To the despair of State Department professionals (who are very professional indeed), the art and craft of US diplomacy have taken a very nasty knock since the appearance of Donald Trump on the world stage. To be sure, the practice of sending rich political donors to prime ambassadorial posts such as Berlin, Tokyo and London …
Continue reading Why Pakistan Should Ditch Washington
Financial injections by Qatar and possibly China may resolve Turkey’s immediate economic crisis, aggravated by a politics-driven trade war with the United States, but are unlikely to resolve the country’s structural problems, fuelled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s counterintuitive interest rate theories. The latest crisis in Turkey’s boom-bust economy raises questions about a development model …
Alexander the Great couldn't do it. Genghis Khan couldn't do it. Neither could the British Empire nor NATO and the US military machine. But Erik Prince thinks he can stabilize Afghanistan with his latest mercenary empire? “I think it will make Erik Prince billions of dollars while he loses the war for us,” a congressional aide …
A Saudi Arabian youth organization posted an image in its Twitter feed depicting a plane approaching the CN Tower (the tallest building in the world erected in Toronto, and the city’s symbol, whose height is 553.33 meters), which is reminiscent of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York. The Canadian website CBC, which reported on …
Continue reading Saudi Arabia: Wherever One Looks, Failure Abounds
Trump’s attack on the Turkish lira, combined with recent Federal Reserve moves to choke off dollar supply, is pushing the world towards a re-run of the 1997 currency crisis. This may well be the whole point. Last Friday, Donald Trump announced new sanctions on Turkey – comprising a doubling of the steel and aluminum tariffs …
Continue reading Trump Just Triggered a New Financial Crisis. Here’s Why
The President of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska recently signaled his support for Vucic’s plan to partition Kosovo, but while he may try to clothe his arguments in pragmatism, Dodik is really only concerned with promoting his own interests. The name Milodrad Dodik is one that usually inspires a sense of pride in many Serbs, seeing as …
Continue reading Dodik’s Support of Vucic’s Kosovo Partition Plan Is Self-Interested
A good example of the discarded wisdom of America’s Founders is George Washington’s Farewell Address to the nation, delivered by him not orally but instead solely in printed form, published in Philadelphia by David C. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, on 19 September 1796, and distributed to the nation. The following extended excerpt from it is the most …
According to the Transitive Axiom if A=B and B=C then A = C (If any two items are equal to the same third item then the two are equal to each other). I mention the Transitive Axiom because it is a straightforward way to understand that if Corbyn (A) = existential threat to Jews (B) and …
Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel(1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. Much of …
