The so-called “Manbij Model” that the US and Turkey agreed to in jointly administering the strategic city following the YPG’s withdrawal is promising but nevertheless imperfect because it fails to address the Kurdish-led “deep state” that controls the SDF’s political and military activities in northeastern Syria. The US and Turkey finally reached a deal to…
Ahead of the crucial Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Qingdao this coming weekend, three other recent events have offered clues on how the new world order is coming about. The Astana Economic Forum in Kazakhstan centered on how mega-partnerships are changing world trade. Participants included the president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)…
In a recent article for Foreign Policy magazine, Jonathan Spyer, a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin was content with what Spyer perceives to be the current situation in Syria: A “frozen conflict” in which Putin is prepared to accept a continuous low level conflict and…
Like a geographical virus the spread of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has broken all natural boundaries. It is immune to any antibiotic of logic and poses a deadly threat to the health, peace and stability of the world. For decades in the West, NATO was believed to have been a defensive response to the…
A military delegation of high-ranking officers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE recently visited a Kurdish SDF base in Aïn al-Arab (Kobani) on the Syrian border with Turkey. They discussed practical questions connected with replacing the US military presence there with troops from several Arab nations, who would represent the League of Arab States. There…
US Defense Secretary James Mattis, who earned the nickname “Mad Dog” while serving in the Marine Corps, jetted off to the 2018 International Institute of Strategic Studies’ (IISS) annual Shangri-La Dialogue conference in Singapore armed with threats against China and North Korea. Ironically, Mattis’s military machismo occurred prior to the June 12 summit in Singapore…
