An attack on a military parade in the southern Iranian city of Ahwaz is likely to prompt Iranian retaliation against opposition groups at home and abroad. It also deepens Iranian fears that the United States. Saudi Arabia and others may seek to destabilize the country by instigating unrest among its ethnic minorities. With competing claims …
Continue reading Attack in Iran Raises Spectre of a Potentially Far Larger Conflagration
What is the bigger story? The West Against the Rest or The West Against Itself? The Illiberal Quartet of Xi, Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan is in the line of fire of haughty homilies about Western “values.” Illiberalism is arrogantly and provocatively depicted in the West repeatedly as a Tartar Invasion 2.0. But closer to home …
Continue reading The West Against the Rest or The West Against Itself?
It’s the war from hell, the savage one that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with seven other Middle Eastern and North African states, have been waging in Yemen since March 2015, with fulsome support from the Pentagon and American weapons galore. It’s got everything. Dead children in the dozens, a never-ending air …
The Syrian defence system shot down by mistake a Russian Ilyushin IL-20M 90924 surveillance plane in Syria with 15 servicemen on board on Monday evening, the day after an Israeli F-16 destroyed an Iranian military cargo plane on the Damascus airport runway killing the second pilot. Simultaneously with the downing of the Russian plane, four …
Continue reading Russia-USA-Iran and Syria – A Continuous Struggle to Trigger or Avoid War
On the 17th of September, an important meeting was held in Sochi between Erdogan and Putin to discuss Syria, in particular Idlib. A few hours after the agreement between the two leaders was reached, there was a French-Israeli strike on Syria’s coastal area of Latakia, causing the loss of a Russian Air Force Il-20 aircraft and bringing …
CENTO – the Central Treaty Organization launched by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1958 is totally forgotten now. Even most regional experts on the Middle East and South Asia remember nothing about it. But it had a surprisingly long afterlife of 60 years, and its final, complete …
Continue reading The Death of CENTO’s Ghost: How the US Lost the Four Great Powers of Southwest Asia
The Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif’s visit to Islamabad in late August 2018 was the first meeting conducted by the new Pakistani leadership headed by the Prime Minister Imran Khan and high-ranking foreign guests. The agreements reached confirmed the trend towards consolidating the forces in the region. The ad hoc nature of …
Continue reading Pakistan and Iran are Strengthening the Centre-oriented Trends in the Region
The Trump administration has brought U.S. foreign policy to the brink of crisis, if it has not already tipped into one. There is little room to argue otherwise. In Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and in Washington’s ever-fraught relations with Russia, U.S. strategy, as reviewed in my previous column, amounts to little more than …
Continue reading Why the U.S. Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran
India is increasingly finding itself caught between competing alliances. On one hand, ties between Washington and New Delhi have improved in recent years in large part to what both sides perceive as increased threats from China both militarily and economically in the South China Sea and overall Indo-Pacific region. On the other, New Delhi has …
Continue reading Will the U.S. Let India Continue to Import Iranian Crude?
