Israel revealed on Friday the name of a Syrian officer who is assisting the Syrian Army in the Golan Heights and is offering aid to Hezbollah’s activities inside a demilitarized zone near the border. “Bashar al-Hussein, a resident of Homs, is the commanding officer of the Syrian Arab Army 90th …

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is preparing to release over 850 detainees arrested on charges of “belonging to ISIS,” mainly from Deir Ezzor and al-Hasakah, after mediation by tribal elders. It is still unknown if all the prisoners will be released at once or in stages. On September 22, the …

Another U.S. warship has sailed into the Black Sea, again drawing intense Kremlin scrutiny amid continued concerns about a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. The destroyer USS Arleigh Burke entered the sea via the Bosporus Strait on Thursday for a routine patrol in support of NATO allies and partners, U.S. …

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday claimed that his country’s intelligence service has uncovered plans for a Russia-backed coup d’etat in the country set for next week that allegedly involves one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs. Both the oligarch and the Russian government rejected the allegations. At a news conference in …

Navy SEALs and Green Berets operated alongside their Greek counterparts this week in Athens, where watercraft recently donated by the U.S. to an elite Greek unit were on display. “I have been so impressed to see not only the growth in the U.S. – Greece Special Forces partnership but also …

Poland has urged NATO to send reinforcements east over concerns about Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine, which is expected to be the focus of high-level alliance talks in Latvia next week that will include U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. President Andrzej Duda said Thursday at NATO headquarters in Brussels …

Make in India lost steam. Prime Minister Narendra Modi escaped success stories from the rampart of Red Fort in Independence Speech in 2019. Several attempts were made to rejuvenate Make in India , invoking major reforms like reduction in corporate taxes, land reforms at state level and downsizing cumbersome procedures …

Since 2019, more than 40 protests were held against ‘Chinese expansion’ in Central Asia. Yet Central Asian elites have hardly had a bad word to say. On the contrary, they suppressed these protests, denied that China’s goal was expansion and even requested their publics be grateful to China. No wonder …

Debt limit episodes have been a recurrent federal fiscal feature in the past two decades. Since 2002, the debt limit has been modified 19 times. In August 2019, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 (BBA 2019; P.L. 116-37) suspended the debt limit through July 31, 2021. The limit was reset …

In Europe and the US, there used to be a tradition of pragmatic and often harshly realist statecraft. It went back at least as far as the 5th century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides, whose influential history of the war between Athens and Sparta was essentially an account of the coercive …