标签： Asia

BRUSSELS — In a quiet but significant shift in diplomatic engagement, a five-person Afghan Taliban delegation arrived in Brussels Tuesday for closed-door technical talks with European Union officials, a meeting centered overwhelmingly on accelerating the forced deportation of rejected Afghan asylum seekers and criminal migrants from the 27-nation bloc. The gathering marks only the second formal contact between EU institutions and the Taliban since the group seized control of Kabul in 2021 following the chaotic withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces, and it comes at a moment of growing political pressure from EU member states to tighten migration controls.

Afghans currently make up one of the largest single groups of asylum seekers across the European Union. In recent years, a growing majority of EU national governments have pushed aggressively to expand and speed up deportations for Afghans whose asylum claims have been rejected, as well as those who have committed criminal offenses in their host countries. Data from European officials underscores the urgency driving the talks: as of late 2024, only 2 percent of the nearly 23,000 Afghans ordered to leave the EU have actually complied with deportation orders.

The push for this week’s meeting follows an open letter signed in October by 20 EU member states, drafted in part by Belgian Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt, calling on the European Commission to ramp up collective migration policy action and coordinate formal technical talks with the Taliban on deportation procedures. “We can no longer afford a standstill,” Van Bossuyt said at the time the letter was released. “It is high time for a firm and joint approach, so that Europe can regain control over migration and security.” European Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert confirmed Monday that the talks are a direct response to that member state pressure, noting that leaders are specifically focused on creating pathways to deport individuals convicted of serious crimes who pose potential security risks. The first EU-Taliban technical meeting on this issue was held in Kabul back in January, and the EU has maintained a small permanent staff presence in the Afghan capital since that time.

Notably, no EU member state has formally recognized the Taliban as the legitimate governing authority of Afghanistan, and EU officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize that the meeting does not constitute any shift in that official position. Belgian officials, who as hosts of EU institutions were required to issue visas to the delegation, stressed that the gathering carries no implicit recognition of the Taliban regime. “Belgium cannot confer legitimacy on a regime accused of serious human rights violations,” Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot said in a formal statement. “Making a meeting possible in the framework of our host-state policy does not amount to recognition, does not amount to legitimacy, and does not constitute an invitation by the Belgian government.” Visas issued to the Taliban delegation carry strict conditions: limited 24-hour territorial validity exclusively for Belgium, with no permission to travel to other countries in the Schengen Area’s border-free zone. The talks are also being held off-site, not in any official EU or Belgian government buildings, to reinforce the non-recognition stance. The European Commission has declined repeated requests for additional comment on the details of the closed-door discussions.

The delegation, which includes New Zealand-born Taliban foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi, arrives in Brussels at a moment of dual need for the Taliban regime. Already grappling with crippling international economic sanctions, widespread food insecurity, and a collapsing national economy, the Taliban has absorbed roughly 3 million forcibly repatriated Afghans from neighboring Pakistan and Iran over the past 12 months alone, a wave that has pushed the country’s already catastrophic humanitarian crisis to new breaking points. For the Taliban, engagement with the EU on deportation issues also represents a small but valuable crack in the diplomatic isolation that has isolated the regime since it took power in 2021, with the group eager to chip away at international pariah status and secure greater access to humanitarian and economic support.

The talks have already sparked sharp condemnation from global human rights organizations, which argue that the EU’s push to cooperate with the Taliban on deportations directly undermines the bloc’s own stated human rights commitments, and puts deported Afghans at grave risk under the Taliban’s repressive rule. Since seizing power, the Taliban has imposed sweeping, draconian restrictions on the basic rights of Afghan women and girls, including bans on secondary and higher education, prohibitions on most forms of employment, and strict public dress codes that are enforced with violent penalties.

“Any engagement with the Taliban needs to prioritize protecting human rights and accountability — not deporting people to danger there,” said Fereshta Abbasi, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “EU countries are undermining their credibility by condemning Taliban abuses and pursuing accountability on one hand, while cooperating with the Taliban to forcibly return Afghans on the other.” Eve Geddie, Director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office, echoed that criticism, noting that “The desperate scenes of people — including EU staff — fleeing Afghanistan are a recent memory. It is unconscionable that the EU would now try and deport people to Afghanistan, which has only become more dangerous in the meantime.”

