Merve Sebnem Oruc On 2 August, 1990, Iraqi forces blew into Kuwait. The main reason for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was economic; Iraq couldn’t pay its huge debts after eight years of war with Iran. Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of overproduction of oil from the two countries’ …

Their disappointment with Obama has led the Saudis to adopt a sophisticated and aggressive strategy. No longer the world’s oil barrel, Riyadh is now using oil prices to remove American companies from the market, punish the Russians for their support of Assad and shatter Iran’s hopes of exporting …

Low oil prices are eating into defense spending in the Gulf region, one of the world’s largest arms markets, with budgets trimmed for the first time in a decade this year and deeper cuts expected in 2016, according to a report published on Thursday. Overall spending fell to …

The militants of the so-called Islamic State dominated headlines through 2013–2015 with their swift seizure of territory and population centers across Syria and Iraq. Their use of basic tenets of maneuver warfare (mobility, mass, concentration) allowed them to overwhelm state-sponsored militias and military forces from Assad’s Syrian regime …

Luciana Bohne In October of 1930, Thomas Mann made “An Appeal to Reason” in The Berliner Tageblatt: “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and …

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya Because of the Turkish government’s role in the multi-spectrum US-led war against the Syrian Arab Republic, a war of words has ignited between Ankara and Moscow. Russia, however, is not alone in accusing Turkey of being involved in the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil. …

The literature on imperialism suffers from a fundamental confusion about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. The aim of this paper is to remove this confusion. The paper is organised in three parts. In Part I we state our own position of the capitalism-imperialism relation. In part II …

Scarcely heard amid the guns of Ukraine, the South Stream pipeline, which the Russians want to build through southern Europe to circumvent Ukraine, is still gurgling along in the background. The FT tries hard to hide its glee behind a facade of philosophical twaddle centered around the notion …

Paul Saunders When President Barack Obama acknowledged in September 2014 that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), he stunned his supporters and detractors alike. Obama was similarly candid nine months later, when he announced in a June …