Hysteria reigned supreme after the first round of US sanctions were reinstated against Iran over the past week. War scenarios abound, and yet the key aspect of the economic war unleashed by the Trump administration has been overlooked: Iran is a major piece in a much larger chessboard. The US sanctions offensive, launched after Washington’s…
No two “color revolutions” have been the same, although the anatomy may bear similarity. This explains why Russia continues to face a problem in calibrating its response to emerging revolutionary tides in its backyard. Russia fumbled in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004 and 2014), but digested the ‘color revolutions’ in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010….
Leaked Chinese military documents purport that the People’s Liberation Army will seek to expand its presence across the world in order to defend its Silk Road interests. The Japan Times was the first outlet to report on the plans that putatively circulated in Chinese circles back in February and which implored the state to concentrate…
To the utter despair of stoic defenders of “Western values,” Europe is now condemned to suffer two populist autocracies on its eastern borders: Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey. For the EU’s political leaders, the only accepted narrative is blanket, hysterical condemnation of “illiberal democracies” distorted by personal rule, xenophobia and suppression of free speech. And…
The world events of the past days are significant far beyond the apparent divide within the G7 industrial nations. If we imagine the planet as a giant electric force field, the lines of flux are in dramatic reordering as the post-1945 global dollar-based system comes to its disordered end phase. Europe’s political elites are currently…
A confluence of regional and international factors makes the 18th summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) this weekend in Qingdao an event of special interest. The summit has an added meaning insofar as for the first time the two newly inducted member states India and Pakistan will be taking their place at the high…
