Eurasia

Crisis In Armenia Provides Fertile Ground For Russian Meddling – OpEd

Armenia is in crisis. Again. The immediate cause came on February 25, when Onik Gasparyan, Chief of General Staff of the Armenian Army, and other senior commanders released a statement calling for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to step down. Pashinyan responded by firing Gasparyan. Yet the real cause of the …

Read More »

Talking to Russia: A Plan for Syria

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 …

Read More »

Opinion: Biden’s bid to mend relations with Europe is crucial to his global strategy

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 …

Read More »

Bitcoin And Baseball Cards – OpEd

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 …

Read More »

Jihadist Groups In Sub-Saharan Africa: Assessing The Threat – Analysis

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 …

Read More »

Money Laundering: Darker Side Of World’s Offshore Financial System – Analysis

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 …

Read More »

Regime Fighter Found Dead in Ghouta

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 …

Read More »

French Court Acquits Sami Al-Kurdi, Former Free Army Leader

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 …

Read More »

Joe Biden’s US Foreign Policy: Return to the Old Normal?

US President Biden bellicosely proclaimed, “American is back,” in his major foreign policy priorities speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 19. Repeated twice for effect, Biden signaled the end of the Trump interregnum. No more assuring words could have been uttered for George W. Bush’s former Defense Secretary …

Read More »