Author: M Barbu

What Did the Biden-Putin Summit Mean for Syria ?

Analysts cannot offer any definitive indications about the fate of the Syrian issue after the summit between president Joe Biden, and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Reports hinted, however, at the possibility of cooperation between the two countries.

Some reports described the Biden-Putin meeting as a pragmatic summit, while other analysts described the meeting as a “red line summit” that was demanded by the two presidents, asserting that the Syrian issue was at the bottom of the agenda.

An Anxious Erdogan Tries to Make Nice With the West

Weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the NATO summit, Erdogan vowed that the meeting would be transformative. In a virtual gathering with American investors last month, he predicted that the encounter would “herald a new era.” It was no surprise, then, that after the Monday meeting in Brussels concluded, Erdogan took pains to stretch the truth and describe it as a major success.

Whatever happened to the provocateur, the pugnacious politician whose words and actions so frequently put him at odds with his neighbors and his allies? Where did that Erdogan go?

Biden’s Tour of Europe Leaves a Lot of Unfinished Business

“America is back at the table,” President Joe Biden said at a press conference Sunday in Cornwall following his first G-7 summit. That statement perhaps best encapsulated Biden’s message during his maiden voyage overseas. While he didn’t mention his predecessor by name, the contrast with Donald Trump couldn’t have been clearer. And it certainly came as a relief to the other G-7 leaders, as the summit was mercifully free of temper tantrums and Twitter tirades.

Iran’s Engineered Election Leaves Reformists With No Good Options

Iranians will go to the polls this Friday to choose the successor to centrist President Hassan Rouhani, who is winding down his second four-year term and cannot run for reelection. The polls will take place in an atmosphere of widespread public apathy, as voters choose from a list of presidential candidates that has been heavily vetted beforehand. Of the seven contenders approved last month by the Guardian Council—an oversight body of 12 clerics who are closely aligned with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—five are regarded as hard-liners, while the other two are uncharismatic moderates with relatively low profiles. Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line jurist, is widely seen as the front-runner.

As US withdraws, Afghanistan’s lure returns for Southeast Asian extremists – women and children included

It took 25-year-old Wardini and her two young children almost two months to travel with smugglers by road from Jordan, through Iran, to western Afghanistan. By the time they were arrested by Afghan border guards, she had burned their Indonesian passports. They were not going home, she told an Indonesian consular officer who visited her in a Kabul prison in 2019. With the end of days near, she and her children, both then under three, would live in “Khorasan, the blessed land”, she said.

Pentagon Works to Sharpen Definition of ‘Extremism’

Review could reshape cooperation with domestic agencies, consequences for troops’ social media posts, and more.

How do you define extremism? That’s one question the Defense Department is asking itself as it works to implement the first National Strategic for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released by the White House this week.

Rumors of U.S. Secretly Harboring Top China Official Swirl

Reports that a top Chinese official defected to the U.S. have swept Chinese-language media this week. The alleged reason? Sharing sensitive information about COVID-19 origins.

Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.