December 25, 2021 Africa, South East Asia
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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December 25, 2021 Eurasia
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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December 25, 2021 Eurasia, Iran, South East Asia
NATO’s Weakness Invites Russian Aggression “Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” -Artistotle In September, we ran a story about the think tank, RAND, and their war game after an action that essentially proved NATO, like a pearl of wisdom in Congress, is …
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December 24, 2021 Balkans, Eurasia
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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December 24, 2021 Iran, Middle Orient
Iranian support for Arab militias has long threatened Iran’s detractors, unable to develop an effective counterstrategy. Now, the tide may be turning. A string of events suggests that the usefulness of at least some of the militias in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine is waning as their popularity diminishes and …
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December 24, 2021 Afghanistan, Eurasia, South East Asia
It is sometimes said that when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 each still harbored some lingering regret that they were not joining the NATO of 1949 — an alliance with a resolute and single-track focus to deter any territorial threat that Moscow could contemplate. The alliance that …
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December 24, 2021 Eurasia, India, Middle Orient, South East Asia
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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December 24, 2021 Eurasia
Ukrainian military forces have conducted combat drills with U.S.-made Javelin anti-tank missiles in a conflict area with separatists in eastern Ukraine as tensions run high with Russia, Ukrainian Dom television channel said on Wednesday. Ukraine, which seeks to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has since 2018 received a …
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December 24, 2021 Eurasia
The United States has marshaled support from its European allies for significant sanctions against Moscow should Russian President Vladimir Putin proceed with a new invasion of Ukraine. But the strategy of relying heavily on the sanctions threat to shape Russian behavior faces challenges and limitations. Political divides on the issue …
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December 24, 2021 Afghanistan, Eurasia
Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan disrupted the erecting of a security fence by the Pakistani military along the border between the two countries, Afghan officials said on Wednesday. Pakistan has fenced most of the 2,600 km (1,615 mile) border despite protestations from Kabul, which has always contested the British-era boundary demarcation …
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