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 …
Read More »Libyan rivals sign UN-brokered unity deal
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 …
Read More »It’s still about oil and gas in the Middle East
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’ …
Read More »Gulf Arab defense spending drops for first time in decade, report says
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 …
Read More »Friction and ISIS What happens when Daesh loses momentum on the battlefield?
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 …
Read More »Barbarism Advances. “The 1930s All Over Again in Europe”
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 …
Read More »Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia All Accuse Turkey of Smuggling Oil
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. …
Read More »Imperialism and capitalism: Rethinking an intimate relationship
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 …
Read More »The Real Reason the EU Doesn’t Want the South Stream Pipeline
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 …
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