The Brussels meeting comes as the EU has recently passed sweeping reforms to its collective migration and asylum rules, designed explicitly to expand deportation capabilities across the bloc. The new framework allows for the creation of regional “return hubs” for deportees, expands domestic surveillance powers for migration authorities, tightens external border controls, and explicitly allows for formal engagement with non-recognized regimes like the Taliban when it serves migration management goals. The shift comes as center-right and nationalist political parties across much of the EU have gained traction campaigning on stricter migration policies ahead of upcoming EU-wide elections, putting intense pressure on Brussels to deliver visible action on returns.

On Monday, China launched a coordinated, targeted retaliation against the United States, responding to Washington’s recent escalation of unilateral sanctions by rolling out two major restrictive measures targeting American defense and industrial entities. The actions come just weeks after a seemingly productive bilateral summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, where the two sides had announced agreements on increased Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural goods and aircraft, highlighting how quickly diplomatic goodwill has evaporated amid escalating trade and tech tensions.\n\nFirst, China’s Ministry of Finance announced an immediate ban on all government procurement entities purchasing products from 46 U.S. defense contractors, led by industry giants Lockheed Martin Corporation and Raytheon Missiles & Defense. In a calibrated move to limit unintended spillover, the ban explicitly exempts U.S.-funded enterprises that operate production and commercial activities within China’s borders, leaving most U.S. commercial firms operating in the Chinese market unaffected.\n\nSimultaneously, China’s Ministry of Commerce added 10 U.S. entities to its official export control list under the country’s Export Control Law, barring all Chinese exporters from supplying dual-use technologies and materials to the blacklisted firms. The roster of restricted entities includes two of the United States’ most high-profile rare earth development firms, MP Materials Corp and USA Rare Earth, as well as leading U.S. drone and defense electronics manufacturers Red Cat Holdings, Teal Drones, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.\n\nA Commerce Ministry spokesperson clarified that the measures are a direct response to the U.S.’s recent expansion of its so-called Chinese military-industrial entity list, and are intended to safeguard China’s core national security interests and uphold international non-proliferation commitments. The context for the retaliation traces back to June 8, when the U.S. Pentagon carried out the largest expansion in the history of its blacklist of alleged Chinese military-linked companies, growing the roster from 134 to 188 entities. The update controversially included top Chinese civilian technology giants Alibaba, BYD, and Baidu, drawing outrage in Beijing for expanding the crackdown far beyond the defense sector to target China’s leading commercial technology firms. All three Chinese firms have rejected the U.S. designations as entirely baseless.\n\nLi Yong, an executive council member of the China Society for WTO Studies, framed the retaliation as a necessary check on Washington’s pattern of abusing unilateral sanctions and entity lists to suppress Chinese firms. “If such U.S. malpractices are left uncurbed, they will only escalate further,” Li told the Global Times in an interview Monday. He emphasized that China’s restrictions are narrowly tailored, targeting only items directly tied to military supply and manufacturing chains, a stark contrast to the U.S. approach of arbitrarily broadening its crackdown scope by fabricating false military connections for civilian firms with no military ties, as a pretense to hinder China’s high-tech sector development. Li added that the U.S.’s move to target leading Chinese firms across multiple sectors exposes its true goal: hindering the growth of China’s technology industry under a false veneer of national security concerns.\n\nChinese policy analysts note that Beijing designed the two retaliatory measures to maximize pressure on targeted U.S. sectors while avoiding broad damage to general foreign commercial activity in China. One Henan-based commentator writing under the pen name Sanding Sugar explained that the 10 blacklisted U.S. firms cover critical segments of the U.S. defense innovation ecosystem, from small drone manufacturing and aerospace payload supply chains to army tactical vehicle platforms and underwater surveillance systems. All of these sectors rely heavily on critical minerals that China dominates globally, including high-performance permanent magnets, high-purity indium coatings, and specialty ceramics — supply chains that cannot be reoriented or replaced overnight.\n\nOf particular note, the blacklisting of MP Materials and USA Rare Earth deals a major blow to Washington’s years-long effort to rebuild a domestic rare earth supply chain independent of China. “Blacklisting them does not stop them from mining raw rare earth ore, but it cuts off their access to China’s processed rare earth materials, separation products, and magnet precursors,” Sanding Sugar explained. “America’s plan to revive its domestic rare earth sector just hit a major compliance wall.”\n\nOn the Finance Ministry’s procurement ban covering 46 U.S. defense firms, analysts note the measure carries two clear signals. All 46 firms have been added to mandatory screening systems across every provincial finance department and central budget unit, turning the prohibition into an automatic check for all government purchase approvals. At the same time, the explicit exemption for U.S.-funded enterprises operating inside China means that U.S. commercial firms such as Apple’s component suppliers or U.S. medical equipment manufacturers operating in the Chinese market remain fully eligible for procurement, avoiding broad disruption to ordinary commercial activity.\n\nHunan-based political commentator Xi Kunlun argued that Beijing’s approach intentionally splits U.S. commercial and industrial interests, rewarding firms that maintain active, legitimate commercial operations in China while punishing those tied to the U.S. defense and competing rare earth sectors. “This retaliation carries a deeper message than simple payback. China is telling Washington that suppressing Chinese companies comes at a tangible price,” Xi said. “The U.S. targeted China’s drone industry, so China put American drone makers on its Entity List. The U.S. labels Chinese technology companies as military firms, so China blacklisted the equivalent American firms.”\n\nXi added that China is also leveraging its largest leverage: its massive domestic government procurement market, cutting off the access that allowed targeted U.S. firms to profit from Chinese public spending. “If Washington wants to talk, come with respect. If it wants to fight, China will oblige,” he summarized China’s position.\n\nStill, some independent observers have noted that the latest measures are more symbolic than a step toward full economic and technological decoupling between the two powers. They point out that most of the 10 blacklisted U.S. firms have very limited demand for Chinese-sourced raw materials and equipment, and Chinese government agencies had already largely halted purchases of U.S. defense products years before the ban. Some analysts also warn that Beijing must be cautious that retaliatory measures do not unintentionally deter the foreign direct investment that China continues to need for economic growth.\n\nRecent official data underscores this concern: China’s Commerce Ministry reported that inbound foreign direct investment fell 8.6% year-on-year in the first five months of the year, reaching 327.29 billion yuan, or approximately US$45.3 billion. While the ministry did not release a country-by-country breakdown, it confirmed that investment from Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Switzerland, and the United States actually increased over the period, suggesting that inflows from most European and other Asian economies have declined.\n\nOne Shanxi-based commentator noted that some Chinese firms, including consumer electronics giant Xiaomi and semiconductor equipment manufacturer Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc, have already successfully petitioned to be removed from the Pentagon’s blacklist through legal challenges. Still, he acknowledged the structural imbalance in the current standoff: “To be honest about the shortcomings, Washington still sets the tone on military and security affairs globally, and can pull its European and allied partners into lockstep. It is unrealistic for China to fully decouple with the West. Western markets cannot be replaced quickly, emerging markets cannot yet fill China’s export order gap, and many overseas trading partners will quietly avoid blacklisted Chinese firms rather than risk falling foul of U.S. rules.”’

