Month: August 2023

Forming a Unity Government May be Libya’s Best Bet for Healing Rift

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Libyan politicians have floated a plan to put together an interim government. The UN and other external actors should support this step toward breaking the country’s political deadlock. Libya’s political crisis took a new turn after its House of Representatives, based in the eastern city of Tobruk, approved a plan to appoint an interim government that would reunify the country’s two parallel executives as part of a roadmap to general elections. House members made this decision with backing from representatives of the rival Tripoli-based assembly, the High State Council, and from east-based military strongman Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

Le grand déballage : «Pour tout ce qui nous appartient, nous devons nous battre»

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L’ensemble du dispositif politique américain – avec ou sans inculpation au titre de la FARA (Loi sur l’enregistrement des agents étrangers), et à l’approche des élections de 2024 – est fragile.

La situation devient très confuse. On frôle la folie. Un nouvel acte d’accusation comportant quatre chefs d’inculpation relatifs aux événements du 6 janvier a été émis à l’encontre de l’ancien président Trump, qui est désormais accusé de plus de 75 crimes. Toutefois, ces nouvelles accusations ne feront probablement qu’éroder davantage la confiance dans le processus judiciaire fédéral et dans l’intégrité du système politique américain lui-même. L’acte d’accusation doit être examiné dans le district de Columbia, qui est notoirement politisé et qui a peu de chances de constituer un jury autre que totalement hostile (on dit à Washington que le département de la Justice pourrait condamner un hamburger avec un jury de Washington).

Taliban prepare hundreds of suicide bombers over water dispute with Iran

In this picture taken on February 21, 2023, Taliban security personnel watch horsemen compete in the traditional sport of Buzkashi in Fayzabad district of Badakhshan province. (AFP)

In mid-May, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi issued a warning to the Taliban: honor Afghanistan’s water-supply agreement or face the consequences.

A well-known Taliban figure offered a mocking gift of a 20-liter water container in response and told him to stop making terrifying ultimatums. About a week later, a skirmish erupted on the border, leaving two Iranian guards and one Taliban member dead.

Le succès massif de l’éradication de l’opium par les Taliban soulève des questions sur ce que faisaient vraiment les États-Unis (et l’OTAN) depuis le début

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Avec le recul, on peut considérer que l’occupation de l’Afghanistan par les armées des USA/OTAN n’étaient rien d’autre qu’une nouvelle grande guerre de l’opium comme celles menées contre la Chine au 19ème siècle, ou celles de l’apprès Deuxième Guerre mondiale menées par la France dans le Triangle d’Or en Indochine, reprises plus tard par la CIA au Vietnam et au Laos. Les mêmes guerres, habillées différemment, et nous n’y voyons que du feu, même en la regardant se dérouler sous nos yeux.

L’échiquier mondial : Les enjeux militaro-économiques de la mer Noire

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La mer Noire, traditionnellement zone de prospérité avec d’abondantes ressources agricoles mais aussi zone de transit énergétique nécessaire à l’Europe depuis la destruction des gazoducs Nord Stream, est devenue une zone d’affrontement. Le 19 juillet 2023, le ministère de la Défense russe a déclaré que tous les navires naviguant en mer Noire vers les ports ukrainiens seront considérés comme des transporteurs potentiels de cargaison militaire.

Iran’s renewed Africa policy: Raisi’s ambition and the perception of Western decline

Over the past two years, as the United States and the European Union have invested in the revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Iranian leadership has opted to solidify its non-Western foreign policy approach. In line with this approach, President Ebrahim Raisi embarked on a three-country trip to Africa in mid-July, marking the first time an Iranian president has undertaken such a visit in over 11 years. Earlier in the month, Iranian officials reported that the Islamic Republic’s exports to the continent had increased by 100% over the past year. It is now clear that engagement with Africa will be a major foreign policy focus under the Raisi administration. However, this is not the first time that Iran has taken such an approach to the continent. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad implemented a similar policy from 2005 to 2013, although it did not yield significant results. This raises the question of whether, a decade on, Raisi’s Africa policy will prove any more successful.

Two decades on, Iraq’s ongoing, if fragile, cultural revival

Photo by Khalil Dawood/Xinhua via Getty Images

The view across the Tigris River from the eighth floor of the Babylon Hotel reveals a telling mise-en-scène: As a giant neon billboard that adorns the gleaming 32-story Baghdad Mall flashes the Iraqi flag in between ads for Coca-Cola, the ghost of the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid looms large over her adjacent tower in progress. Commissioned in 2010 to be the headquarters for the Central Bank of Iraq and a symbol of a “new era,” it’s not yet finished, and the Australian engineer whose company helped build it is still languishing in Iraqi prison after a dispute about payment.

MAKE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

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Alexander Dugin
Once we have established ourselves as a sovereign civilization, we need to change the dominant discourse. What everyone was afraid or embarrassed to say before (what the world community will think of us in the West …) must now be stated clearly and openly.

So let’s say: we urgently need to begin the revival of the Russian people.

WHY “SOFT POWER” IS NOT APPLICABLE IN RUSSIA

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Leonid Savin
Copying alien theories and models is unlikely to benefit our state and people.
From the mid-2000s to the early 2020s, there was a fashion for “soft power” in the Russian community of political scientists and international affairs experts – numerous articles on this topic were published, dissertations were defended, representatives of a number of Russian NGOs and foundations eloquently tried to convince that they were engaged in “soft power” issues in order to promote Russia’s interests abroad. We must agree that the term coined by Joseph Nye Jr. was indeed attractive. True, he also talked about hard power, smart power and cyber power. And then there’s the sharp power (by Christopher Walker) and the sticky power (by Walter Russell Mead). And different views on how to use power to exercise US domination led to controversy between theorists of these methodologies.

DECIPHERING THE RUSSIAN CODE

Alexander Prokhanov
Russia is in dire need of an ideology capable of fighting the enemy on an invisible battlefield.

Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union, and with it the communist ideology. The ideologues of victorious liberalism – Gaidar and Chubais – built a country that resembled an ugly caricature of the victorious Western civilization.