The US-brokered Taliban-Indian prisoner swap might lead to the resumption of the Afghan peace process but the deal also carries with it somewhat uncomfortable optics for Pakistan since it was likely agreed to during US peace envoy Khalilzad’s “ice-breaking” meeting with the Taliban in Islamabad last week. *** Last week’s informal meeting between the Taliban…
Over the weekend I asked whether Donald Trump had risen to the level of Grey Champion. A few days later Trump takes to Twitter and puts a big line item in his resume. There have been signs of change coming since Trump rightly refused to go to war with Iran over their shooting down an unmanned…
Being half an Irishman myself I feel entitled to refer to the probably apocryphal answer given by an Irishman asked by a lost, weary, traveler for directions to Dublin. “Oh, well now, I wouldn’t have started from here.” Turkey went from a foreign policy of “no quarrels with the neighbours” to near war with Iraq…
President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US military personnel from Syria’s border with Turkey effectively opens a new chapter in the conflict, leaving Turkey on its own in the so-called “peace corridor” plan in northern Syria. The fragmented structure of US foreign policy-making at large, the flip-flopping policies and the failure to appreciate Turkey’s strategic priorities resulted in Trump’s abrupt go-ahead to…
The US president Donald Trump is not known to practise judo. A few judo techniques he may have got to know from his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who is a Black Belt. But what Trump has just done to Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan is straight out of a Physics concept in judo. Taking advantage of…
On September 24, while the Ukraine corruption scandal was gathering momentum in Washington, the US Air Force’s 31 Fighter Wing deployed F-16 strike aircraft to Graf Ignatievo Air Base in Bulgaria as part of Exercise Rapid Buzzard which has the aim of improving the “joint warfighting capability” of the US and Bulgarian air forces. It…
