Kogalymavia confirmed on Monday that a Russian airliner’s tail part had been damaged prior to the air crash in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. © REUTERS/ MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY Decompression, Structural Faults May Explain A321 Plane Crash On Saturday, Airbus A-321 operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia crashed in the Sinai Peninsula …

Amid the instability and violence that have plagued the Arab and Muslim world in recent years, the international community is searching for a sustainable model of state-building in the region.  Among restive populations and civil strife, two pillars of peace and progress have emerged:  the United Arab Emirates …

By Beat Guldimann In the days leading up to the Canadian federal election 2015, pundits and pollsters had gotten the basic result right when they predicted that Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party would defeat Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. What nobody saw coming was the landslide that got the Liberal Party …

Iran was invited to take part for the first time ever in international talks aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, US officials said Tuesday.  Iran has yet to respond to the invitation, which was extended by Russia. The next round of talks will take place Thursday in Vienna. The United States …

An apparent discovery of huge volumes of oil in the disputed Golan Heights brings the stakes of the Russian involvement in Syria to a new geopolitical dimension, F. William Engdahl stresses.  It is no secret anymore that the Western political establishment and its Gulf allies have facilitated the …

YEKATERINA SINELSCHIKOVA The foreign ministers of Russia and the U.S. met their counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Turkey in Vienna on October 23 for high-level discussions of ways to find a settlement to the Syrian crisis. Russian experts believe the talks mark the first step in the formation …

By THOMAS S. HARRINGTON The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up. This is what has just happened to the US …

By J. Matthew McInnis The Russian Air Force, Syrian Arab Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-trained and led militias haveassembled a significant force in Syria. As part of a multi-front campaign to undermine the opposition forces’ 2015 gains, that force aims to recapture Aleppo (Syria’s …

By Ryan Pikrell Conflict between a rising power and an established power is not inevitable as most realist scholars suggest. However, in every relationship, there is a tipping point or a point of no return, and China and the United States are rapidly approaching this point. As traditional …