The global trend in international relations is often difficult to discern.But one can be helped in this task by looking at two events, organized in Washington and Beijing, comparing the different themes, participants, objectives, and broached for discussion.After all, we are talking about the two largest economies in the world, two colossi directing and shaping…
When Syrian government soldiers first recaptured the small village of Deir Hafar from Isis in 2017, they found the black-painted but hurriedly abandoned Islamic “court” strewn with piles of documents. These hundreds of pages contained terrible proof of how the Syrian civilians there had behaved under at least three years of Isis occupation. I arrived in…
Two recent electoral regime changes in Central America pose serious challenges for China’s regional strategy since the incoming leaders of El Salvador and Panama have pledged to take a tougher stance towards the People’s Republic than their predecessors and thus appear poised to reach out to the US in an effort to play it off…
Recently, the Trump administration has been gearing up for the overthrow of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. At the same time, it is directly attacking Maduro’s closest allies as part of its overall foreign policy strategy. The Helms-Burton Act In mid-April this year, the US State Department announced that it would put into practice a section…
There are many partisan responses to this question. Of course, internationally, the United States is regarded by many people to be the gold standard of what constitutes a democracy (perhaps because the US was the first nation that was born out of a successful revolution against an existing dictatorship and that quickly produced a written…
Donald Trump is a con man. Think of Trump University or a juicy Trump steak or can’t-lose casinos (that never won). But as president, one crew he hasn’t conned is the Pentagon. Quite the opposite, they’ve conned him because they’ve been at the game a lot longer and lie (in Trump-speak) in far biglier ways….
