Articles

Human rights and liberal values are under threat in a small, little-known country most people would be hard-pressed to find on a map. Brunei Darussalam, following the radical vision of Usama bin Laden and his followers, became an Islamic state under strict Sharia law this past week, with punishments of death by stoning for adulterers and severing of limbs for thieves. Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have yet to focus on the challenges posed by radical Islamic regimes, much less tackle them effectively.

Remember the U.S.-Turkish alliance? Not long ago, President Obama was proclaiming that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his favorite Middle Eastern statesman, and one of very few foreign leaders with whom he had forged a "bond of trust." Yet today, ties between Washington and Ankara are unmistakably on the downswing. The culprits are a quartet of issues that cumulatively have soured relations between Washington and Ankara — and which promise to keep the once-vibrant relationship at a low ebb, at least for the foreseeable future.

Recent Israeli-Palestinian peace talks raise questions as to why Washington invested so much in such a misbegotten venture, but they brought one salutary result - they laid bare the Obama Administration's hostility to the Jewish state

Give the Iranian regime credit for creativity. In the midst of extensive nuclear negotiations with the West, officials in Tehran have apparently hit upon a new way to play for time.

The most recent developments in Ukraine as of April 25 betray a mounting series of dangerous paradoxes. First, Russian officials from Putin down have consistently denied reports of Russian troops either in Crimea or now Eastern Ukraine. But Putin in his call-in show on April 17 admitted that they were present in Crimea and even linked that presence to the subsequent referendum though he claimed it was a fully democratic exercise where nobody was intimidated. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Putin and his officials deny the presence of Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine.