NATO foreign ministers invited tiny Montenegro on Wednesday to join their military alliance in its first expansion since 2009, defying Russian warnings that enlargement of the US-led bloc further into the Balkans would be a provocation. In a scripted session at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Montenegro’s foreign minister, …

Germany’s state intelligence agency says competition for influence inside the Saudi Arabian royal family is destabilising the wider Middle East, according to domestic media reports. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s premier daily newspapers, carries the warning from the BND intelligence agency. According to FAZ, the BND …

Iran is entering the global economy, and some investment-bank analysts are starting to get pretty excited. Most outsiders see Iran as an anti-Semitic Islamic state run by extremists who tolerate terrorism (as long as it’s not in Iran). But Iran is also the last large, modern, educated economy …

Where is leadership in the European Union? Who dares to don its trappings, now that German Chancellor Angela Merkel no longer seems to command the authority she did up until the end of the summer? After the attacks in Paris, and with refugees still knocking on the door …

In the wake of the recent escalation of tensions between Russia and Turkey and, de facto, between Moscow and NATO, experts consider if the rhetoric of a hot war between Russia and the West is not “before time?” Political analyst Ian Kearns believes the situation actually reminds “playing …

Russian Defense Ministry has presented photos of oil delivery convoys at Syria-Turkey border, the head of the Russian General Staff’s operative command said. The general staff has irrefutable evidence on Turkey’s involvement in illegal oil trade. Moscow has called on Turkey to open access to the places where, according to the retrieved Russian intel, …

Guess who just popped up in the Kremlin? Bashar al-Assad, Syrian dictator and destroyer, now Vladimir Putin’s newest pet. After four years holed up in Damascus, Assad was summoned to Russia to bend a knee to Putin, show the world that today Middle East questions get settled not …

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s high-profile meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on November 23 has triggered speculationthat the two sides are weighing some serious policy choices about Syria. The key question, as always, is the fate of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. There is no …

Trita Parsi A senior German official told me in 2010, quite proudly, that under the leadership of Angela Merkel, Germany’s Iran policy had become a function of its relations with Israel. Whether Germany would sanction Iran or engage in diplomacy very much depended on Israel’s reaction. In its …