Fresh diplomatic progress between the United States and Iran has cleared the way for a temporary rollback of US sanctions on Tehran’s energy sector, even as the two sides remain publicly divided over the terms of nuclear inspection commitments reached during high-level talks in Switzerland.

US Vice President JD Vance characterized Monday’s discussions — the first high-level meeting under a pre-existing 60-day ceasefire and negotiation framework between Washington and Tehran — as having yielded “good progress.” Hours after the talks concluded, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that the US would issue a 60-day general license temporarily suspending sanctions on Iranian oil production and exports through August 21. All transactions completed during this window are required to be settled in US dollars.
Bessent outlined the agreement’s terms in a post on X, noting that the sanction rollback is tied to Iran’s pledges to maintain unobstructed navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and grant entry to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). For Iran, which saw its oil output and exports plummet after the US imposed a full energy blockade amid rising hostilities over the Strait of Hormuz, the temporary relief is expected to deliver significant economic breathing room: prior to the blockade, Iran produced roughly 4.6 million barrels of crude per day and exported 1.5 million barrels daily.

But Iran has quickly pushed back on the US’s framing of the deal. In a report carried by state-run news agency IRNA, foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei stated that Iran never entered negotiations on its nuclear program during the talks, and that “no new commitments” related to IAEA inspections have been adopted. Any future engagement with the nuclear watchdog, Baghaei added, will proceed “under existing procedures set by Parliament and the Supreme National Security Council” — a position reaffirmed by the Iranian government, which stressed that any new inspection arrangements would require formal approval from both governing bodies before taking effect.

US President Donald Trump pushed back on Iran’s denial hours later via his Truth Social platform, writing that “Everybody is fully aware that Iran will agree to have Major Weapons Inspections in order to ensure ‘Nuclear Honesty’ long into the future.”

Monday’s meeting marked the conclusion of the first High-Level Committee gathering under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a bilateral agreement between the US and Iran that paused active hostilities for 60 days to create space for technical negotiations. Pakistan and Qatar are serving as mediators for the talks, with Vance leading the US delegation and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf heading Iran’s negotiating team. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose government brokered the original MOU, hailed Monday’s session as a success, confirming that the two sides have agreed to a roadmap to reach a final comprehensive agreement within the 60-day negotiation window.

