Following the 9/11 attacks, successive U.S. administrations have promulgated three consistent objectives: First, to prevent additional mass casualty attacks on our homeland. Second, to find and punish those responsible. And third, to shatter the larger transnational terrorist movement’s capability and capacity to be a future threat. Read Here – War On The Rocks
President Donald Trump’s ALL-CAPS Twitter threat against Iran—“CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED”—feels like a cut-and-paste job from his approach to North Korea. Apply sanctions, make irresponsible suggestion of Armageddon, see what happens. Read Here – Politico Also Read: The Real Threat to America: Iran May Close the Strait of Hormuz
India’s need for oil and gas imports from Iran provides only a partial explanation of New Delhi’s desire to preserve good relations with that country. Iran is the third largest source of oil imports for India behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq and a significant supplier of natural gas. But India’s interest in cultivating Iran goes […]
Chinese President Xi Jinping heads to Africa this week as Beijing moves to further cement its role as one of the continent’s closest economic and diplomatic allies. After a brief stop in the Persian Gulf Thursday, Xi’s itinerary — his first overseas trip since beginning his second term as leader — takes him to Senegal, Rwanda, […]
The United States has a long history of intervening overseas to solve one problem and inadvertently creating others. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed rebels fighting Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government only to find that some of them later targeted the United States…It’s worth remembering these precedents as the Trump administration prepares to reimpose sanctions on […]
What made democracies different and more restrained in warfare, according to Kant’s theory of democratic peace, was that the costs in both blood and treasure were passed along to the public, which then imposed pressure on leaders to keep wars short and low in cost. Read Here – War On The Rocks
According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, the funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait have a combined $2.8 trillion in assets under management. These governments are using their national wealth as a strategic tool of power projection as never before and blurring the line between economic and political decision-making. Read Here – Foreign Policy
The Costs of War Project identifies no less than 76 countries, 39% of those on the planet, as involved in that global conflict. That means places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya where U.S. drone or other air strikes are the norm and U.S. ground troops (often Special Operations forces) have been either directly […]
The most ominous threats in 2018 — nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula and a spiralling confrontation pitting the United States and its allies against Iran — could both be aggravated by Trump’s actions, inactions, and idiosyncrasies. U.S. demands (in the North Korean case, denuclearisation; in Iran’s, unilateral renegotiation of the nuclear deal or Tehran’s […]
Sales of arms and military services by the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies—the SIPRI Top 100—totalled $374.8 billion in 2016. The total for the SIPRI Top 100 in 2016 is 1.9 per cent higher compared with 2015 and represents an increase of 38 per cent since 2002 (when SIPRI began reporting corporate arms […]
looking beyond borders 