President Trump outraged European opinion by denouncing his allies on the far side of the Atlantic for their failure to meet NATO’s spending target of 2% of GDP. Other alliance members, he added, should spend 4% of their output on defense, just like America does. His dudgeon at the Europeans was more than justified: the…
Great powers throughout history often become lazy. This translates into opting for easy solutions by force majeure to problems that might better be dealt with more constructively, a process once referred to as “gunboat diplomacy.” The United States has fallen into that trap, operating under the assumption that military power is ultimately the only thing that matters….
The usual NATO summit begins and ends with U.S. and European leaders issuing platitudes about the unbreakable bonds between Western democracies. The two-day summit that began Wednesday is not the usual NATO summit. President Donald Trump came to Brussels armed with a barrage of insults and Twitter blasts against his ostensible allies. He gave a public tongue-lashing…
The Presidential and Parliamentary elections in Turkey, the unrest in Iran, the civil war in Syria, the US exit from the “nuclear deal” with Tehran, the military actions in Yemen and the situation in Afghanistan attract the attention of international media. In addition, in many regions of the Middle East the situation is no less…
The politicization of sports sometimes can’t be avoided, whether it’s because a player injected such sentiment into a match or the fans themselves decide to root for a certain team in order to send a political statement, but the onus is on the individual to remain consistent with their beliefs once that threshold has been…
Under the radar, away from World Cup frenzy and the merger and acquisition of Cristiano Ronaldo Inc. and Fiat, the eighth ministerial meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), established in 2004, sailed on in Beijing, hosted by President Xi Jinping. Amid the torrential pledge of loans and aid, China committed to invest right…
