Geopolitics

Back in June I asked if the United States had an anti-ISIS strategy. The conclusion was straightforward: Yes, the Obama administration has a clear and defined strategy, but it’s not working. Specifically, America’s focus on military operations without fully backing or resourcing a governance plan will ultimately end …

Nikolay Pakhomov The current outbreak of animosity between Russia and Turkey has had many consequences. One consequence, in the economic sphere, has repercussions far exceeding bilateral ties: a project to deliver Russian natural gas—first to Turkey and then to Europe—has been put on hold. This project, known as …

Delegates from Libya’s rival parliaments have signed a United Nations-brokered agreement to form a national government, in what the UN described as a “first step” towards ending the country’s crisis. Politicians from the the Tobruk and Tripoli parliaments, as well as other political figures, signed the accord in …

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 …

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 …

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 …

David Barchard The announcement on 3 December that Turkey had sent a detachment of 150 soldiers and seven tanks over 100km south of the border to the town of Bashiqa in Iraq added a new and confusing strand to the tangle of international disputes Turkey is currently involved …