Iran’s Rouhani Officially Begins Second Term

Rouhani is obviously not the same president-elect as he was in 2013. He now appears to be ready to draw his own road map in front of both friends and foes — including Khamenei. All of Rouhani’s men were at the ceremony, as were his rivals, from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to his most recent conservative presidential competitor, Ebrahim […]

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A Dangerous Gulf In The Horn: How The Inter-Arab Crisis Is Fuelling Regional Tensions

The Gulf and the Horn are intricately intertwined regions that face common threats and vulnerabilities: armed conflict, transnational jihadism and organised crime, including piracy, human trafficking and money laundering. The current crisis comes at a difficult moment for the historically conflict-prone Horn, much of which is either politically unstable, mired in internal armed conflict or […]

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The Sorry Story Of Pakistan Prime Ministers

Nawaz Sharif is the proverbial cat with nine lives. But his third, the longest and perhaps final term as Pakistan’s prime minister, came to an end last Friday when the Supreme Court of the country disqualified him from holding public office…Whether Sharif is able to make yet another comeback is still to be seen, but […]

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America Should Not Cheer On An India-China Fight

Even as China and India once more come nose to nose and eyeball to eyeball across the forbidding glaciers of the high Himalayas, the United States must resist the temptation to pour gasoline on this potentially dangerous conflagration even though more than a few U.S. (and global) arms merchants would benefit from the intensification of Sino-Indian military […]

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Pakistan’s Creation — A Mistake?

Both Gandhi, for all his saintly status a profoundly sectarian Hindu leader, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League and the founder of Pakistan, were dead within a year after partition. If the British government had not been in such a panic-stricken rush to get out of India, there might have […]

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Explaining Global Recovery Amid Political Recession

Today, the world’s major economies are experiencing a steady recovery, despite the occasional setback. To be sure, economic performance is far from reaching its full potential: depending on where one looks, one can find output gaps, excess leverage, fragile balance sheets, under-investment, and unfunded longer-term non-debt liabilities. Still, financial markets show no signs of convulsion, […]

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Top 10 Signs Of Creeping Authoritarianism, Revisited

Has Trump undermined America’s constitutional order? Is he consolidating executive power the way democratically elected leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have? Or are U.S. institutions holding up reasonably well, either because they have proved to be surprisingly resilient or because Trump has been less adept at politics than he […]

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