Transcaucasian Trail: Ancient lands & new frontiers in great game Three days into the renewed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in the Transcaucasian region — also known as South Caucasus — it is becoming clear that the binary narrative dished out by western commentators of this being a Turkish-Russian clash of wills and strategies is either simply …
Continue reading “The Time of Troubles in Transcaucasia – Part 1”
The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz transits the Strait of Hormuz as the flagship of US Carrier Strike Group, Sept 18, 2020 (US Navy photo) The US Fifth Fleet announced on September 18 that a Carrier Strike Group comprising USS Nimitz passed through the Strait of Hormuz with the guided-missile cruisers USS Princeton and USS Philippine …
Continue reading “Pompeo threatens to light the fuse in Persian Gulf”
Iranian military delegation led by Defence Minister Gen. Amir Hatami examining Russian weaponry, Moscow, August 24, 2020 The US President Donald Trump’s legacy in the Middle East is going to be that he scattered the region’s Arab unity once and for all. What the successive waves of Cold War, oil, petrodollar, terrorism, political Islam or …
Continue reading “Trump sets the Israeli cat among Arab pigeons”
As expected, the Trump Administration delivered letters on Thursday to both the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and to the president of the Security Council Dian Triansyah Djani notifying them that the United States is initiating the restoration of virtually all UN sanctions on Iran lifted under UN Security Council Resolution 2231. This process, if successful, …
The UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed: Palestinian leadership has accused UAE of ‘stabbing them in the back’ by establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. The controversial peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates has two fathers already — US President Donald Trump and …
Continue reading “Israel, UAE legitimise their relationship”
“The keys predict that Donald Trump will lose the White House this year.” The statement by the Director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center William Evanina on August 7 giving an “unclassified overview of foreign threats” to the 2020 US presidential election selectively focuses on “the ongoing and potential activity” by three …
Continue reading “The ‘foreign threats’ to 2020 US election”
Iraqi militia fighters attacked the US Embassy, Baghdad, Dec 31, 2019. Getting caught between a rock and a hard place is an unenviable situation for a politician. A tragic case in modern times was of Hafizullah Amin, the Cold War era Afghan communist politician who tried to reduce his country’s dependence on the former Soviet …
Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton said Israel should act now ahead of US election to strengthen its security interests. The former US National Security Advisor John Bolton is a paradox in some ways — an extreme right winger with working class background, an outlier like Richard Nixon who had to run twice …
Continue reading “Bolton forewarns Israel on US policy shifts”
US President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shaking hands after the Helsinki Summit, July 16, 2018 There was a time when President Trump’s personalised diplomacy seemed a hydra-headed phenomenon with tentacles reaching far and wide. He engaged such diverse politicians — from Shinzo Abe and Kim Jong-Un to Xi Jinping and …
Continue reading “Trump foreign policy enters lame duck period”
With the rebound of the Chinese economy, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is on the march again. An Associated Press report from Beijing last Thursday said China is the first major economy to grow since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, recording a 3.2% expansion in the latest quarter following the reopening of factories and …
Continue reading “China’s BRI makes entry in post-Covid-19 era”
