Articles

Don’t forget what's really at stake for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On December 17, 2013, the Financial Crimes and Battle Against Criminal Incomes department of the Istanbul Security Directory detained 47 people, including a number of high-level officials. The sons of the minister of the Interior, the minister of Economy, and the minister of Urban Planning were implicated, as was Erdogan's own son, Bilal, with all three ministers handing in resignations.

President Barack Obama says that 99 percent of the world supports his proposed nuclear deal with Iran. He had better check his math.

Since its historic rapprochement with Beijing in the 1970s, America has approached a rising China with an "engagement" strategy guided by two key assumptions: first, that political liberalization would ultimately follow economic growth; and second, that supporting China's integration into the global order would preempt Beijing from forcibly challenging that order. While confidence in those assumptions has waxed and waned, never did a consensus emerge that they were fundamentally flawed - until now.

Buried within the 150-plus pages of technical minutia and regulations that make up the recently concluded nuclear deal between the P5+1 powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran lies a stunning revelation, the full import of which has not yet been adequately appreciated by the international community. It is that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the agreement is formally known, is designed to serve as nothing less than a Marshall Plan for the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.

The White House says the only alternative to the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran is war. However it is the deal itself that is pushing the Middle East towards conflict.

As Vladimir Putin's international image continues to decline, his domestic popularity has, paradoxically, reached an all-time high. The most recent poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center reports a staggering 89 percent approval rating for the Russian president, in spite of a stumbling economy, declining living standards, rampant corruption and deepening international isolation.

Even before it was formally published late last month, Michael Oren's memoir of his time as Israel's envoy to the United States had ignited a firestorm of controversy, and for very good reason. His book, Ally: My Journey across the American-Israeli Divide, provides the most damning account to date of a "special relationship" that, on President Obama's watch, has deteriorated to an almost unthinkable degree, with the White House coming to view Israel and its often-pugnacious premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, as more of a problem than Iran's nuclear ambitions, Palestinian corruption, or the Syrian civil war.

For decades, first the Soviet Union and then Russia languished under adverse population trends. Deaths far outpaced births, life expectancy was dismally low, and social ills, from alcoholism to unsafe abortion practices, were rampant.

If North Korea could develop and test a nuclear weapon, even under a stringent arms control regime, why can't Iran also build a bomb under a far less ample nuclear deal?

Amid multiple signs of an impending battle in Ukraine, NATO and Ukraine have stepped up their response. But so has Russia.

By July 2015 it was clear that Russia is paying a steep economic price for its war in Ukraine. Poverty, inflation, unemployment are all rising, the economy is shrinking, and foreign investment is drying up. Moscow had to cut spending on the 2018 FIFA World CUP, pensions, and infrastructure, not to mention health care, education, science and technology, and infrastructure, i.e. human and social capital.

Those in America's foreign policymaking circles who are concerned about the emerging U.S.-led nuclear agreement with Iran are increasingly pinning their hopes not on Washington changing its negotiating posture but, instead, on Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei walking away from the table.

On June 18, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel offered a press preview of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue (S&ED) now taking place in Washington, D.C. During the briefing Russel fielded a question about U.S. efforts to reduce tensions with China in the South China Sea. His response was surprising: "As important as [the] South China Sea is... it's not fundamentally an issue between the U.S. and China."

It would be fair to say that the past year-and-a-half of nuclear talks with Iran has not been America's finest negotiating hour. But even by the comparatively low standards of U.S. diplomacy to date, the collapse of the American position in recent days has been nothing short of breathtaking.

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.

Both NATO and the United States have publicly acknowledged that Russia is violating the newest cease-fire over Ukraine, which was recently concluded in Minsk, Belarus. Despite the agreement, Moscow is still sending tanks, armored vehicles, rocket technology and artillery to separatist elements inside Ukraine, and has moved on to occupy the strategically located railroad terminal of Debaltseve. Moscow's continuing military buildup in the Donbass region, and the outbreak of renewed fighting, strongly suggests that Russia does not seek an off-ramp out of Ukraine but intends to conquer still more Ukrainian territory.

