China and Pakistan have slammed US President Donald Trump’s new policy on Afghanistan, which includes sending additional troops to the country. The nations have instead urged new talks with the Taliban. The Pakistani and Chinese foreign ministers announced that their two countries and Afghanistan would hold a new series of three-way talks later this year,…
United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has proven herself to be one of the most hawkish U.S. representatives to the UN, likely a reflection of the increasingly hawkish veer of the U.S. President Donald Trump, who had originally campaigned on anti-interventionism. On September 5th, following a nuclear weapon test conducted by North Korea a few days…
Immediately after Israel’s latest unprovoked strike on Syria we posed the question, did Benjamin Netanyahu just panic? The answer is yes, Israel is now acting from a position of desperation as it has failed in its goal of regime change in Syria. Overnight (Wed. evening/Thursday early morning), Israel attacked a Syrian military base near the town of…
It is amazing yet somehow impressive how Washington manages in such a convoluted fashion to make so many countries irritated and resentful. There’s an art in it, really. Take the case of Turkey, Pakistan and pilot training. Following an attempted coup in Turkey last year its air force ran short of pilots, which wasn’t surprising…
The message from the two-day Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) conference, which concluded in Vladivostok on Thursday, is that Russia’s “pivot to Asia” in recent years, in the downstream of Western sanctions against it, has become a core vector of its foreign policies. The EEF began modestly in 2015 with the agenda of showcasing the “new reality”…
The “Race for Raqqa” might have long been over ever since the Kurdish-led “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) reached the northern edge of Daesh’s so-called “capital” a few months ago, but that didn’t mean that the battle for northeastern Syria was anywhere close to finished. So long as the besieged desert town of Deir ez-Zor remained…
