In Europe, everything still revolves around disarmament.
In East Asia this is now completely different.
China is becoming a military superpower through massive armaments initiatives and is increasingly resisting strategic encirclement by US allies: South Korea, Japan and India have also begun to rearm.
At the same time, all the states around the South China Sea are now extremely closely tied to China economically.
And the leadership in Beijing is clearly signaling that it no longer wants to tolerate the status quo, in which it is surrounded by American bases in the South China Sea.
After China's air force repeatedly penetrated the Taiwanese air surveillance room and North Korea recently presented new missiles, political observers are now warning of the arms race in the Indo-Pacific, which could lead to a local war or even a military conflict between China and the United States.
"The scenario that must worry us all is not the scenario of the Second World War, in which a madman starts a war," analyzes Bernhard Zand, who lives as a SPIEGEL correspondent in Hong Kong, "but the scenario before the first World War: If one side does that, then the other side has to react accordingly and this creates an automatism that can lead to conflict through situational misjudgments «.
Even now, individual states fear that in future they will have to choose between the economic partner and the protecting power;
this is especially true for South Korea.
"After the Aukus deal, the prevailing feeling in South Korea is that it is becoming independent from the USA," reports Katharina Graça Peters, the SPIEGEL correspondent in Seoul, "and the armament is seen as an assurance that it will continue to assert itself in the region to be able to. "
In this episode of "Eight Billion" you will hear how dangerous the situation in the Indo-Pacific is, why the tensions also affect Europe and what role the acquaintance of Xi Jinping and Joe Biden plays.