China plans to break petrodollar stranglehold on December 25, 2017Petrodollars have dominated the global energy markets for more than 40 years. But now, China is looking to change that by replacing the word dollars for yuan. Nations, of course, have tried this before since the system was set up by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in tandem with the House of Saud […]
And the winners in the post-Daesh era are on August 21, 2017MUQTADA al-Sadr is up to something. In 2004 occupied Iraq, the nationalist leader who later engineered the Sadrist movement was even demonized as America’s number one enemy – briefly dethroning Osama bin Laden. Now, he’s being painted – by the usual Wahhabi-coddling suspects – as some sort of Reconciliator. Last month, al-Sadr flew to Jeddah […]
Eurasian integration meets America first on June 12, 2017Crucial developments in Washington, Brussels, Virginia and St. Petersburg these last few days may offer us serious clues on where we are now heading – geopolitically and geoeconomically. Let’s start with a neo-apocalyptic stream of analysis ruling that President Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accords has plunged the West into a conflict deeper […]
Will Trump hop on an American silk road? on January 30, 2017Hysteria reigns supreme at the dawn of the Trump era, with the President rebranded across the whole ideological spectrum as an American Mao or even an American Hitler. Let’s step away from this “American [media] carnage” to examine a few facts concerning the unofficial G2: US-China relations. A case can be made that Beijing has […]
All aboard the post-TPP world on November 27, 2016A half-hearted near handshake between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin before and after they spoke “for about four minutes”, standing up, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, Peru, captured to perfection the melancholic dwindling of the Obama era. A whirlwind flashback of the fractious relationship […]
Made in China G20 and its geoeconomic significance on September 11, 2016What has just taken place in Hangzhou, China, is of immense geoeconomic importance. Beijing from the start treated the G20 very seriously; this was designed as China’s party, not the declining West’s. And much less Washington’s. Outlining the agenda for the discussions, President Xi Jinping went straight to the point also geopolitically, as he set […]