70 years ago in April 1949 the last Western military action took place on Chinese territory. The ‘Amethyst Incident’ saw Chinese Red Army troops fire on a British warship sent to remove UK embassy staff from the Chinese capital. At this time Chinese communist forces, on the verge of victory in their civil war against…
Notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s announcement of the deal with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to tactically withdraw US forces from specific locations in occupied north-east Syria- and in consequence to leave the Syrian Kurds to their fate- the departure of US forces from Syria is highly implausible. These US forces have established several military…
America has done little but betray the Kurdish people, over and over. You see, you can only betray someone that trusts you and the Kurds, to a fault, are trusting people who love Americans. Problem is, the Americans the Kurds love don’t run America and, quite frankly, maybe just don’t exist anymore. We begin with…
In a field beside a disused railway station on the plain just south of the Syrian-Turkish frontier, a brigade of Syrian Kurdish soldiers were retraining in order to resist an invasion by the Turkish army. “We acted like a regular army when we were fighting Daesh [Isis],” Rojvan, a veteran Kurdish commander of the YPG…
Convinced of its invincibility, even as partisan politics threatens to topple Washington, US policymakers remained strangely oblivious to the dangers of a resurgent Russia-China alliance. Although it may be too early to call ‘check mate’ on the US just yet, the nuclear superpower finds itself increasingly restrained. Although it is easily forgotten in these clinically…
Adobe is to cut Venezuela off because of US sanctions, showing how vulnerable countries in the ‘line of fire’ are, due to their dependence on American computer software products. We all know about US hard power. We know a lot about US soft power too (think Hollywood, rock-and-roll, and Marvel comics). But there is another…
