Can Saudi Arabia Outlive North America’s New Energy Boom?

Current trends in the global energy market don’t look good for Saudi Arabia. First, the International Energy Agency projected in November 2012 that the United States will surpass the Gulf petrogiant as the world’s top energy producer by 2020. Then, last week, it revealed that North America, buoyed by the rapid development of its unconventional oil industry, […]

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Should Japan Ask India To Join NPT First?

The Japanese government has decided to restart talks with India to reach a bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement. The move is aimed at paving the way for exports of Japanese nuclear power technology to India. India has developed nuclear weapons without becoming a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), a key international pact to prevent […]

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Why Are Iranians Excited To Vote?

The paradoxical nature of politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been on full display in this short campaign season for the presidency. As plenty of commentators — both in the Iranian and Western media — have pointed out, much of the action took place before the race was officially under way. This week, […]

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Iran Continues To Disappoint

Iran has long characterised its domestic struggle as being between the revolutionaries of 1979 and those who opposed the revolution, the “agents of the West”. But what the nation has proved time and again is that its internal struggle is now between the revolutionaries themselves. Read Here – Gulf News

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Saying Goodbye

Is it time to write the political obituary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose second and final term in office as the President of Iran is coming to an end in a few weeks? Not necessarily. But it is time to take stock of the man and his eight-year presidency. All the more so because he is […]

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Kerry And His Quagmire

Nobody ever accused John Kerry of lacking in self-belief. Nor are they ever likely to. This week, for the fourth time since taking over from Hillary Clinton in February, Kerry arrives for talks in Israel and Palestine, where he hopes to twitch the corpse of two-state peace talks back to life. His chances are not […]

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For Russia, Syria Is Not In The Middle East

Moscow’s refusal thus far to act on Syria seems puzzling. Russia has let other of its Middle East client regimes fall without much action on its part in the past. Why is Syria different to Moscow than those other Russian allies in the Middle East? Because, in Russia’s view, the outcome in Syria affects Moscow’s […]

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Sending Money Home

In Asia’s developing countries, the power and potential of remittances – the money that migrant workers send home to their families (many of whom live in poor and remote areas) – is immense. Currently, over 60 million migrant workers from the Asia/Pacific region account for more than half of all remittance flows to developing countries, […]

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