MIDDLE ISRAEL: Moscow’s strategic setbacks in Ukraine have yet to spell victory for anyone else. Having listened to Nikolai Gogol read to him from his Dead Souls, which mocked feudal Russia through a plan to buy dead serfs’ souls, Alexander Pushkin at one point burst into laughter only to suddenly …

President Joe Biden initially picked much of the low-hanging fruit from the misery of the Trump years. He revived the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and returned the United States to the Paris climate accords; the World Health Organization; and the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. But Biden …

Post World War II Germany has exhibited commendable characteristics — publicly atoning for its Nazi past, working assiduously to create a thriving nation, designing a truly democratic country, integrating its European compatriots into a common market, leading others in opening borders to refugees, and modifying its previous ultra-nationalism to form …

Rule of law, transparency, accountability and citizenship rights are fundamental pillars of constitutional democracy. These pillars are eroding rapidly. The democratic cultures based on equality, liberty, justice, reason, science, secularism, tolerance and mutual respect for dissenting and diverse opinions are declining across the globe. The corporatisation of electoral campaigns, market …

It is hard to feel good about this report, but with wage growth slowing sharply in the last six months to around 4.0 percent (compared to 3.4 percent in 2019), it’s hard to see how an inflation rate north of 9.0 percent can be sustained. The overall CPI was up …

When Arab leaders sit down with US President Joe Biden in Riyadh this week, one topic they will no doubt be eager to raise is the threat posed by Iran and how Tehran’s nuclear ambitions can be thwarted or contained. During his campaign for the presidential nomination in 2020, Biden …

The Mediterranean region in question The Mediterranean is etymologically the “sea in the middle of the land“. (1) The Romans called it Mare Magnum (‘Great Sea’) or Mare Internum (‘Internal Sea’) and, starting with the Roman Empire, Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’). The term Mare Mediterrāneum appears later in the work …

Iran getting the Bomb is not necessarily a bad thing, though in a perverse way. An Israeli physicist who worked at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor, which produces the plutonium for the country’s nuclear warheads, published a Haaretz article declaring the the US and Israeli policy of “maximum pressure,” has utterly …

L’inévitable poignée de mains avec Mohammed ben Salmane ne sera pas la seule épreuve pour le président américain sur la route semée d’embûches de cet Orient compliqué. Dix-huit mois après son arrivée à la Maison-Blanche, le président américain Joe Biden a débuté mercredi sa première tournée au Moyen-Orient, une région …

As the Ukraine war has entered its fifth month, and two decades after Iran, Russia and India signed the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) in 2002, Dariush Jamali, head of the Iranian-Russian Port of Solyanka in Astrakhan Oblast, announced that the first transit shipment from Russia to India had been …