Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today surprised regional politics and financial markets by calling snap elections on June 24, consolidating one-man rule in what used to be the region’s lone democracy. The Turkish lira rose sharply on the news, from 5.08 lira per euro to less than 5 per euro at this writing. Money in…
There is a lot of concern over the possibility of a trade war between China and the U.S. In early April, President Trump announced that his administration was considering levying $100 billion of additional tariffs on Chinese exports, after the Chinese government responded to a previously proposed U.S. tariff hike on Chinese goods of $50 billion…
In the wake of last week’s cruise missile attack on Syria, there was a joke going around the internet saying that it doesn’t matter who Americans vote for, they always wind up getting John McCain as President of the United States. The humor derives from the fact that the past three presidents all ran for…
The beginning of April saw a curious disinformation flood initiated by the Japanese media and then supported by the South Korean media. Allegedly, on March 9, 2018, while speaking on the phone with the US President Donald Trump, the Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping suggested a new format of the Korean settlement, which excludes the…
The Trump administration delivered several dozen military strikes against Syria purportedly aimed at chemical production and storage facilities. It was an act the international community feared might lead to overt war in Syria between the US, Iran and Russia, but it came off a bit better: the strike seems to have been carefully calibrated, involved…
Over the past two months the news has been dominated by two bizarre but related events: 1) the alleged nerve agent poisoning of the exchanged Russian dual-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England; and 2) the supposed gas poisoning of Syrian civilians by the Assad government, leading to the “retaliatory” April 13-14…
