Eurasia

Presidents Joseph Biden and Vladimir Putin met in Geneva on Wednesday, June 16. Both separately noted that the talks went well. “There’s been no hostility,” Putin said. “On the contrary, our meeting took place in a constructive spirit.” Biden meanwhile declared “the tone of the entire meeting… was good. Positive.” …

Putin said, “..We can see attempts at destroying the relationship between Russia and China. We can see that those attempts are being made in practical policies. And your questions, too, have to do with it. This is, perhaps, the salience of the Geneva summit…” Russia and China have congruent interest …

Concerns over the white-supremacist neofascism of the Republican Party were overblown, a “Marxist” told me last January, because Trump had never won the allegiance of all but a small fraction of the nation’s corporate and financial ruling class. Had I not read the latest Noam Chomsky interview, the “Marxist” said, …

On June 15, the “Promoting Education Not Indoctrination Act” was introduced in the Ohio legislature by Sarah Fowler Arthur, a first-term representative from the overwhelmingly white district of northeastern Ohio that includes both the rustbelt lake towns of Ashtabula and Conneaut and the Cleveland suburb of Chardon. Like many other …

SOMALIA Al-Shabaab claimed a suicide attack on a military training centre in the capital Mogadishu on Tuesday that killed at least fifteen people. The bomber pretended to be a military trainee and detonated as new recruits, seeking training from Turkish forces, gathered. Crisis Group expert Omar Mahmood says the attack, …

The UN is recruiting a new envoy to broker peace in Yemen. More important than who gets the job is how UN member states and the mediator perceive its purpose, interpretations of which have limited the UN to the flawed two-party framework adopted since 2015. Martin Griffiths, the outgoing UN …

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has dismissed speculation that Turkey could build a military base in Azerbaijan as “rumors.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said during a visit to Baku this week that he hasn’t ruled out the possibility Ankara could build a military base in Azerbaijan under an agreement …

In retrospect, Germany’s much-vaunted Hezbollah ban appears to have been little more than a publicity stunt aimed at silencing critics of the German government’s pro-Iran foreign policy. Hezbollah has effectively evaded the ban by transferring many of its activities to charities and cultural centers controlled by Iran. Iran’s main base …

Iranians will go to the polls this Friday to choose the successor to centrist President Hassan Rouhani, who is winding down his second four-year term and cannot run for reelection. The polls will take place in an atmosphere of widespread public apathy, as voters choose from a list of presidential …

I first met Salim, a 35-year-old French citizen of Algerian origin, about 10 years ago at a cafe near Levallois, the Parisian banlieue—or peri-urban ghetto—where he lived at the time. In the course of our wide-ranging discussion about French history and identity, part of the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation, …