Top Israeli defense and political leaders are scheduled to meet on February 28 to discuss a response to what Israel’s defense minister says was likely an attack by Iran against a an Israeli-owned cargo vessel in the Gulf of Oman. Israel’s state-owned Kan television quoted unnamed Israeli officials as saying …

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called on local manufacturers to focus on non-oil exports and expanding access to world markets as an effective instrument for defeating the sanctions. Speaking at a Sunday session of the Administration’s Economic Coordination Headquarters, Rouhani described non-oil exports as the key to Iran’s participation in the …

Iran’s position in the South Caucasus, a region it sees as a part of its historical interests, is coming under tremendous pressure. The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War underlined the need for Tehran to rapidly adjust its approach in light of Turkey’s and Russia’s growing power. The November 2020 peace deal which …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …