Author: M Barbu

UN extends Syria cross-border aid without challenge from Russia

The Biden administration eased restrictions on aid groups working with the Syrian government in November.

The United Nations has extended authorization to deliver aid from Turkey into Syria’s opposition-held Idlib province for another six months.

Bab al-Hawa is the last Syrian border crossing authorized for direct aid deliveries into parts of the country not controlled by the Syrian government. UN authorizations for cross-border aid into other opposition areas have all lapsed amid Russia’s insistence that aid be directed through Damascus.

Iraq’s speaker re-elected with backing of Muqtada al-Sadr

Mohammed al-Halbusi is Iraq’s speaker of parliament for a second term despite opposition from Shiite parties aligned with Iran.

The first session of Iraq’s new parliament was held on Jan. 9. In that session, new parliament members voted that Mohammed al-Halbusi will serve a second term as speaker of the Iraqi parliament.

From the start of the day, different party members showed their strengths via different methods.

No, Putin is not becoming Stalin

Making parallels with the USSR in the 1930s cannot help explain Putin’s Russia.

In late December, a Russian court ruled to shut down Memorial, an organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of people who perished in communist terror. Memorial was founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov and fellow Soviet dissidents at the height of Perestroika in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (free speech) made it possible to talk openly about Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s genocidal crimes.

What is behind the protests rocking Kazakhstan?

Protests against fuel price rises have spiralled amid wider political and economic grievances.

As the city hall in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, stood in flames and protesters pulled down the statue of the country’s first President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the image of the post-Soviet country as a beacon of stability in the volatile region disintegrated.

How Britain Influences US Policies

London realized earlier than any other country that one of America’s weaknesses was exorbitant focus on unplanned international consensus. This was of course the best opportunity for Britain. London was well aware that the United States had the power to be at the center of global consensus after World War II and that was why European allies were following Washington. Given its cultural and linguistic affinity, Britain quite delicately prevented Washington from making independent foreign policy moves through powerful foreign lobbies and some influential Middle Eastern governments in the American press and think tanks. Consequently, over the past decade, the importance of the United States’s global role as a consensus-building leader has gradually diminished. The result is that most US allies and partners whose wars and crises were taken care of through US taxpayers’ money are no longer willing to cooperate and help protect the United States‘ interests

Russia’s Strategy To Control Ukraine

Relying on NATO and the support of its European allies, the United States has trapped Russia in a geopolitical dilemma since the 1950s and has reduced Moscow’s ability to play an influential role in the international community. In order to break this barrier after the annexation of Crimea, Russia has considered Ukraine as the last piece of the puzzle, which will be completed only by a military attack on this country. Ukraine is currently Putin’s most important geopolitical case, as he sees Kyiv as out of Russia’s orbit and seeking closer ties with the West.

Erdogan’s Adventurism: A Challenge For Europe

Turkey has come a long way as a pillar of NATO and the West during the Cold War and has recently gone from being a credible member of the Council of Europe and a country seeking to join the European Union to a destructive and untrustworthy partner for NATO and the West. Turkey’s conflicts and tensions with European countries and the United States have escalated gradually since the justice and development party (AKP) came to power in 2002. In 2020 the Erdogan-led Turkey saw a profound shift in relations with its traditional Western partners. This transformation took place at a time when Turkish foreign policy was close to being militarily influenced by nationalist narratives in order to exert Ankara’s power to near abroad.

Russia’s Putin Says Western Leaders Broke Promises, But Did They? – Analysis

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his senior aides have repeatedly claimed that Western powers broke promises they made not to expand NATO as the Soviet Union collapsed.

In his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow in December, Putin accused NATO of deceiving Russia by giving assurances in the 1990s that it would not expand “an inch to the East” — promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification, the Russian leader said.

From the Jaws of Retreat

The history of the United States in the postwar era is replete with American efforts to change other nations. These projects often failed to achieve their goals, but few so completely as the recent one in Afghanistan. After 20 years, a great many lives lost, and untold billions spent, the Taliban—the very same group that the United States had intervened to remove at the outset—returned to power while U.S. personnel were still mid-evacuation.

A More Just Drone War Is Within Reach

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this past August brought an end to a 20-year war. But as a series of recent investigations by The New York Times has underscored, it also marked the beginning of postmortems about what the United States did right and, in some cases, did wrong.