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…
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…
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…
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…
