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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Riyadh and Doha are united in their opposition to normalization with the Damascus regime, according to al-Hal Net.
Political researcher Darwish Khalifa, who is close to Saudi Arabia, says that there is a conciliatory diplomatic movement in the region. It seeks to resolve the problems and overcome the differences that have ravaged the Middle East during the ten years of the Arab Spring revolutions. The UAE is a leading part of this movement, through building bridges of communication, paving the way for others, and establishing a new political reality in a conflict-exhausted region, most recently through normalization with the regime in Damascus.