The euphoria to which Turkey’s June 7 election results have given rise calls to mind an oncology ward patient learning that an experimental protocol might slow the advance of her tumor. The elation is warranted in rough proportion to the desperation of the situation. In other words, good news is, like most things, relative.
If, as Marx taught, history repeats itself "first as tragedy, then as farce," then Washington's latest reported concession proves that U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran have moved from the tragic to the farcical.
For 13 years, the escape routes from Turkey's political haunted-house have been shutting one by one. Suffocation seemed inevitable. The June 7 election, which resulted in the first hung parliament since 1999, cracked open a tiny window in the attic. Turkey's hope is now predicated upon an unlikely scenario: One in which every major political group exits from that window in an orderly fashion, even as the smoke is rising.
After a heated battle last month, the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015, commonly known as trade promotion authority, which gives the president the ability to negotiate trade deals and submit them to Congress as a whole for an up or down vote, which, these days, is an essential step towards passage. The fight now moves to the House of Representatives, where passage is critical as both chambers must agree on the final text of the pending trade promotion authority bill.
Over the weekend, Turkey experienced something resembling an electoral earthquake, with Sunday's general election yielding an array of unexpected outcomes that suggest a major political reconfiguration lies ahead for the Republic.
The Chinese military is expanding disputed islands under its control in the South China Sea, alarming its neighbors. How worried should the world be that supreme leader Xi Jinping is making China into an expansionary power? The history of the People's Republic offers some useful clues.
In the frenzied discussions now taking place in Washington about how to prevent the Islamic State terrorist group from making further territorial advances in Iraq and Syria, one topic has been conspicuously absent so far.
Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno, Colombia's minister of defense, is constantly on the move, traveling all over the country to meet with members of the armed forces and citizens as part of his duties. At any given moment, he may be on a military base awarding medals to the wounded in action, in a helicopter surveying a ministry-funded resettlement village for a displaced indigenous tribe, or in a remote rural village once ravaged by rebel violence, inaugurating five miles of road rebuilt by the Army Corps of Engineers.
"Interviews with scientists is completely out of the question and so is inspection of military sites," Abbas Araqchi, Iran's senior negotiator on its nuclear program, announced on state television on Saturday, just as Secretary of State John Kerry was conferring with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a final push to meet the June 30 deadline for an Iran nuclear agreement.
A recent weekend brought two very different dispatches from the front lines of the global war on terror. The first was a tale of tactical success; the second a narrative of strategic failure.
The U.S. government's vast apparatus for data collection touches every aspect of human activity. But how can a system that seemingly has the capability to know absolutely everything still get major events so wrong?
When it comes to the prospects of war in Europe, perhaps we simply aren't asking the right questions. For months now, Russia watchers within the Beltway and in European capitals have been preoccupied with anticipating the next moves of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the year-old conflict taking place in Ukraine.
Last month 57 nations applied to become founding members of China's newest creation: the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Ostensibly designed to help finance projects that sate Asia's expanding appetite for infrastructure, the AIIB has left Washington struggling over how to respond. Some applaud China for assuming greater international responsibility and wielding soft power to aid Asia's growth. Some oppose the move as undermining the U.S.-led economic order and using aid as a tool to advance China's strategic agenda.
"We who defeated the Israelis will also defeat the terrorists," a Hezbollah fighter in Syria told the New York Times the other day, referring to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in the early 1980s. "And we will take Jerusalem."
By every account Russia and its "insurgent army" are planning a new offensive in Ukraine. Shelling aroundShyrokyne has increased considerably. Russia, once again violating the Minsk II agreement that it first broke even before the ink was dry, has brought up reinforcements, including air defenses - a telltale sign of an impending offensive. It has also reorganized and trained separatist fighters in Ukraine to make them more proficient and professional under Russian command and control.
The growing concerns of Arab nations over an emerging Iran nuclear deal and their reported desire for U.S. weapons to protect themselves are the unfortunate outgrowths of President Barack Obama's foreign policy realism.
To hear the Obama administration tell it, the framework nuclear accord agreed to between the P5+1 powers and Iran last month in Lausanne, Switzerland is a good deal. The White House has pledged that the final agreement to be concluded in coming weeks, backed up by a robust monitoring and verification regime, will block Iran's pathways to a bomb for at least a decade - and perhaps considerably longer.
The United States is beginning to realize the strategic benefits of the fracking revolution. And they just keep growing.
This week at the IHS CERAWeek energy summit in Texas, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said that the United States anticipated "becoming big players" in the global liquefied natural gas market and that "there's a good chance that we will be LNG exporters on the scale of Qatar," which he noted was the world's largest LNG exporter.
Less than a month after it was signed in Lausanne, Switzerland, the framework nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 powers is already beginning to pay dividends - for Iran, that is.
Even before the April 2 accord, the enforced isolation that brought Iran's ayatollahs to the nuclear negotiating table back in 2013 had begun to erode, progressively undermined by hungry investors eager to return to "business as usual" with the Islamic Republic. But since the framework deal was signed, the floodgates have opened in earnest.
As global talks over Iran's nuclear program resume in Vienna this week, one can't help wonder whether, in a larger sense, the die of an Iranian regional, military and economic victory has already been cast. From Washington to Berlin, Moscow to Beijing, and many places in between, Iran's isolation is disappearing as governments and businesses prepare to exploit its return to global respectability.