Russian grand strategy had hitherto been characterized by Moscow’s desire to reach a series of mutual compromises with the US-led-West’s Golden Billion (“New Détente”) aimed at pragmatically de-escalating their growing tensions. This was intended to turn that country into the bridge between the supercontinent’s Eastern (China) and Western (EU) halves with...
Republican President George Bush Jr., and Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden have destroyed freedom of expression in the West. All three have managed to make the main media support their common ideology. In two decades, the press has turned a blind eye to anything that contradicts the official rhetoric from Washington and has become converted t...
President Putin unexpectedly held a far-reaching press conference on Thursday [Dec. 22-ed], during which time he explained why he had no choice but to protect the Russian population in Ukraine, among the other important topics that he discussed. The Russian leader has regularly reaffirmed this humanitarian-driven motivation behind his country’s special opera...
Bloomberg published an extensively detailed report on Wednesday about how “Russia and Iran Are Building a Trade Route That Defies Sanctions”, which informs their readers of the game-changing geostrategic significance of the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) between those two and India. The US-led West’s Golden Billion ignored this Eurasian economic corri...
The real tragedy is what we don’t see. We see billions squandered on wind and solar. Tragic enough, but we don’t see the magnificent electrical infrastructures coal might create if similarly furnished with funds. The world’s largest coal-fired power stations, Inner Mongolia’s 6,720 Megawatt (MW) Tuoketuo Station and South Korea’s 6,100 MW Taean Station, were...
This decade and beyond could be the era of Middle Eastern sports. It may not have sunk in yet, but the Qatar World Cup was the kick-off rather than the finale. Qatar and Saudi Arabia will be this decade’s focal points of Asian sports. By 2030, Egypt and Turkey could become part of the global sports-hosting mix. That doesn’t mean that Arab and Berber North Af...
It’s an objectively existing and easily verifiable fact that the total assistance that the US gave Ukraine in the span of a single year amounts to approximately two-thirds of what it gave Israel over the past three-quarters of a century. This statistic is all the more surprising when considering that the Israel lobby is widely regarded by many as exerting di...
Kiev can’t expect to be treated better than NATO allies since that would irredeemably break the bloc’s trust in its American leader, nor can it expect that anti-Russian alliance’s European members to run through the rest of their already dwindling stockpiles at the expense of their minimum-security needs. Biden probably didn’t intend to, but he inadvertently...
Jeffrey Silverman, Georgian Bureau Chief for Veterans Today, has been interviewed by several Russian TV channels concerning his work over the years in exposing US bio weapons programmes in Georgia and countries of the former Soviet Union, with special emphasis on Ukraine, and on the latest breaking news, that the US and Ukraine are in fact working on develop...
‘This is not how you treat allies’ was, as various media reports in the US and Europe show, the message that the French leader gave to the US President Joe Biden during the former’s recent visit to the US. The message is a continuation of the logic i.e., Europe’s growing discomfort with US geopolitics, that underpinned the German Chancellor’s recent visit to...
It would be so tempting to qualify Chinese President Xi Jinping landing in Riyadh a week ago [Dec. 7-ed], welcomed with royal pomp and circumstance, as Xi of Arabia proclaiming the dawn of the petroyuan era. But it’s more complicated than that. As much as the seismic shift implied by the petroyuan move applies, Chinese diplomacy is way too sophisticated to e...
France defeated Morocco 2:0 on the pitch, but off the pitch Morocco is up 4:0. Ultimately, the effects of Morocco’s off-the-pitch success may ripple much longer than the fallout of its stellar performance in the stadium. To be sure, Morocco shares its off-the-pitch success with others, including France, its on-the-pitch history-laden rival, as well as Qatar ...
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been named by Time Magazine as the “Person of the Year 2022”; an obvious choice, according to the magazine’s editors. Indeed, he embodies an infectious courage that has enabled his people to resist the Russian invasion. However, in his country, power has gradually passed from his hands to those of his deputy cha...
Muslim religious soft power rivalry, a battle for the soul of Islam, just got hotter. The rivalry’s latest battlefield is not Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Tehran, or Istanbul. It’s Hindu nationalist Delhi. That is because, for the next year, India chairs the Group of 20 largest economies in the world. At stake for the Muslim rivals, proponents of rival pluralistic ...
Taking a closer look at the EU, it is striking that police uniforms generally are also black, perhaps not always those worn by officers on regular duty, but certainly those of the riot police. Riot police in full gear are literally black soldiers. As such, they have been brutally suppressing peaceful demonstrations for over a decade now. For instance, police...
