President Joseph Biden has clearly signaled that his administration will deprioritize the post-9/11 focus on the Middle East and, instead, devote diplomatic energy and finite defense dollars to priorities in Asia and Europe. The focus on America’s peer competitors—the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China—is a welcome change after …

PRESIDENT BIDEN made clear last week that his push to revive U.S. relations with traditional allies in Europe is not simply a matter of restoring a status quo disrupted by Donald Trump. “We are,” he said in an address to the Munich Security Conference, “in the midst of fundamental debate …

I saw this piece last week on the soaring price of baseball cards and naturally started thinking about Bitcoin. The article begins with a story about how a rare LeBron James trading card (it’s all sports cards, not just baseball cards) would now sell for over $3 million, more than …

As the Biden administration surveys the litany of foreign policy challenges that exist—Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea, to name a few—counterterrorism in sub-Saharan Africa likely falls outside of its top priorities. Throughout the Trump administration, there were high-level discussions on troop redeployments and how best to transition away from …

A sign outside a laundry in New York city had a frivolously flippant slogan: “We launder dirty clothes, not dirty money.” And a 2019 movie titled “Laundromat,” based on a book ‘Secrecy World’ by Pulitzer Prize winning author Jake Bernstein, exposed the byzantine world of money laundering. That’s the insidiously …

On Wednesday, the Syrian regime forces found one of their fighters killed near the village of Jisreen in eastern Ghouta, Damascus countryside. The SY 24 correspondent in eastern Ghouta said, “the Presidential Guard, affiliated with the regime army, found the body of one of its members on the outskirts of …

Assad forces defector Sami Al-Kurdi has been acquitted of crimes against humanity, writes Al-Souria Net. The French judiciary threw out a lawsuit against the officer who defected from the Bashar al-Assad forces and the former spokesperson for the Free Army in the Central Region, Sami al-Kurdi. On Saturday, France 24 …

Israel targets Iran-backed strongholds in second attack in less than a month on outskirts of Syrian capital. The Syrian army said on Sunday evening that Israeli-fired rockets struck parts of southern Damascus in escalating attacks that regional intelligence sources said target Iran-linked assets. A Syrian army statement said the attack …

Former Jaysh al-Islam spokesman’s family have claimed that he is subjected to psychological and physical torture in France, writes Sowt Al-Asima. The family of the former spokesman for Jaysh al-Islam (“Army of Islam”), Majdi Nehme, known as Islam Alloush, has reactivated his case in the media through a statement published …

Discussion of Islam in Western languages, and latterly much of it in the languages of the Islamic world as well, is bedeviled by polemic and reductionism. Islam itself always seems to be in the dock. One school of thought wishes to prove that Islam as such is responsible for all …