Few geoeconomic game-changers are more spectacular than yuan-denominated future crude oil contracts – especially when set up by the largest importer of crude on the planet. And yet Beijing’s media strategy seems to have consisted in substantially play down the official launch of the petro-yuan at the Shanghai International Energy Exchange. Still, some euphoria was…
In a sensational interview with the Washington Post, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and de-facto leader Muhammad bin Salman has blamed the US and its allies for putting pressure on Saudi Arabia to export the extremist Wahhabi ideology during the Cold War as a means to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in the wider…
The designation of John Bolton as US National Security Advisor, in addition to the State Department being taken over by the CIA, sends an unmistakable signal that the Trump administration is gearing up for some serious mischief in the Middle East. In an ongoing administrative shakeup that has witnessed a number of controversial Trump appointees…
The US recently passed the so-called “Taiwan Travel Act”. This piece of legislation decrees that the American government should encourage bilateral visits between its officials and their Taiwanese counterparts, essentially formalizing a policy that has been unofficial for decades since the US switched its recognition of China’s legal government from Taipei to Beijing as part…
Expulsion of diplomats won’t yield tangible results. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire had a peculiar tradition. When the Sublime Porte’s relations with a particular country went south and a new war was inevitable, the ambassador of the enemy state was thrown in the Ambassador’s Tower of Yedikule Fortress (“Fortress of the Seven Towers”), dubbed the…
A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan, from George Washington to Barack Obama, has anyone…
