Twenty years ago, the firebrand mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led his party to a landslide victory in a parliamentary election that would transform Turkish politics. What followed were two decades of uninterrupted control of the government by the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which set out to prove that an Islamist party was not a threat, but could in fact move the country forward.
The European Union is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran’s ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. That should not be the objective of the nuclear talks. Instead, European leaders ought to be seeking a strong deal that will prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially — as they should have learned from Russia by now — because those nukes may soon be aimed at their countries.
Just as the commentariat was hailing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Westward pivot, he announced today that Finland and Sweden’s bid to join NATO was not such a great idea.
While the Kremlin is busy in the west, developments to the south promise further threats to its aggressive policy in the borderlands.
Overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the South Caucasus is witnessing huge developments which could potentially decrease tensions between Armenia on the one hand and Turkey and Azerbaijan on the other. The process might also critically affect Russia’s position in the region and may even give some momentum to the West’s ambivalent policy.
Iraq has blown past all the constitutional deadlines to form a government in the aftermath of its October 2021 parliamentary elections, the results of which initially threatened to upend Iraq’s system of sectarian kleptocracy.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards artillery fire hit an area north of the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil on Wednesday, targeting what Iranian state television described as terrorist bases.
Iraqi Kurdish media reported that a shell had landed in a village in the Sidekan area near the Iranian border, around 60 miles (100 km) northeast of Erbil.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured a suspected ISIS facilitator in an operation near the Euphrates River Valley in Syria’s eastern Deir al-Zor province, the US-led Special Operations Joint Task Force-Levant (SOJTF LEVANT) announced on Tuesday morning.
Although great empires rank among the most powerful engines of world history, they are also among the most dangerous, especially as they brood over their decline.
The National Interest has published a shameless apology for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, “The Saudi War of Necessity in Yemen” by Ahmed al-Maimouni.
With his second sentence, Al-Maimouni, a retired Saudi major general, forfeits his right to be taken seriously: “It is imperative for Saudi Arabia to preserve peace in Yemen….” What peace? Yemen has been at war since 2015 and the reason is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In 2015, an Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen without provocation. Since then, 150,000 Yemenis have died, most of them at the hands of the Saudi coalition.
Conflict and counterterrorism are two sides of the same coin, and silos between the two must be broken down to reduce terrorism.
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine overshadowed the latest step taken in Washington to turn the page on 20 years of a costly, largely military-driven approach to addressing conflicts.