Wars in Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) pushed the number of people internally displaced by armed conflict, violence and human rights violations to 28.8 million last year, the highest figure recorded by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in Geneva. More than 6.5 million people were newly displaced within their own countries in 2012, almost twice as many […]
So has the time finally come when America and its allies will take action, send in the bombers, declare a no-fly zone? It seems not. For there is a matching shout from the West: “It’s Iraq all over again.” Indeed, if there are any polls suggesting intervention would be a vote-winner, governments across the world […]
The White House finally made it official last week: Yes, the civil war in Syria is a slippery slope and yes the US is on it. Nobody in the Obama administration actually used those words, of course, but if you paid attention to what officials said, it was clear that President Barack Obama has reluctantly […]
Iran, Syria and North Korea have prevented the adoption of the first international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade, complaining that it was flawed and failed to ban weapons sales to rebel groups. To get around the blockade, British U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant sent the draft treaty to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and asked him […]
Exploratory drilling near the coasts of Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey has unearthed vast reserves of natural gas. Competition over the rights to tap those resources is compounding existing tensions over sovereignty and maritime borders. The eastern Mediterranean is quickly becoming as volatile as its eastern cousin, the South China Sea. Read Here […]
It is still, on occasion, good to be the king. It is not necessarily good to be the king of a Middle Eastern country that is bereft of oil; nor is it necessarily so wonderful to be the king during the turmoil and uncertainty of the Arab Spring. It is certainly not good to be […]
Even as Obama hesitates to thrust the United States into the rolling cauldron that is Syria, critics accuse him of coddling a dictator in Cairo. Read Here – Foreign Policy
As the world looks on (or away), the country jammed between Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Israel is disintegrating. Perhaps the regime of Bashar Assad, Syria’s president, will collapse in chaos; for some time it could well fight on from a fortified enclave, the biggest militia in a land of militias. Either way, Syria looks […]
President Barack Obama devoted just one sentence in last week’s State of the Union address to call for a new transatlantic trade and investment deal. However, if negotiated with sufficient ambition and presidential engagement, it is Obama’s best chance yet at leaving a positive foreign policy legacy. The other global issues Obama catalogued in his speech were […]
…There is a need for US President Barack Obama to come up with a genuine initiative in his second term to move the Middle East peace process towards that lofty goal of a two-state solution. That failure, along with the ad hoc handling of the forces of change in the republics of the Arab Spring, […]
looking beyond borders 