The opening round of talks has already spurred a wave of follow-up diplomatic activity across the Middle East. The US confirmed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will travel to Bahrain next week to attend the Gulf Cooperation Council summit, a trip first reported by Middle East Eye on June 10. Rubio will also make official stops in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait. The trip will mark the first visit by a senior US official to the Gulf since the US and Israel carried out joint strikes against Iran on February 28.

Gulf nations have been deeply divided over the recent conflict between Washington and Tehran. Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait suffered the most significant harm during the hostilities, with the UAE adopting the hardest-line stance against Iran — a position that included carrying out its own strikes against Iranian targets, according to Trump. Bahrain, which hosts the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Manama, saw both its military infrastructure and key commercial assets damaged: the Financial Times reported that Amazon’s regional cloud computing operations based in Bahrain were targeted in an attack early in the conflict.

By contrast, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia pursued more moderate, balanced positions during the war. All three publicly condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf targets, but Saudi Arabia has long pushed for diplomatic negotiations between the US and Iran to de-escalate tensions. The Trump administration, however, has openly expressed frustration with Oman, which has declined to publicly reject Iran’s longstanding position that it has the right to charge transit fees for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump even publicly threatened to bomb Oman if it joined any regional framework to enforce such tolls. Oman shares territorial claims to the strategic waterway with Iran, making its position uniquely sensitive.

In the wake of Monday’s talks, Iran’s chief negotiator Ghalibaf announced via his official Telegram channel that he will travel to Oman for bilateral talks, alongside Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, to discuss cooperation on consolidating joint management of the Strait of Hormuz. Separately, Pakistan confirmed that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian will travel to Islamabad on Tuesday for further discussions on the ongoing negotiation process.

