Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan just visited Tehran and met with President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. That’s a major geopolitical move by any standards. Iran and Turkey are both part of the Astana negotiations aimed at effecting closure in Syria. Both are regarded by Beijing as key nodes in its Belt and …
Continue reading Iraqi Kurdistan The Fly to Regional Spiders Turkey, Iraq, Iran
Even in this era of global paradigmatic changes, Saudi Arabia’s shifting grand strategy is perhaps one of the most surprising developments to occur thus far, but the fast-moving Russian-Saudi rapprochement is likely to provoke an Iranian “zero-sum” reaction which could complicate Moscow’s multipolar efforts in managing the “New Middle East”. Most observers were taken aback …
In this era of widespread nuclear capabilities it is important that military generals should refrain from commenting forcefully on international affairs in public. They should certainly pay close attention to world developments, because it is essential for their country’s security and planning that they and their staffs should analyse the situation along national borders and …
Continue reading The India-China Standoff Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Escalate
As ISIS fades and as the Syrian conflict winds down, regional tensions in the Middle East are escalating, as the attention of the Great Powers switches to the growing crisis in Iraq’s and Syria’s Kurdish areas. The latest stage in the seemingly endless geopolitical struggle in the Middle East is currently underway, with the Kurds …
Continue reading The US Plan C for Syria and Iraq: Its Reckless Game with the Kurds
More than 100 days of conflict around Qatar have passed and, as they say, it is now there. All the efforts of a number of countries to resolve the conflict peacefully by means of negotiations between the parties concerned have not yet yielded concrete results. Not the least role in this was played by the …
The recent referenda in Catalonia and Kurdistan, while by no means crucial developments for Russia, have resulted in a lively debate in the Russian media and the Russian public opinion. The Kremlin itself has refrained from making any strong statements, possibly indicating that there might be several schools of thought on these issues in key …
Continue reading Russian Views on the Separatist Referendums in Spain and Iraq
After the purge of the strategist Steve Bannon from the ultra-nationalist entourage of Donald Trump by the troika of generals who took over the White House: James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Secretary of Defense; H.. R. McMaster, National Security Adviser, and John Kelly, Chief of Staff, the non-conventional and asymmetric war against Venezuela, partially declared by …
Continue reading Trump, Mattis and The Asymmetric War Against Venezuela
President Trump’s bellicose speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month sparked a crisis for the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that was then reaching out to North Korea and Iran, with Trump’s comments jeopardizing not only the talks but the credibility of the intermediaries, according to a source familiar with those efforts. Trump essentially pulled the …
America has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist country. In this essay we will discuss the socio-economic roots of inequalities and the relation between the concentration of wealth and the downward mobility of the working and salaried classes. How the …
