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Following the poisoning of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent from the Novichok group, the possibility of using Nord Stream 2 to put pressure on Russia has been widely discussed. Specifically, there are calls to abandon the project, to impose a moratorium or to...
Afghanistan is at a critical stage in its decades-long conflict. A combination of factors has led to a deterioration of the country’s security. These include political corruption, dysfunctional institutions, patron-clientelism and social instability. Violence has intensified in recent years,...
Having harbored al-Qaeda militants, the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 was toppled by the US following the 9/11 attacks in the US. In 2003, the Taliban reorganized and began their insurgency against the Afghan government and NATO forces. Since then, despite national and...
The European Union and its member states have presented an approach to the ongoing conflict in Yemen that has lacked both coordination and coherence. The situation in Yemen, which was the poorest Arab country already before the eruption of a civil war in 2014, has been described by the Secretary...
A stunning and humiliating sign of America’s loss of leadership was the UN Security Council’s rejection on August 14 of the US attempt to extend the arms embargo on Iran. None of its traditional allies, including Britain, France and Germany, supported the US. Washington was only backed by...
In July, Yahoo News revealed that US President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct offensive cyber operations against various nations deemed to be adversaries of the US. Trump generously invited the CIA “to both conduct cyber...
In late June, the United Arab Emirates asked Somalia to enter the conflict in Yemen in return for financial incentives and the reopening of a medical facility. Somalia’s instant rejection partially resulted from the strained Mogadishu-Abu Dhabi relationship. Why did the UAE initially make the...
With the 2020 US election approaching, the Republicans, led by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appear to have decided that there are only two issues worth pursuing. The first, which they hope the American public will swallow, would be the visibly diminished...
As of August 12, over 746,000 have died as a result of COVID-19 worldwide, with infections topping 20 million. Some experts are talking about the beginning of de-globalization, and economists are predicting a recession worse than the Great Depression. Both American defense and intelligence...
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is reason enough to mull over its meaning and its implications. In a recent article for Fair Observer, Peter Isackson has made a strong case that the annihilation of the two Japanese cities by American...
Born in the UK to Bangladeshi parents, Shamima Begum left London as a 15-year-old in 2015. Using her British passport, she traveled to Turkey with two of her friends from school. From there, Begum and her friends crossed into Syria, where they met their Islamic State (IS) contacts. While in Syria,...
