Former Qatari emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the father of the Gulf state’s current ruler, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, learnt a lesson from the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. A US-led military coalition liberated Kuwait while many conservative Kuwaitis fled to Saudi Arabia. Less conservative Kuwaiti nationals sat the war out in the casino of the Cairo Hilton...
Never underestimate a wounded and decaying Empire collapsing in real time. Imperial functionaries, even in a “diplomatic” capacity, continue to brazenly declare that their exceptionalist control over the world is mandatory. If that’s not the case, competitors may emerge and steal the limelight – monopolized by US oligarchies. That, of course, is absolute ana...
We live in one of the most important moments in history. Perhaps this moment is even more important than the end of the Cold War. Similar to those events more than 30 years ago, major geopolitical shifts are currently taking place today. If the end of the cold war saw the rise of the Western Bloc to dominance, then the start of this new Cold War has seen the...
There’s no more obvious failure of Europe’s politicians to protect their own citizens than the drop in the euro and the pound to below parity and near-parity, respectively, with the United States dollar. However, this article was planned before the brazen sabotage of the Russian-German Nord Stream gas pipelines which – almost impossibly – outranks the curren...
In Washington, economic and financial sanctions remain one of the most favourite options for fighting wars by other means. We continue to witness the use of this tool quite often, with the US strategy to fight Russia’s military operations in Ukraine being the most recent example. A key reason that has thus far enabled the US and its allies in Europe to weapo...
The sixth summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) – an international forum uniting the states of the Asian continent with the mission of strengthening relations to ensure stability and security in the region – has ended in Astana. Official representatives of more than 30 states of the Asian region participated....
The 12th International Defence Exhibition DefExpo 2022 opened on October 18 in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Defence ministers from 25 countries are expected to attend the exhibition, with representatives from 75 countries participating. The theme of the exhibition is “The Path to Pride,” reflecting Republic Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intention to...
The Western World is being shaken by a reactionary movement that is reversing the historic accomplishments of the 20th century in building humane societies of social justice and caring. The assault is registering remarkable victories – especially in North America and Britain but in continental Europe as well. Within the European Union, country after country ...
This is how recently, MK Stalin, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu wrote a long letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The provocation was the Home Minister Amit Shah’s report to the President of India that the Official Languages Committee of Parliament has recommended that the medium of instruction in technical and non-technical higher education institutes ...
Everything that matters in the complex process of Eurasia integration was once again at play in Astana, as the – renamed – Kazakh capital hosted the 6th Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA). The roll call was a Eurasian thing of beauty – featuring the leaders of Russia and Belarus (EAEU), West Asia (Azerbaijan, Turkey, Ir...
Animal rights activists are working for banning all domestic elephants. This is alarming because (i) It works against the preservation of a species which is dying at an alarming rate, (ii) Works against preservation of a 4000-year-old culture, (iii) Is an essential part of patrolling forests and chasing away crop raiders, (iv) Involves no cruelty to the anim...
Elephants in India can broadly be categorized as (1) Wild and (2) Domestic, that is under human care. These include elephants in zoo, with Forest department, Temple, privately owned, Circus (now banned) and Army (now defunct). Both wild and domestic elephants have existed for thousands of years. But in recent years, a self-styled category of ‘animal lovers’...
Let’s start with Pipelineistan. Nearly seven years ago, I showed how Syria was the ultimate Pipelineistan war. Damascus had rejected the – American – plan for a Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline, to the benefit of Iran-Iraq-Syria (for which a memorandum of understanding was signed). What followed was a vicious, concerted “Assad must go” campaign: proxy war as the r...
India’s abstention from voting on a draft resolution at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to debate on the human rights situation in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) on October 6, has surprised many at home and abroad. The draft resolution, moved by a core group of eight nations—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the UK and t...
Nahdlatul Ulama, arguably the world’s only Muslim mass movement propagating a genuinely moderate and pluralistic form of Islam, has forged an unlikely, albeit temporary, alliance with the Saudi-controlled Muslim World League. The League is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s chief propagator of a socially less restrictive but autocratic interpretation o...
