Among today’s geopolitical risks, none is greater than the long arc of instability stretching from the Maghreb to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With the Arab Spring an increasingly distant memory, the instability along this arc is deepening. Indeed, of the three initial Arab Spring countries, Libya has become a failed state, Egypt has returned to authoritarian […]
It is worth asking whether Russia achieved the strategic goals that the Russian president announced at the UN. That is: Did Moscow’s unannounced and uncooperative air strikes in any way help lay the foundation for the broadest possible anti-terrorism coalition? Judging by the reaction of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the answer is “no.” What’s more, it did nothing to end Russia’s international isolation. Read Here – Moscow […]
Judging by the content of state-controlled television, Russia is primarily focused on its foreign agenda. In fact, Russia does not appear to even have a domestic agenda — that is, other than occasional reports that Duma deputies have found something else to prohibit. Read Here – The Moscow Times
ISIS is murdering and enslaving across Syria and Iraq. Russia is deploying dozens of aircraft to support the regime in Damascus. Huddled masses have been tempest-tossed into Europe. At the eye of the storm, Bashar al-Assad is pursuing a cynical, brutal, and risky strategy to cling to power. Read Here – The Atlantic
Europe’s response to waves of refugees from the war-torn Middle East raises serious questions about its commitment to humanitarian values. To be sure, Europe is facing a very difficult set of challenges. But these pale in comparison to those confronting India’s policymakers in 1971, when New Delhi was faced with a refugee surge orders of magnitude greater than […]
China cannot match the United States’ proven track record of projecting its military power in the Middle East. Nevertheless, there is wide agreement among Saudis that during a time of unprecedented turmoil in the region, it is vital to keep all their options open and to strengthen relations with as many regional and global powers […]
For Israel, the bigger problem with the deal is the omission of guidelines on Iran’s regional activities. Changes to the United Nations Security Council embargos on arms deals and ballistic missile technology, for example, are not conditional on Iranian behavior apart from direct violations of the agreement. This is to be expected, as it is […]
Whether its central claim is an inscrutable dream of religiously legitimated sovereignty or a malleable delusion, the appeal of ISIS is easily abstracted from motives available to outsiders. It is, in the incisive words of the New York artist Molly Crabapple, a ‘cosplay Caliphate’, a dress-up festival of blood-soaked nostalgia whose very pretensions to antiquity […]
The fall of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, was both the culmination of a blitzkrieg campaign IS had started in winter 2013 in Iraq and in Syria, seizing the city of Raqqa in May of that year, and the prelude to a wider strategic phase to deepen and expand the group’s dominance. Over the […]
India is unaware of its responsibility to Islam in the wider Muslim world because its governments and media have turned Indian Muslims into what John Pilger has aptly described as “unpeople”. Today it still has a sliver of a chance to redeem itself by coming out strongly in favour of the Iran deal, by sustaining […]
looking beyond borders 