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…
Myanmar, the place we used to call Burma, has come back into the spotlight Western governments always try and keep it away from. Much is going on here, and too, many contradictions … but why? There is a well-known management technique called “kicking it into the long grass”. This involves committing yourself to doing something…
The latest scandal coming out of Turkey reads like a novel by Tom Clancy or John le Carre: spies, kidnapping, assassination attempts and terrorists. Given the seriousness of the allegations, the utter lack of reaction by Turkish officialdom and media is stunning. Last week, Al-Monitor reported that militants in Iraqi Kurdistan claimed to have captured two high-level Turkish intelligence officials. Cemil Bayik, one…
Hurricane Irma may find US immigration difficult as 59,000 people claim they’ll point their fans in its direction in an effort to deny it entry. A Facebook event has gone viral in the hope of preventing the category 4 storm from reaching Florida. https://www.instagram.com/p/BYwIYCJFZuk/ “Everyone takes their fans outside and points them at Hurricane Irma…
