Key points In addition to the 51 allies the United States is obligated by treaty to defend, it has a number of quasi-allies: states the United States is not committed to defend but to which it provides a substantial degree of military and political support. By creating uncertainty about U.S. …

Claims about the territory’s spiritual status have been revealed to be fiction. In December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood in the middle of the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, delivering his annual address to the country’s Federal Assembly. Nine months removed from his formal annexation of Crimea, the Russian president …

China’s Communists rulers intend to establish a new world order It’s been said that the last thing a fish is likely to be aware of is water. By the same token, the last thing most Americans are likely to be aware of is the world order. There has always been …

Hezbollah now plays a greater role in deciding where the Houthis allocate funds. A report in Al-Ain media in the UAE claimed to reveal an interesting development in Yemen. According to the report, Hezbollah has “confiscated” funds in Yemen from the Houthis and is playing a role in that country. …

What is taking place in occupied Palestine is not a conflict, but a straightforward case of illegal military occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide. Those who insist on using ‘neutral’ language in depicting the crisis in Palestine are harming the Palestinian people beyond their seemingly innocuous words. This morally …

The timing of President Xi Jinping’s visit to Belgrade yesterday was far from accidental: exactly 25 years before, Nato forces bombed the city’s Chinese embassy during Operation Allied Force, the two-and-half month campaign against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Given the Nato campaign was justified by the …

Amid escalating regional tensions since October 7 last year and reports of American contemplations of troop withdrawal from Syria, the US administration should reassess its Syria policy, and consider a long-term, minimalist presence coupled with robust political and diplomatic efforts in the interest of regional security and peace. The ongoing …

The Islamic State (IS) is a transnational Sunni Islamist insurgent and terrorist group. At its 2015 height, the group controlled large areas of Iraq and Syria from which it launched attacks in the region and beyond. While the group no longer controls territory outright in Syria and Iraq, U.S. military …

In Cairo, representatives from Hamas held indirect negotiations with Israel for a ceasefire. The sticking point for several of the rounds was the order of events. Israel wanted the hostages to be released before it would stop the bombing, while Hamas said that the bombing must stop first. Israel has …

“The Chinese are imposing a kind of sanction on us. They don’t officially declare it, but they are delaying shipments to Israel…. In electronic products, there are tens of thousands of components, but if even one component doesn’t arrive, we cannot deliver the product.” — Unnamed senior figure in a …