Author: M Barbu

Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Challenges to China’s Silk Road Strategy in the Middle East

Despite Beijing’s increasing engagement in the Middle East, it lacks a clear, consistent, and comprehensive strategy for the successful implementation of the new Silk Road. Although China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework for cooperation with the Middle Eastern states is marked by strategic flexibility and maximizing opportunities, that may prove insufficient. As China and the countries of the region become more integrated, they will also share risks and face near-term geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges.

Russia’s Syria Intervention Has Been A Mixed Blessing For Moscow

Here’s What You Need To Remember: Long-term stability in Syria almost seems quixotic, more likely measured in decades than years. It will take time to assess the extent to which Russia has “won” in Syria. Absent a peaceful end to the conflict and an infusion of large-scale Western aid, downside risks for Russia could take some of the bloom off of its rose in Syria.

What is antifa?

Why is Trump trying to designate it as a terrorist organization in the wake of protests over George Floyd’s death?

President Trump is blaming the far-left network known as antifa for the looting and rioting that has arisen during anti-police-brutality protests in cities across the nation. Trump said he’ll label the movement a terrorist organization, though he legally cannot do that, and Attorney General William P. Barr said there is evidence antifa and other similar extremist groups are instigating violence.

ISIS Redux: The Central Syria Insurgency – April & May 2020

Following a lull in the second half of April, ISIS attacks increased in both quantity and geographic diversity during May. This boost in activity coincided with increasingly persistent and widespread anti-ISIS operations conducted by the Syrian regime and its allied militias. Both the ISIS attacks and counter-insurgency operations spread across four governorates: Hama and Raqqa in the north, and Homs and Deir Ez Zor in the south.

How Turkey crushed UAE’s gambit in Libya

Turkish drones in early April this year successfully carried out strikes on an Antonov military cargo aircraft from the UAE at an airstrip north of Tarhuna city in Libya. The hit was aimed at disrupting the UAE’s regular supply of weapons to the warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces attacking the southern Tripoli front line. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya is virtually divided into two seats of power: The Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which enjoys UN and international recognition but seriously backed only by Turkey, and the other group led by Khalifa Haftar, a renegade general, in eastern Libya backed by United Arab Emirates (UAE) sheikhs, the Egyptian military regime, Russian mercenaries and French leader Emmanuel Macron.

Return of Nation-States Need Not be a Threat

The trend we witness in world politics is away from the initial forms of globalization and toward a reassertion of the nation-state as one of the two key players in international economic and business relations, the other player being transnational businesses.