The United States and its allies continue to cajole and threaten North Korea to negotiate an agreement that would relinquish its growing nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The latest verbal prodding came from President Trump during his joint press conference with South Korean president Moon Jae-in. Trump urged Pyongyang to “come to the negotiating table,” and…
Libya is rarely mentioned in the mainstream Western media, which is not surprising because the place is a catastrophic shambles as a result of the US-NATO Operation Unified Protector in 2011 during which the military alliance carried out 9,658 airstrikes and several hundred cruise missile attacks in seven months of war against the Libyan government. They didn’t lose a…
Geopolitics becomes a lot easier if we can discern repeating patterns. For example, the common thread through the crises in Ukraine, Libya and Syria is a clever but ruthless playbook of regime-change. This stratagem of toppling governments while appearing noble should perhaps be called the “geopolitics of crocodile tears.” There were times in history when…
The deaths of four US soldiers in Niger, West Africa would have passed unremarked without the controversy concerning Trump’s phone call to the widow of one of the men involved. It now opens up the wider question of US military presence in Africa and the role of AFRICOM (US Africa Command) within Washington’s global strategic…
Exactly six years ago, on October 20th, 2011, Muammar Gaddafi was murdered, joining a long list of African revolutionaries martyred by the West for daring to dream of continental independence. Earlier that day, Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte had been occupied by Western-backed militias, following a month-long battle during which NATO and its ‘rebel’ allies pounded…
Libyans have described their fears of an emboldened Islamic State reasserting itself in vast swathes of lawless territory, as the group seeks to re-establish a new power base after the fall of Mosul in Iraq and ongoing operations to end its control of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor in Syria. Almost a year after the liberation…