It’s soccer World Cup season – a blip on the calendar for Americans; the quadrennial extravaganza of sport for the rest of the world. They call it “football” for some inexplicable reason. Soccer/football is an unusual game. Scoring goals is a rare event – one that occurs suddenly like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky. The rest of the play can become te...
NEO has frequently reported on the situation in Pakistan, which has been in a highly unstable situation for most of this year, and at the time of this author’s last article supporters of Imran Khan, the former Prime Minister who stood down this spring, were gathering for a protest march to Pakistan’s first national capital, Rawalpindi – an event known as the...
Much of what is published about the impact of the Midterm elections in the US must be taken with a grain of salt, not at face value. It is a lot more complicated than just that the Republicans have squeaked a majority in the House of Representatives and the Democrats in the Senate. Democrats may technically still hold onto a slim majority in the US Senate, b...
On Wednesday November 30, Ursula Von der Leyen, the German president of the European Commission, stated that the European Union will set up a specialised tribunal, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. The French foreign ministry and Kiev regime echoed her remarks. “We are ready to star...
On December 1, 2018, the Yellow Vests announced themselves to France, the world and the history books with their revolutionary graffiti tagging of the Arc de Triomphe. “The Yellow Vests will win” was a slogan gaped at worldwide as they would become the biggest, most organic, most devoted and most truly revolutionary threat any Western country had faced for 5...
The Biden administration excels in scoring its own goals, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. Missed in the hype of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia is that no part of the world lends itself more than the Middle East to put into practice the administration’s vision of a world in which the United States and China simultaneously...
A year ago, the whole world was actively debating the fate of United States weapons supplied to Afghanistan, which ended up in the hands of terrorists and criminal gangs. It should be recalled that according to Joe Biden, the total US military spending in 2001-2021 on military operations in Afghanistan exceeded $2 trillion, and the total military aid to the ...
Iran’s parliament has just approved the accession of the Islamic Republic to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), previously enshrined at the Samarkand summit last September, marking the culmination of a process that lasted no less than 15 years. Iran has already applied to become a member of the expanding BRICS+, which before 2025 will be inevitably...
Having an important geostrategic position and being an essential link in the development of cooperation between Central and South Asia as well as in regional security issues, Afghanistan has attracted a lot of attention from its regional neighbours. The Central Asian countries, objectively interested in multifaceted cooperation with all their neighbours, se...
Over the past weeks a coordinated all-out assault on our agriculture—the ability to produce food for human existence—has begun. The recent G20 governmental meeting in Bali, the UN Agenda 2030 Cop27 meeting in Egypt, the Davos World Economic Forum and Bill Gates are all complicit. Typically, they are using dystopian linguistic framing to give the illusion the...
As per the statement posted on the website of the Open Society Foundation (“Open Society” or Soros Foundation – which was declared an undesirable organization in Russia back in 2015), the so-called “charity” of American billionaire George Soros, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at $6.7 billion, has decided to close its branch – the “Assistance Fund” – in...
US midterm elections don’t usually have much relevance outside the country. A change of President can have a profound effect on the world around, but the composition of Congress is much more of an internal matter, until recently. Americans are very proud of their democratic system, which can be regarded as the world’s first liberal state – ironically, give...
“It seems probable that Russia will impose a solution. If, as expected, it becomes clear that the West can’t or won’t negotiate, it will behoove Russia to implement a maximalist solution. Or alternatively, Russia “bargains” by showing that it can create a dead zone in Western Ukraine as big as it likes. If Ukraine and its US minders don’t come to their sense...
Everywhere in the world, we observe a multiplicity of media, but no pluralism among them. All refer to the same sources which convey the same vision of the facts. However, we all know that if the facts exist in a unique way, the way we perceive them is multiple. Already in the 80’s, UNESCO had highlighted “information imperialism”; this way of imposing a sin...
In 1999, after the world faced a massive financial crisis, some sane thoughts prevailed to bring together finance ministers and bankers from the world’s top twenty countries to work towards ways to avoid such a crisis in the future. This group came to be known as G20. In its most recent, seventeenth head of State and Government summit held in Bali (Indonesia...
Another day of large-scale missile attacks on Ukraine’s hobbled energy infrastructure has plunged much of the country into darkness. The relentless attacks—which continued through the night and into the early morning hours—have intensified dramatically as Russian combat troops continue to join their units along the perimeter in preparation for a major winter...