When President Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, the U.S. economy was shrinking at a rate unmatched since World War II. In the seven years between then and his final State of the Union address Tuesday night, global investors have enjoyed stellar results from the rapidly expanding Obama economy. Read Here – Bloomberg
THE death of Iran’s Princess Ashraf in Dubai turned the focus on a defining cultural metaphor of our times — an unequal contest between waning riparian civilisations of which she was a part, and a noxious upstart culture that came with the advent of desalinated water, in which she perished. Read Here – Dawn
Gulf Arab states rallied dutifully behind Saudi Arabia when it cut relations with Iran, recalling their ambassadors and cancelling flights to Tehran in solidarity with the oil-rich kingdom after its embassy in Iran was torched by protesters. But all apart from Bahrain stopped short of severing ties… Read Here – Zawya
When Mohammed bin Salman was just 12 he began sitting in on meetings led by his father Salman, the then governor of Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Province. Some 17 years later, at 29 and already the world’s youngest defence minister, he plunged his country into a brutal war in Yemen with no end in sight. Read […]
What the map shows is that, due to a peculiar correlation of religious history and anaerobic decomposition of plankton, almost all the Persian Gulf’s fossil fuels are located underneath Shiites. This is true even in Sunni Saudi Arabia, where the major oil fields are in the Eastern Province, which has a majority Shiite population. Read […]
The terrorist attacks on the Pathankot airbase and the Indian Consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif just days after Narendra Modi’s chai-pe-charcha with Nawaz Sharif in Lahore have prompted predictable responses in India: calls by hardliners to cancel talks with Pakistan, and by pragmatists and liberals to keep those talks on track, not to mention the usual paroxysms […]
India’s vast military forces, although well suited to fighting conventional conflicts against its principal adversaries—Pakistan and China—are still not configured to deal with urban terror attacks. To prevent future attacks, it needs to have dedicated, local paramilitary forces dispersed across vulnerable areas of the country. If India fails to adopt an adequate counterterrorism strategy, there […]
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 brought the world close to a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev drama eclipsed another momentous event that occurred at the same time: a border war between the world’s most populous countries, China and India. A new book by Bruce Riedel, JFK’s Forgotten […]
One reason that the global economy is so sluggish is that, seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, financial stability is not yet assured. Financial-sector weaknesses linger in many countries – and financial risks are growing in emerging markets. Putting all of this together, global growth in 2016 will be disappointing and uneven, says Christine […]
Rising tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have put Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on the spot again, providing a fresh example of how its Islamist/Sunni-driven “strategic plans” for the Middle East can be undermined by unforeseen developments. Read Here – Al Monitor
looking beyond borders 