An article by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times last July is a prime example of western intelligentsia’s limited understanding of China’s unhindered rise as a superpower. “Becoming a superpower is a complicated business. It poses a series of connected questions about capabilities, intentions and will,” Rachman wrote.
Terrorist Groups Have Doubled Since the Passage of the 2001 AUMF
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.
The Doomsday Clock has been sitting the past year at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse. The United States has done little to quell doomsday apprehensions by ratcheting up tensions with China over Taiwan and its warships in the South China Sea, as well as with Russia over Ukraine, further NATO expansion, and missile deployment in eastern Europe. Will the first-ever Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races help to put a damper on any potential conflagration?
The United States has recently been talking seriously about starting a new Cold War with China. In Cold War with the former Soviet Union which mostly revolved ideological and security spheres, the two sides reached a strategic agreement to replace political threats with military ones. Thus, the former Cold War between the Kremlin and the White House began with an agreement, not a threat.
In the new Cold War; however, there is no such agreement between US and China and due to Beijing‘s economic rise as well as the profound geopolitical changes that have taken place in the Indo-Pacific region in recent years the political and economic threats are turning into military ones.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to reset relations with Moscow and is planning a face-to-face meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin later this month.
Senior German officials were already scheduled to get together with Russian counterparts in January in a bid to ease geopolitical tensions amid rising alarm that the Kremlin is planning a further military incursion into Ukraine.
On December 15, the Federal Reserve announced numerous quantitative tightening measures that have the intended goal of combating the rising inflation that has been bogging down the American economy. As of November 2021, the rate of inflation has reached 6.8 percent, the highest since 1982, and is unlikely to have peaked yet.
Bello Turji’s gesture is coming a few days after Nigerian Air force jets bombed to death two other bandits’ leaders and their commanders in Gusami forest in Zamfara state.
A few days after military operations in Zamfara State killed two leaders of terror groups and their followers, another kingpin, Bello Turji, has released dozens of victims his group kidnapped.
Kenyan police arrested a man sought in connection with human trafficking since 2017 in a joint operation with Dutch authorities and Interpol.
53-year-old John Habeta was taken into custody at Schiphol International airport in Amsterdam on 25 December after his arrest in Kenya.
Abstract
On 3rd January 2020, Iranian General, Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in Baghdad under the orders of Former President Donald Trump. Trump argued that Iran was planning an imminent attack, although till today no proof of this claim has been provided by the US. Experts in international law have highlighted that the targeted killing of Soleimani was neither legal, nor necessary. The US failed to prove that Soleimani was a threat, that he was involved in terror operations, or that killing Soleimani was necessary to avert other terror attacks. This paper will examine the arguments presented by Trump, analyse the right to life under International human rights law, and explore the challenges presented by America’s war on terror campaign with respect to human rights and state sovereignty.
It may just be the ultimate agreement that neither the US or Russia can refuse.
Whether deliberately or not, the Russian government has left the United States and NATO a perfect “golden bridge” out of the trap that is developing in Ukraine. In diplomatic parlance, this means finding the other side a way of abandoning an untenable position without excessive loss of face or sacrifice of truly important interests.
In the present crisis between Russia and the West, the golden bridge is Ukrainian neutrality, along the general lines of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, by which Western and Soviet occupying troops withdrew from that country, allowing it to develop as a successful free-market democracy. The Biden administration, either directly or through German and French mediation, should seek to “own” the idea of Ukrainian neutrality as its response to Russia’s demands.