The Turkish finance minister is planning a visit to Egypt next month in the latest step toward rapprochement between the two countries.
In a new step toward rapprochement between Egypt and Turkey, Turkish Minister of Treasury and Finance Nureddin Nebati will visit Egypt on June 1.
From the vantage point of the West, giving in to Ankara’s demands from Finland and Sweden amounts to letting an autocrat design the security architecture of Europe.
US President Joe Biden’s announcement of his country’s unequivocal support of Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bids came as a veiled rebuke of Ankara.
Enraged by the Greek premier’s remarks to US Congress against arms sales to Turkey, Erdogan denounces Greece, along with Sweden and Finland, for supporting terrorism.
Opening up a new battlefront with NATO allies, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced late Monday that he had “written off” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for lobbying the US Congress against military sales to Turkey.
Over the past month, a series of violent episodes on Afghanistan’s borders have put the country’s relations with its neighbors in the spotlight. Some incidents involved Taliban fighters, such as clashes on the border with Iran.
As of last week, NATO seemed well on its way to expanding, when Finland and Sweden formally submitted their applications for membership. When they officially join, becoming the 31st and 32nd member of the alliance, it could potentially mark the fastest accession process in the alliance’s history. This is reflective of the sudden about-face in the two countries’ foreign policies in the months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both went quickly from countries content with a posture of non-alignment marked by occasional cooperation with NATO, to expressing increasing support for the alliance, to applying for full membership.
[A]s official results came in, [Iran’s Supreme Guide Ali] Khamenei and [Major General Esmail Qaani, chief of the Quds Force who is supposed to rule the “Resistance Front” countries as a satrap]… realized that the Lebanese electorate, or at least the 49% who went to the polls, had denied Tehran the “crushing victory” it had hoped for.
Late last week, Finland’s prime minister and president jointly announced Helsinki’s intention to move ahead with its application for NATO, a move that, if completed, would be a significant boon for the transatlantic alliance.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s brinkmanship over Finland and Sweden’s bid to join NATO has put Turkey back at the top of the news. I provided some background, including a scoop on Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s bullying of his Swedish counterpart Anna Linde over her support for the US-backed Syrian Kurdish group which Turkey labels terrorist during a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin.
Iraqi writer Farouk Yousef pointed out that after the US gave Iran $90 billion following the signing of the nuclear agreement with the Obama administration in 2015… the bulk of the money… was spent on terrorist groups run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as terrorist groups run covertly in other Arab countries.
Taiz, a city in central Yemen, is besieged by Huthi rebels and practically cut off from the rest of the country. Restored road access would save lives and build trust that could help bring peace to Yemen, but time is short.