Eurasia’s Great Game is anything but simple and straightforward. A burgeoning alliance between China and Russia that at least for now is relegating potential differences between the two powers to the sidelines has sparked a complex geopolitical dance of its own. With India, Japan and Europe seeking to drive a wedge between the two Asian…
The summer/autumn of 1989 was a period of great change in Europe, leading to the end of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But have all the changes been positive – for the east and west? Someone wrote recently that there needs to be more focus on post-war West Germany and its many…
The Pentagon and its sub-office in Brussels, HQ NATO, in its new billion dollar building, are intent on maintaining military pressure around the globe. The US itself is much more widely spread, having bases tentacled from continent to continent, with the Pentagon admitting to 514 but omitting mention of many countries, including Afghanistan, Syria and…
Since the Iranian revolution took power in 1979, the world stood against Iran because it is an “Islamic Republic”, unwilling to acknowledge and bow to US dominance of the Middle East and the entire world. I say the world because the revolution was followed by the Russian Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet empire…
In May 2019, a curious document was made publicly available under the aegis of the US Defense Department and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is entitled “Russian Strategic Intentions” and was prepared as part of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment programme. The report is the joint effort of more than 30 authors, including John…
On my many walking visits to the vast Normandy battlefield in France, I kept recalling the ever so wise dictum of Prussia’s great monarch, Frederick the Great: ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’ On this 74th anniversary of the D-Day landings, it’s well worth recalling the old warrior-king Adolf Hitler, a veteran of the infantry,…
