One of the world’s top energy importers, China, is set to roll out a yuan-denominated oil contract as early as this year. Analysts call the plan, announced by Beijing in September, a huge move against the dollar’s global dominance. The so-called petro-yuan is a “wake up call” for investors who haven’t paid attention to the…
The US-Indian Strategic Partnership has rapidly evolved to such a point that the Indian government is now obliquely hinting that Russian twitter trolls are backing the country’s opposition leader, showing that New Delhi is willing to say and do anything in order to further ingratiate itself with Washington even if this means demolishing its decades-long…
Last week the new head of the CIA Mike Pompeo publicly threatened to make the CIA a “much more vicious agency”. His first step towards that is to unleash CIA sponsored killer gangs onto the people of Afghanistan: The C.I.A. is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and…
As forces of the so-called Islamic State terrorist group are pushed across Syria and Iraq, one can clearly see Israel’s shifting position regarding the situation in Syria, which can be explained by Tel-Aviv’s desire to reorder the Middle East. It’s clear that Israel has finally realized that it’s been betting on the wrong side in…
In testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Secretary of Defense James Mattis unveiled his new Afghan strategy, which he called “R4+S” (regionalize, realign, reinforce, reconcile and sustain). The “new” plan Mattis presented is one part a regurgitation of select Obama policies and one part an increased use of air…
“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds. As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them…
