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Considering Donald Trump’s impromptu twitter pronouncements during and after the presidential election in the US, it is not surprising that people living both inside and outside the US are in a state of shock. And amongst those most shocked are the country’s intelligence agencies that he has been previously contemptuous of, notwithstanding the fact that […]

Israel is one of the few countries in the world that can get away with murder. It has evicted, killed and occupied Palestinian lands and still able to pronounce that they are the real victims. Of course, they (the Jews) have been among the most persecuted people in the world, as evidenced by the holocaust […]

An interesting recent development about the multifaceted Middle Eastern crisis was the “Moscow Declaration” in which Russia, Turkey and Iran suggested that they could become the guarantors of a Syrian peace deal. That begs the question: what kind of deal it might be? So far, a political solution mooted at different times by the rebel […]

The US-China relations are entering a dangerous phase. So far, it has been a case of controlled management with probing signals from both sides of testing boundaries. The latest was the case of an underwater US drone operated by a US naval vessel carrying research in international waters of the South China Sea, much of […]

Britain’s flamboyant and controversial foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, landed himself into trouble recently by blaming Saudi Arabia and Iran for the continuing mayhem in the Middle East through their proxy wars in the region. For this, he earned the rebuke of his Prime Minister, Theresa May, who pointedly disowned her foreign minister’s remarks by saying […]

At a time when the erstwhile political fringe is tending to become the mainstream, the recent failure of Italy’s ruling Democratic Party (PD) to win referendum on constitutional reform is another blow. Italy’s youngest ever Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi (at 41), had tied his political destiny to the outcome of the referendum, vowing to resign […]

The political spat between US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese authorities would suggest that the relationship between the two countries might be entering an even more difficult period than it has been the case so far. It is, therefore, interesting to look at the state of their relationship before Trump takes over as President starting […]

First Brexit, the referendum in Britain to leave the European Union, and now Donald Trump’s election as the US president, show how far populism has come to in developed (for want of a better word) western societies. It is the world that prided itself on ‘enlightenment’ — the triumph of reason over ignorance and prejudice […]

Donald Trump’s victory is raising all sorts of questions about where we go from here. Trump prides himself on being a shrewd and successful businessman, though his self-image is controversial. The governing principle of his business strategy is that all dealings are transactional. This means that the US can’t and won’t underwrite the security of […]

Much is expected from the battle for Mosul in Iraq. It is hoped that if Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, is liberated from the IS, it would significantly curb the new kind of terrorist menace that it represents. Ever since the IS dramatically captured some important Iraqi towns and declared a caliphate, it became the centre […]