How Brexit talks nearly foundered on the Rock on March 26, 2018The European Council summit of presidents and prime ministers on Friday confirmed the Brexit transition deal agreed last Monday between the UK and EU-27. This accord, which will come into play when the UK leaves the EU in March 2019, was finally agreed after Spain threatened to veto it over the inclusion of Gibraltar. Gibraltar, […]
BRICS lead the way in taking millions out of poverty on January 22, 2018China and Russia last week lambasted the validity of a 20-nation international summit on North Korea, held in Canada, to which neither Beijing nor Moscow was invited. The intervention highlights the growing geopolitical interventions of combinations of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) on select global issues, from Syria to Korea. […]
Key Iraq legacy: the biggest disruptive shift in foreign attitudes toward US on April 26, 2016Ten years on, it is clear that the Iraq War fuelled a sea-change in international opinion toward the United States. These movements in foreign sentiment are the most significant since at least the Vietnam conflict, and hold key present day implications for US policymakers. Over the course of the past decade, not one but two […]
Key Iraq legacy: the biggest disruptive shift in foreign attitudes toward US on April 26, 2016Ten years on, it is clear that the Iraq War fuelled a sea-change in international opinion toward the United States. These movements in foreign sentiment are the most significant since at least the Vietnam conflict, and hold key present day implications for US policymakers. Over the course of the past decade, not one but two […]
Why foreign policy holds the key to Obamas second term on April 20, 2016President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney is a landmark moment in US politics. He is only the second Democratic president to win re-election since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, doing so despite a very challenging economic headwind of sluggish growth and comparatively high unemployment in the United States. While many Democrats are elated by Mr […]
US economy and foreign policy on April 17, 2016Since the early years of the Cold War, foreign policy has generally ceased to be the biggest issue for American voters in presidential elections. Instead, the economy is what matters most. November’s presidential ballot will — probably — continue this pattern. Voters remain most concerned by the sluggish economic recovery, which last week prompted the […]
Debt debacle sends global shockwaves on October 16, 2013At the eleventh hour, Congress has agreed a short-term deal to raise the US debt ceiling. Although a worst-case scenario of debt default has therefore been dodged for at least a few more months, the troubling episode has nonetheless sent seismic shockwaves across the globe. For some time, world leaders and senior US officials have […]
Chinas reputation as a global power on September 16, 2013September 2008, the month that Lehman Brothers went bust, was the time that many of us realised we were in the midst of an international financial crisis. As dazed workers clutching cardboard boxes streamed out of offices in Wall Street and other financial centres, regulators and politicians rushed to stem the damage of a situation […]
US surveillance program on August 24, 2013In a 2011 report, which was declassified last week (August 21), then Chief Judge John Bates of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed concern at US Government surveillance programmes. He asserted that “the volume and nature of the information [that was being collected as of 2011] is fundamentally different from what the court had […]
Xi begins process of repairing Chinas image on June 9, 2013Chinese and US Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama concluded their first summit on June 7, 2013, in California. For both leaders, the meeting appears to have been successful and accords were reached on cyber security and military-to-military communication. Perhaps the most interesting joint pledge, however, is to build, in the words of Xi, a […]