Newly unsealed court documents obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization ProPublica have pulled back the curtain on previously undisclosed pre-IPO foreign investments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, bringing long-simmering U.S. national security concerns about foreign access to sensitive aerospace technology into sharp relief. The records, which emerged from a corporate legal dispute in Delaware after a court battle that ended in the Delaware Supreme Court ruling in favor of ProPublica’s request for public access, detail how a U.S.-based intermediary firm named Tomales Bay Capital connected more than a dozen investors based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Russia to early SpaceX share purchases between 2018 and 2021, at a time when the rocket company remained privately held. SpaceX, which builds a substantial portion of its core business around classified U.S. government contracts including spy satellite development for the Pentagon, has long faced scrutiny over how it manages foreign investment, given Washington’s longstanding concerns that Beijing seeks to acquire cutting-edge U.S. aerospace technology for military and espionage purposes. Strikingly, the records reveal that one of the most high-profile investors linked to these pre-IPO deals is an entity controlled by David Su, co-founder of leading Beijing-based venture capital firm MPCi. Su’s entity invested $15 million into a SpaceX-focused fund managed by Tomales Bay in 2020, court records show. This is not Su’s only connection to the global space industry: MPCi has been a prominent backer of multiple Chinese aerospace companies that compete directly with SpaceX, and two of those satellite firms have been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government. One of the sanctioned firms was penalized for allegedly supporting Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, and hit with a second round of sanctions just last month for accusations that it assists Iran in targeting U.S. military forces. MPCi also maintains formal partnerships with Chinese state-backed investment initiatives: in 2025, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology listed the firm as a partner in a national government program to advance China’s domestic aerospace sector. Beyond the Chinese-linked investments, the records also confirm that an investment entity tied to Qatar’s royal family acquired an early stake in SpaceX, adding another layer of complexity to the rocket maker’s roster of foreign backers. Investment values in the early SpaceX stakes ranged from just $800,000 to a high of $40 million, making the total foreign holdings in the company extremely small as a percentage of overall equity. Even so, the revelations come as SpaceX wrapped up the largest initial public offering in U.S. history last week, a listing that catapulted Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire, and that saw the company explicitly bar investors from China and Hong Kong from participating in the IPO due to cited “regulatory and compliance risks,” according to prior reporting from Bloomberg. That decision to block Chinese and Hong Kong investors in the public offering underscores the company’s awareness of the sensitivity of foreign ownership, and aligns with longstanding U.S. government allegations that China uses outbound investment into sensitive American technology sectors to acquire proprietary information and support military modernization efforts. No evidence of improper activity by Su or any of the named investors has emerged from the released records. But foreign policy and national security experts warn that the connections raise legitimate red flags for U.S. national security. Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor and former State Department official who specializes in foreign investment scrutiny, noted that the core outstanding question is whether any China-based investors gained access to nonpublic information about SpaceX’s proprietary technology or strategic planning. “If an investor has conflicts of interests with other companies in China – if they could feed that information to competitors – it could be a national security concern,” Danzman explained. All parties connected to the early investments have pushed back against any implication of wrongdoing. In an official statement, MPCi noted that Su “has not received any nonpublic information of SpaceX,” adding that Su is a Singapore citizen residing in Singapore and that he only manages U.S. dollar-focused funds for the firm. That said, a 2024 public profile of Su notes that he has spent nearly 100% of his time working in mainland China over the past two decades. Ryan Stonerock, a lawyer representing Tomales Bay Capital, also emphasized in a statement that his client “has not provided any non-public, sensitive information regarding SpaceX to investors.” Stonerock explained that all investors in the firm’s SpaceX funds are passive limited partners, and that the only information they receive is standard quarterly fund valuation updates, with no additional access to SpaceX internal data. The lawyer also pushed back on characterizations that most of the investors with listed addresses in China or Russia are aligned with adversarial foreign governments, noting that “the vast majority, if not all, of the investors included on the unsealed Tomales Bay investor list are not citizens of any foreign adversary, including Russia or China, and certainly none of them are agents of Russia or China, or any other foreign adversary.” He added that many investors with listed mailing addresses in those countries do not actually reside there, and are instead citizens and residents of the U.S. or other allied nations. SpaceX itself has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the newly revealed records, and one of the sanctioned Chinese space companies named in the documents has previously denied allegations that it supported the Wagner Group. Beyond Su and the Chinese-linked investors, the records reveal a range of other notable names on the Tomales Bay investor roster, including former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Indian politician Abhishek Singhvi, and a British Virgin Islands entity linked to Indonesian billionaires. The records also highlight connections to Russian interests: a $10 million 2020 investment by a shell Delaware company called HAL9001 Partners Fund I was signed by venture capitalist Roman Sobachevskiy, who co-owned a separate company that was recently fined hundreds of millions of dollars by the U.S. Treasury Department for managing investments on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Sobachevskiy has not been personally accused of any wrongdoing in connection with the SpaceX investment, and a Tomales Bay spokesperson confirmed that the Russian oligarch “had no involvement with the investment.” Sobachevskiy has not responded to requests for comment on who provided the capital for the SpaceX stake. On the Qatari side, the records show that funds affiliated with Bracket Capital, an investment firm with offices in Los Angeles, London, and Doha, invested roughly $48 million in SpaceX stock across multiple transactions between 2017 and 2020. An email from Tomales Bay founder Iqbaljit Kahlon to SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen confirms that Bracket Capital manages capital on behalf of the Qatari royal family. The records also list a $10 million 2020 investment from AM FIG Cayman Limited, an entity with a listed address in Doha. It remains unclear whether the Bracket investments were made directly on behalf of the royal family or another client, and Bracket Capital has not responded to requests for comment. Kahlon, who has longstanding close ties to SpaceX leadership – with Johnsen testifying that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have” during Johnsen’s 15-year tenure at the firm – built a lucrative business brokering pre-IPO SpaceX shares for outside investors. His model involved Tomales Bay purchasing SpaceX stock directly, packaging the shares into investment funds, and selling limited partnership stakes in those funds to outside investors for fees. In a 2021 pitch meeting with a potential Chinese investor, meeting minutes later entered into court records show Kahlon promised special access to SpaceX leadership, including quarterly business updates, on-site visits to SpaceX facilities, and opportunities to hold direct interviews with the company’s CFO. Prior reporting had already confirmed the existence of Chinese pre-IPO investors in SpaceX, but most individual identities have been closely guarded for years. The unsealed Tomales Bay investor list adds hundreds of new names to the public record of SpaceX ownership, offering the most detailed snapshot to date of the company’s pre-IPO shareholder base. While the early stakes held by foreign investors represented tiny fractions of SpaceX’s total equity, they have already generated massive windfalls: SpaceX’s valuation surged from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion following last week’s IPO, turning even small early investments into substantial returns. A 2025 ProPublica report also previously revealed that SpaceX explicitly allowed Chinese investors to acquire pre-IPO stakes as long as investment capital was routed through offshore secrecy jurisdictions including the Cayman Islands, a practice laid out in court testimony from the Delaware corporate dispute. Musk also maintains extensive separate business interests in China, where his electric vehicle firm Tesla operates multiple large manufacturing facilities that produce the majority of the company’s global output.