No sooner had the P5+1 powers and Iran announced on April 2 that they had agreed upon the framework of a nuclear deal than its supporters began to spin the results. To hear the boosters tell it, the preliminary agreement represents a victory for proponents of peace and a defeat for warmongers everywhere. That sort of simplistic rhetoric may play well on a political level, but there are real strategic reasons to be skeptical of the impending deal.

Of the new framework accord with Iran over its nuclear program, President Barack Obama said he hopes "that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement - and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations - and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors."

At first glance, Grozny seems like an odd place for a gathering of the world's best fighters. The capital of Russia's restive Chechen Republic, Grozny is in a better place today than it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was ground zero for two brutal wars between Islamist insurgents and the Russian state. But the city, like the region it inhabits, still ranks high on the misery index. Despite a major rebuilding effort on the part of the government, Chechnya's unemployment and poverty rates are among the highest in the Russian Federation, and the region has emerged as a significant source of angry young men who have traveled to the Middle East to join the ranks of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

If you go by President Barack Obama's rhetoric, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has single-handedly sunk the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The United States has been forced to "re-assess our options," the commander in chief has said, including supporting Israel at the United Nations, on the basis of Netanyahu's election-eve statement opposing a two-state solution.

President Barack Obama's vow to reassess U.S.-Israeli relations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign remarks about a Palestinian state showcases his badly skewed views of Israel, its conflict with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the true sources of regional instability.

The Israeli electorate has spoken. After a bitterly acrimonious political campaign, and an election on March 17th that saw the highest voter turnout (72.3 percent) in recent memory, Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has received a reinvigorated mandate to govern.

You wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, but President Obama has an Iran problem. His administration has wagered - and wagered big - on the idea of a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. But the effort is increasingly unpopular, and a hard sell among the American electorate.

The laws of war are intended to limit conflict and minimize casualties. But what happens when terrorists use these same laws to expand conflict and kill more people?

A firestorm erupted Tuesday over the letter by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. and 46 other Senators to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, laying out their view of the ongoing negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Critics of the letter started throwing around words like unprecedented, illegal, even treasonous.

The summit on countering violent extremism convened by the Obama administration last month was a lavish affair, full of pomp and circumstance and awash in foreign dignitaries. But substantive strategies for combatting radical ideologies, particularly those of Islamist groups, were far less in evidence.

From today's diary entry of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:

Ah, the Americans. When it comes to our nuclear weapons program, they leave us with only good choices!

On the one hand, I can drag out the talks beyond this month's latest deadline because the desperate Americans certainly will agree to keep talking. That's how we went from the six-month interim deal in November 2013, through a deadline in July 2014, and then through another deadline in November 2014.

There is an old piece of folk wisdom which, in light of current events, must translate neatly into Russian: "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."

As an already shaky second cease-fire crumbles following the Russian capture of the Ukrainian town of Debaltsevo and with Moscow's intent to also seize Mariupol, it is becoming ever clearer that Russia has no intention of keeping the peace with Ukraine — and that the Kremlin is emboldened by what it perceives to be Western weakness.

With the likes of the Islamic State's self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the running, the competition is stiff indeed. But it would be fair to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin currently ranks as one of the world's most dangerous men.

Russia's political opposition has been put on notice. The Feb. 27 murder of prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov just steps from the Kremlin marks a dramatic escalation of the Russian regime's long-running war on its opponents. Nemtsov, after all, wasn't merely a dissenting politician. He was part of the old system, having served as a deputy prime minister in the government of President Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s. Beginning in the early 2000s, Nemtsov had moved into the political opposition, emerging as a critic of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, and his policies. Even so, his position as a member of Yeltsin's inner circle had given him a degree of immunity from official retribution.

On Tuesday in a much anticipated speech before joint session of Congress, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again sounded the warning against Iran's nuclear ambitions and called for "a better deal" than the nuclear agreement currently being negotiated.