Obsessed with reviving Turks’ imperial days of glory, Erdoğan is turning to Turkey’s east to create a pan-Turkic/Islamist strategic alliance consisting of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Pakistan, with part-time, tactical alliances with Iran, Qatar and Bangladesh.
The idea is to bring together three Muslim nations: NATO member Turkey; Azerbaijan with its rich hydrocarbon resources and growing military capabilities; and Pakistan with its nuclear weapons.
Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like us are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.
The third trilateral drill, held in the Indian Ocean, is launched as Iran seeks to boost military cooperation, stronger ties with Beijing and Moscow amid tensions with Washington
Iran, Russia and China on Friday began a joint naval drill in the Indian Ocean aimed at boosting marine security, state media reported.
Iran’s state TV said 11 of its vessels were joined by three Russian ships including a destroyer, and two Chinese vessels. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard will also participate with smaller ships and helicopters.
The PLA has carefully studied the use of network-centric militaries such as the US Army and observed the reliance of those organisations upon information as a key element of their technological superiority. A theoretical representation of the centrality of information to western methods of warfare is provided by the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop as described by John Boyd.
Given the lack of joined up thinking by China’s geopolitical adversaries, the biggest threat to China’s growing economic and geopolitical dominance may actually be itself.
For a country considered by many to have been the source of a global health pandemic resulting in over 5.3 million deaths globally, it is noteworthy that COVID-19 appears to have done little to check China’s geostrategic standing. If anything, it can be argued that China’s geostrategic reach may actually have increased. This is particularly the case as Western governments have presided over a series of geostrategic errors allowing Beijing to extend its sphere of influence almost unchallenged.
On Jan. 13, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed alarm that millions of Afghans are on the “verge of death” thanks to a lethal brew of “freezing temperatures and frozen assets.” This was no idle warning. Notwithstanding the decline in fighting following the Taliban’s victory in August 2021, Afghanistan’s economy is in a deepening spiral of impoverishment and destitution.
Many in the West believe China’s economic ascendancy indicates that Beijing is covertly working to usher in a new world order in which the balance of power has shifted.
History shows that changes in the world order are inevitable, but they are not happening as quickly as some analysts think. For example, the rise of the US to the world’s primary geopolitical position took nearly half a century, from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. France’s rise to domination over western Europe in the 17th century was also a long and arduous process.
While Tehran is proceeding slowly when it comes to establishing official ties with the Taliban government, recent talks highlight Iran’s interest in expanding its role in Afghanistan.
On his first official visit to Iran, the Taliban government’s acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi arrived in Tehran Jan. 9 for talks with his counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. Having held a preliminary meeting with Iranian officials in Kabul, the high-level Taliban delegation had already finalized the agenda.
President Joe Biden took office with what was, in many ways, a soft-power vision of foreign policy. But China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have been busy reminding the United States that today’s world is one of big-power competition.
Regional experts say one key objective of Mr. Putin’s recent actions regarding Ukraine is to convince the U.S. to deal with Russia as the great power he sees it to be. At the end of a week of inconclusive diplomacy addressing Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that if nothing else, “they are taking us seriously now.”
The same inaction by Western leaders to hold China accountable for the global pandemic that infuriates Western citizens only emboldens the Communist Party leadership, which sees inaction as a license to do more.
China will be constantly assessing the political strength of its adversaries. European political leaders have never demonstrated the stomach to confront military threats. During my tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, I observed Europeans always believed dialogue was more important than confrontation. Bad agreements were better than no agreements and being party to agreements that did not work was better than withdrawing.