Iran votes on Friday in a presidential election unlikely to result in seismic shifts in its troubled relations with the West and Gulf Arab neighbors, but which could bring a softening of the confrontational style personified by outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Read Here – Reuters
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, […]
This past two weeks, North Africa has been in an uproar. In Egypt, two million citizens demand that their democratically elected government step down. In Libya, Parliament passes a law prohibiting officials who served under Qaddafi from holding senior offices. If the law passes legal challenges, it will mean that the president, prime minister, much […]
Analysts have been releasing various scenarios of how Russia might develop over the next 10 years. Although each scenario is different, they all have some features in common. Below is a list of the commonalities that form a picture of what awaits Russia over the next decade. The first in a series of possible junctures emerged with the presidential election last year. Following his successful bid for the presidency, Vladimir […]
Every few decades a new energy source comes online and promises to revolutionize the way the world fuels its economies. This was true of the shift from coal and whale oil to conventional oil in the 19th and early 20th century. Then, in the 1960s and 70s came the nuclear power revolution soon followed by […]
The wreckage caused by China’s great, juddering slowdown continues to spread far beyond the country’s shores. Although most commodities enjoyed a bounce on May 3, after better-than-expected U.S. employment data, the plunge in their prices over the past few months suggests the past decade’s rally is truly broken, Ruchir Sharma argues Read Here – Bloomberg
More than two years after the Arab uprisings began, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that U.S. policy toward the Middle East is more or less the same as it was before. Whether it is Secretary of State John Kerry effusively praisingregimes and failing to muster even a sentence of criticism; the unwillingness to condition economic […]
At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason…It’s unlikely that anyone outside Qom read The Unveiling of Secrets; even inside the seminaries few would have embraced its programme. Yet just three decades later the pamphlet’s […]
Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussain. But the debate about the direction of the US-Iraqi relationship is influenced by a pessimistic view that the US has lost Iraq. Not true. Despite all the problems of the past decade, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis agree that we are better off today […]
Last month Afghanistan’s Minister of Mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, told the Wall Street Journal that he expects the country to start exporting oil as early as this year. Mr. Shahrani explained that oil wells in the Amu-Darya Basin in northern Afghanistan, while currently producing no oil, will have an output level of 25,000 barrels of oil a day by […]
looking beyond borders 