As was to be expected, the announcement that the US was withdrawing troops from Syria has served to provoke numerous reactions in the Middle East and beyond. Following the removal of Mattis, Pompey and Bolton embarked on a whirlwind Middle Eastern tour of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman,…
Never before has any presidential administration been as all over the place in terms of national security and foreign policy as is that of Donald J. Trump. Indeed, one might well argue that there is no overriding policy at all in terms of a rational doctrine arrived at through risk versus gain analysis of developing…
Members of the political corps of the U.S. writing about U.S. foreign policy have a particular insider viewpoint that can provide some good insights into how their diplomacy works along with the personal peculiarities of some of the actors involved. Ronan Farrow’s War on Peace – The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American…
Probably the single most important political fact about the modern world has been the steady rise of the United States of America. From a geopolitical point of view, the United States really is in a class of its own. While the Soviet Union might have rivaled the U.S. militarily, and while China and the European…
The words that were to seal Jamal Khashoggi’s fate are of no consequence. At the time, Khashoggi himself was unconscious of the danger he was putting himself in. It was 15 November, 2016. Trump had just been elected president and a Washington think tank was trawling the opinions of journalists and analysts around the Middle…
President Donald Trump’s recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision, similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting…
