By exempting portions of the frozen military aid to the country the Trump administration showed with certainty that China is its geostrategic priority.

The above point starts off today’s brief aide-memoire, a diplomacy term I’m using here to summarize some key points for your stock taking and evaluation of current international politics.

Anyway, understanding that the country’s exemption from the American foreign aid-freeze is a direct expression of a current US grand strategy, in turn, helps us in clarifying questions why the administration is also bent on actively firming up or pursuing security alliances with various friendly countries.

As regards the aid exemption, it is not yet officially clear how much of the US foreign military financing had been released. But news reports indicate that $330 million has been exempted.

China hasn’t reacted officially to the aid waiver, which the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) tersely announced last Monday.

But it is certain China will take hard notice of it. Since, for starters, it’s another tell-tale indication the US is actively working on tearing apart any Russo-Chinese alliance in Ukraine.

This, since should the Russo-Chinese alliance continue and grow in Ukraine, it would produce a “Eurasian power colossus feared by the geostrategists of the Atlantic powers,” says British imperialism historian Richard Drayton.

So, despite the European outcries that the Trump team’s “chaotic,” amoral pivot on Ukraine is “pro-Russian” and anti-Europe, the geostrategic shift is nonetheless ruthlessly pro-American.

Pro-American, since if Trump breaks the Ukrainian stalemate, it allows him to turn his undivided attention to the US’s only key geostrategic competitor, China.

Such intent has various complex explanations. But Drayton says it’s fruitful to consider the American far-right school of international relations known as “neorealism,” advocates of which insist the US must first forcefully deal with China.

Encyclopedia Britannica informs us that “neorealism” advocates, called neorealists or structural realists, insist “international politics is best understood by examining the structure of the international systems as reflected in alliances and other cooperative arrangements between states.”

By seeing the structure of international relations as causing international politics and conflicts, the neorealists contrast themselves from classical realists who trace “international conflicts to the natural propensity of political leaders to seek to increase their power.”

In other words, neorealists view the international order as determined by the balance of power relations between states.

Neorealism also has a subset theory called “offensive realism,” which holds that a state’s need for security and survival makes “states aggressive power maximizers. States do not cooperate, except during temporary alliances, but constantly seek to diminish their competitors’ power and to enhance their own.”

By keeping those in mind, we a now able to make some sense why the Americans need a quick tactical fix in Ukraine and also why in recent months this administration is actively cementing or seeking alliances with countries.

On the latter point, just this week the administration cemented further the country’s already strong security alliance with Japan, forged a visiting forces agreement with New Zealand, held defense talks with South Korea and had a historic joint naval exercise with the French at the West Philippine Sea involving the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.

As to why there’s a need to seek security alliances beyond the US, it is because Trump’s present China policy is as yet unclear.

On one hand, international observers say, Trump is set to retain former US President Biden’s confrontational policy in the South China Sea.

But the wheeling-dealing Trump might also strike a deal with China’s Xi Jin Ping which might harm our interests.

In that case, we have to make sure our backs are covered. Hence, our alliances with other countries besides the US.