter of pre-war militarism to spread, distort historical fact, and continue whitewashing its aggression-era crimes, or it can offer a deep, sincere reckoning with its wartime history, build a correct public narrative of the past, and earn back the trust of its Asian neighbors and the broader global community. Peace-loving forces across the world cannot allow resurgent neo-militarism to threaten regional peace and stability, Guo said, urging the entire international community to maintain close vigilance against Japan’s growing historical revisionism.