French President Emmanuel Macron does not know how to solve crises, but to reshuffle the cards in order to consider new solutions. This is why, noting the absence of discussion around the Ukrainian conflict, he launched an initiative last May: the “European Political Community” (EPC). After François Mitterrand’s “European Confederation” and Nicolas Sarkozy’...
Speaking at a rally and concert on Red Square, held in support of the results of the referenda, President Putin recalled how the USSR was formed when Russia created the modern Ukraine. The President stressed that ‘it was Russia that had created the modern Ukraine, transferring significant territories, the historical territories of Russia itself, along with t...
The war was predominantly dull; with little movement. Trench warfare as in WWI. The big mistake was at the beginning when Russia tried to take a country of 40m with a few soldiers. The Head of Russian Intelligence Mr Naryshkin recently admitted that Russia had no reliable intelligence on Ukraine. For many years, since 1991, Russian intelligence service did n...
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Andrei
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13 Oct 2022
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First, I want to post a video I found on Twitter (original here) which shows what kind of explosion took place on the Crimean bridge. From what I have read, a truck filled with explosives blew up, killing three people in a car nearby, and then the flames took over a train also crossing the bridge. That train was full of fuel. It is only thanks to the amazin...
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has blown new life into Turkey’s vision of a Turkic world that stretches from Anatolia to Xinjiang in north-western China. “Central Asia now resembles the 1990s when there was a huge competition between global and regional powers for influence over the resource-rich region. The shadow of Russia on the region, coupled with the des...
The vulnerability of the world, especially Europe, to importing fossil fuels from abroad was already shown by the oil crisis of the 1970s. Europe began to gradually cope with it only a decade later. In a way, the winning move at that time was to actively build nuclear power plants in order to produce high-tech energy themselves. Given the disastrous effects...
The global confrontation between the superpowers, the PRC and the US, affects every country in the world in one way or another. However, it primarily affects countries within the direct sphere of influence of competing giants. While the US sphere of influence is geographically fragmented and may include African and Asian countries alongside all Western state...
There are moments in life when you receive an unmistakable sign that a landmark has been passed. One of these “scales-dropping-from-the eyes” phenomena occurred under the Obama Presidency. Although slighted at the time, and forgotten today, it marked an historic turning in how the country’s political elites shed their commitment to a broad, comprehensive vie...
As is already well known, referendums were held in the LPR and DPR as well as in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions from September 23 to 27 on the issue of giving up belonging to Ukraine and becoming part of the Russian Federation. They were monitored by a large number of foreign observers who confirmed the free will of the inhabitants of these regions and compl...
While the international press treats the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as a news item, we analyze it as an act of war against Germany and the European Union. Indeed, the three gas supply routes to Western Europe have been cut off simultaneously, while at the same time a new gas pipeline has been opened to Poland. Just as Mikhail Gorbachev saw in ...
During the month [of September], Sri Lanka government made some progress in the measures it had initiated earlier for economic recovery. After holding the staff level meetings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the government is hopeful of $2.9 bn loan materialising. However, some other measures it has taken like the formation of a bloated cabinet f...
Ayn Rand -- of Fountainhead / Atlas Shrugged fame -- hasn’t been in the news since one of her prize disciples, Alan Greenspan, proclaimed her as the inspiration for a way of thinking that brought the world financial system to wrack and ruin. Rand spawned a juvenile creed of unmitigated selfishness (“man exists only for his own sake”) that resounded for a whi...
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is simultaneously speed dating and playing on multiple diplomatic, religious, and economic chessboards. The latest feather in his crown, his appointment as prime minister, aims to ensure that he can continue to do so with as little collateral damage as possible. The appointment shields him from legal proceedings in the...
‘Russian roulette’ is a most peculiar expression. At least for any Russian. For the simple reason that he has never heard of it. In fact, it does not exist in Russian, neither the expression, nor the reality. It is something we learn about with astonishment when we learn English. The expression is an American invention and only an American with a death-wish ...
The global energy crisis, arguably the worst since 1973, is forcing adjustments in nuclear energy policy in the European Union and many other parts of the world. Washington’s policy of squeezing Russia out of the European energy market, decommissioning European NPPs and forcing a “green agenda,” for the express purpose of strangling its main economic rival, ...
The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level. This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned b...