Recent Posts

Moscow’s Proposed US-Russia Treaty – Analysis

Russia proposed a new security treaty between Washington and Moscow on December 17th. The Kremlin contends it will de-escalate tensions surrounding Ukraine, if the U.S. agrees to the terms of the “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees”. An examination of the draft …

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The Price of Nostalgia

America’s Self-Defeating Economic Retreat Anew consensus has emerged in American politics: that the United States has recklessly pursued international economic openness at the expense of workers and the result has been economic inequality, social pain, and political strife. Both Democrats and Republicans are now advocating “a trade policy for the …

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China’s Soft-Power Advantage in Africa

Beijing Isn’t Just Building Roads—It’s Making Friends When U.S. policymakers consider China’s influence in Africa, they often think of big-ticket infrastructure development programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over the past two decades, Beijing has spent billions building dams, highways, railways, and ports in countries from Egypt …

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The Art of War

Can Culture Drive Geopolitics? Around 1949, fresh out of college at Northwestern University, my mother moved to New York to take a job at NBC. She arrived at the dawn of U.S. television. NBC had entered the business just about a decade earlier. Rather than being assigned to a sitcom …

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North Macedonia Urged To Address Far-Right Threat – Analysis

North Macedonia is facing calls to address the threat from right-wing groups and far-right extremism when its national counter-terrorism strategy comes up for renewal next year. The current strategy, which covers the period 2018-2022, focuses primarily on religious extremism and Islamic radicalisation. The European Commission, the executive arm of the …

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The Slow Return Of Syria Into Mainstream West Asian Politics – Analysis

While much of the bandwidth of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) summit in Islamabad this month was reserved for the Afghanistan crisis, with the Taliban attending, another window of diplomatic restart was achieved within the Arab Gulf narrative as Syria’s heavily-sanctioned private airline, started direct flights between Damascus and …

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