In a diplomatic move, Türkiye is seeking BRICS membership, potentially expanding its alliances beyond traditional Western partners while maintaining its NATO membership. Meanwhile, Iran is set to supply Russia with ballistic missiles within days, potentially escalating the war, as some Ukrainian allies have yet to deliver on promises made at the July NATO summit.
For many years now, Hezbollah has served as a major instrument of Iran to take over Lebanon, not only as a territory but as a sovereign state. Many Western countries would like to avoid that and invest in the former “Pearl of the Middle East”, led by France. These efforts are futile in view of the Iranian circumvention apparatus, who’s main mechanism is allocated in the border crossings between Syria and Lebanon. No matter how much pressure is put on a state level, Hezbollah will survive and even prosper, as long as one does not put an end to Hezbollah’s control over these main smuggling routes.
This is a premium article for paid subscribers that covers the recent trend of declaring the rebirth of ‘maneuver warfare’ as product of the perceived “success” of the Ukrainian operation in Kursk. In the piece I refute these conclusions by explaining how maneuver warfare is in fact a misunderstood, and deliberately misleading, concept which uses outdated combat stereotypes from WWII and beyond in a disingenuous attempt to paper over shifting modern paradigms.
The Israeli political and security objectives of the military operation in the northern West Bank and the Jordan Valley are numerous and complex and are linked in their timing to the course of confrontation on other fronts, especially the fronts of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, and the seriousness of the development of the situation in the West Bank is not only related to the course of the Palestinian arena, but affects the Jordanian interior.
Here are the full comments that I gave to The Epoch Times’ Nalova Akua about Africa’s role in the New Cold War, excerpts of which were included in his article titled “South Korean Government Gives Export Boost to Companies Trading in Africa”.
The challenge ahead is a formidable one that will require the military-intelligence services to fully focus on this newly metastasized terrorist threat in order to emerge victorious, which in turn necessitates their top brass giving them the order to abandon the all-out nationwide crackdown against the opposition. Pakistan’s prior large-scale anti-terrorist operations succeeded precisely because those carrying them out weren’t distracted by political witch hunts, which COAS Munir would do well not to forget.
While the Pakistani-Taliban security dilemma owes its origins to “innocent” misperceptions of the other that were previously manageable since neither suspected that any adversarial third party was meddling in these mutually sensitive issues, this dynamic has now evolved to the point where both suspect their counterparts of colluding with their hated enemy (if not outright being under their influence) in ways that threaten their objective national interests.
It’s unrealistic that China would ever abandon its investments in Russia or Pakistan, but those two’s connectivity roles for it vis-à-vis the EU and West Asia/Africa respectively can be complemented by Turkey and Iran via the Middle Corridor.
Up until the beginning of this year, China’s grand strategy was to rely on a network of connectivity corridors across its Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) to integrate Eurasia and thus advance its non-Western model of globalization, which Beijing believes to be more equal, just, and multipolar than the declining Western-centric one. This ambitious plan was abruptly disrupted by two black swan events that created sudden uncertainty about the viability of BRI’s Russian and Pakistani routes: Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine and Islamabad’s scandalous change of government.
The tragedy in IK-19 – the seizure of employees hostage by convicts and their brutal murder, and then the murder of the invaders themselves – once again stirred up public interest in the topic of prison and gave rise to disputes: how this could happen and what led to it. Exactly the same questions were asked after the June hostage-taking of employees of pre-trial detention center-1 in Rostov-on-Don. Most likely, riots will continue, and the reason for this is a whole range of reasons: unbearable conditions of detention, discrimination against Muslims, lack of prison staff and their low level of training. The situation can only be corrected by completely dismantling the penitentiary system, which directly inherits the Gulag, and creating a new one based on the principles of humanism in its place,” says Anna Karetnikova, a former leading analyst of the Federal Penitentiary Service in Moscow.
Since 2007, when the State of Israel implemented its still-ongoing blockade of Gaza, several different monikers have emerged to describe the conditions for Palestinians living in the territory under the ongoing Israeli siege. Now, after 11 months of the murderous Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, it is necessary once again to revise what the State of Israel has imposed on the territory. What the state of Israel has created in the Gaza Strip is nothing less than a death camp akin to what the Nazis created for the massacre of Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich.