The rise of Sharif’s Muslim League is a golden opportunity for a civilian government to build consensus with other political parties and wrest control of domestic, foreign and security policy from the military. Read Here – Gulf News
After the huge protests that followed the 2009 election, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have hoped June polls would quietly install a loyal conservative president, but the surprise candidacies of two major independents may scupper that. Both Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, the nationalist protégé of rabble-rousing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former […]
India cannot afford to be complacent in spite the fact that the issue has been resolved in a win-win manner, as the Chinese media claims. In fact, the Ladakh border episode will be regarded as a watershed in the bilateral relations. India is faced with a new reality of having to deal with an assertive […]
In October 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to inform him that peace was at hand between Israel and Syria. Two weeks later, Rabin was dead, killed by a reactionary Jewish Israeli fanatic; the peace agreement that Rabin referenced died not long thereafter. But Israeli hopes for an eventual agreement […]
Whichever party takes power in Islamabad will almost certainly have to cobble together a coalition to rule. The new government will inherit a looming foreign-exchange crisis, hours-long blackouts that have provoked street riots, and overlapping insurgencies and sectarian wars that have claimed thousands of lives. Though army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has resisted the temptation to […]
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. During her ultimately victorious presidential campaign last year, South Korea’s new conservative president, Park Geun Hye, rarely touched on foreign policy. (Though it’s a fair question as to whether North Korea really constitutes “foreign” policy as far as Seoul is concerned.) When I traveled with Park as she campaigned across […]
If Pakistan‘s May 11 parliamentary elections unfold according to recent national opinion surveys, two-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif will once again take power in Islamabad. Deposed in a 1999 coup led by General Pervez Musharraf, Sharif fled for nearly a decade of Saudi-sponsored exile. Today, however, it is Musharraf who lives under house arrest just outside Islamabad […]
Even if most Saudis recognised the significant progress recorded under the leadership of King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, few appreciated the epochal reform decisions that provided and ensured a high standard of living, which also transformed and continue to change Saudi Arabia into the key Arab pivot in world affairs. For eight continuous years after […]
South Korean President Park Geun-hye meets President Obama on Tuesday in Washington. The South Koreans created a slogan for the summit, “Bound by trust, forward together,” the first time they have adopted an English language motto for an event of this sort. During her visit, Park may talk about “the most successful alliance in history”—the mutual defense pact turns 60 […]
On March 28, Egypt’s former trade minister, Rachid Mohamed Rachid, was removed from an arrest list after he paid back a total of 15 million Egyptian pounds (approximately $2.2 million) to the state as part of a reconciliation program under President Mohamed Morsi. Rachid, who served as minister from 2004 to 2011, fled just before […]
looking beyond borders 