Saudi Arabia, Iran and the US on August 8, 2019The Saudi-Iranian rivalry has, for many years, been a constant in the Middle East. It is a mix of geopolitics and religious sectarianism. Both countries vie for influence in their shared region, with religion and politics impacting on each other. The 1979 Iranian revolution intensified this divide with a religious/revolutionary fervour added to it for […]
Turkey’s massive problems on July 27, 2019Turkey, under Erdogan, feels let down by the US. Turkey has massive problems. Problems, which its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, refuses to see. He doesn’t see Turkey simply as a country. He sees it as phenomena, which, only he can comprehend. He feels aggrieved and angry when the rest of the world, even many of […]
In Trump land on July 15, 2019Trump has not only given shape to random fears. In the process, he has also created a wide constituency in electoral terms. After George Bush left the White House and Barack Obama ushered in as the US president, most of the world breathed a sigh of relief. After the disaster in Iraq and all that […]
Trump’s Iran Mania on June 27, 2019The world was spared an imminent military conflict with Iran-for the time being at least-whenTrump, reportedly, at the last moment, withdrew his orders to attack Iran’s military facilities. This attack was meant to punish Iran for daring to bring down an American unmanned drone on an intelligence-gathering mission over Iranian air space, as claimed by […]
Syria is a perpetual battlefield on June 19, 2019Syria continues to be a perpetual battlefield, in a region strewn with all sorts of minefields. It got caught up in the Arab Spring – a series of apparently popular rebellions in the Middle East. The most important, of course, was Egypt where its dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was toppled. After a few years of experimentation […]
Trump’s doctrine and Iran on June 4, 2019Of late, the United States has virtually declared war on Iran. The first step was the withdrawal from the nuclear accord, signed in 2015, under Barack Obama’s presidency. Even though, by most accounts, Iran was following the provisions of the agreement. President Trump, however, felt that it was a terrible deal. For instance, it didn’t […]
Trump factor in US-Iran relations on May 6, 2019The geopolitics of the Middle East has become more complicated and dangerous than it already was since Donald Trump has become the president of the United States. How is that, one might ask? While there are a number of strands in this story, one that particularly stands out is Trump administration’s decision to strangulate Iran’s […]
White supremacy and the massacre in Christchurch on April 1, 2019The massacre in the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, (more on this later) illustrates the danger from white supremacists. The worst nightmare of white supremacists is that the ‘other’ might, in the not so distant future, replace them; with Muslims being the worst. Which means that they would not only lose their privileged position […]
Trump-Kim love affair on March 15, 2019But, apart from Kim’s broad commitment to denuclearisation, with no set out process and time frame, there was nothing to suggest that there was any real progress at the first summit in Singapore. (What happened in Hanoi at the second Trump-Kim summit, I will come to that later.) Pyongyang continued to link any further progress […]
China’s historical destiny as Middle Kingdom on March 4, 2019An interesting article titled, ‘What China Threat?’, by Kishore Mahbubani, a professor in the practice of public policy at the National University of Singapore, takes issue with the widely held view that China’s rise poses a threat to the US and rest of the Western world. In his long article, Mahbubani disagrees with this view […]