In a recent article, I documented that “US Again Supports Al Qaeda in Syria”. In a prior article, I had documented that since 2012 the US Government has cooperated with the Sauds’ plan to install in Syria a fundamentalist-Sunni government to replace Syria’s existing secular Government, and that the fundamentalist-Sunni organization Al Qaeda has been the US…
China’s “Go West” strategy was brought into sharp focus at a forum in Shanghai last weekend. Billed as the Belt and Road Initiative: Towards Greater Cooperation between China and the Middle East, it highlighted key aspects of Beijing’s wider plan. The New Silk Roads, or the Belt and Road Initiative, involve six key economic corridors,…
Saudi Arabia arrested 11 princes who were protesting the government’s recent decision to stop paying their utility bills. Riyadh implemented a mild austerity plan at the start of the year that also saw the elimination of other state subsidies such as those for gas as well as the introduction of a 5% sales tax on…
Whether or not he is a purveyor of “alternative facts”, Michael Wolff in Fire and Fury tries to get inside the mind of Donald Trump when working out Washington’s new Middle East foreign policy. In Wolff’s words, this is what the United States president was thinking. “There are basically four players [or at least we can forget…
Over the coming months, the current power struggle within the House of Saud may develop into a bloody affair. For a long time Al-Saud boasted that unlike previous emirates and sheikhdoms that had previously ruled Arabia, they avoided bloody power struggles among themselves. The situation now seems to be different. In 2007, the Al-Saud invented…
Saudi Arabia is following the unrest in Iran with intense interest, hoping it will force its regional rival to turn inward. The Saudis have little capacity to influence Iranian domestic developments, however, and share many of the same problems as Tehran. The Iranian question is unlikely to help resolve Riyadh’s biggest foreign policy challenge: the expensive quagmire in Yemen…
