Category: Geopolitical

“April is the cruelest month,” a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, was very much in evidence given the eruption of conflicts in the troubled Muslim realms of the Middle East and North Africa. The yearlong rebellion in Syria against the minority Alawite Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad reached a bloody climax with more than 11,000 […]

This week, Vladimir Putin was sworn in for a third term as Russian president. Putin’s return to the presidency was not unexpected; he was never really unseated as Russia’s leader, even during Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency. But it comes as an anti-incumbent trend is developing in Europe, most recently demonstrated when socialist challenger Francois Hollande defeated […]

Britain controlled about one-fourth of the Earth’s land surface and one-fifth of the world’s population in 1939. Fifty years later, its holdings outside the British Isles had become trivial, and it even faced an insurgency in Northern Ireland.  Britain spent the intervening years developing strategies to cope with what poet Rudyard Kipling called its “recessional,” […]

With its own candidate, Hazem Abu Ismail,disqualified by the election commission, Egypt’s Salafist political party, al-Nour, has endorsed former Muslim Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh for the presidency. While being called a “moderate” by many news outlets, Fotouh’s radical past and a questionable interpretation of Islam’s dedication to equality and tolerance presents a problem for […]

Under Mu’ammar Qadhafi’s rule in Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was outlawed, and conducted most of its activity from abroad. Now that many of its members have returned to the country, the MB is beginning to consolidate its presence in the political arena and has established a party, called Justice and Construction.  Like the MB […]

Renewed Iran-West Nuclear Talks – Tehran Attempts to Deceive U.S. President Obama, Sec’y of State Clinton With Nonexistent Anti-Nuclear Weapons Fatwa By Supreme Leader Khamenei An important element in the renewal of nuclear negotiations with Iran in the talks in Istanbul April 13-14, 2012 was an alleged fatwa attributed to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, […]

Much has been written about a tacit agreement between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) led by Field Marshal Tantawi and the Muslim Brothers. But as events leading up to the presidential elections began to unravel, it has become clear that no such arrangement was ever brokered between the two sides, and if […]

Turkey is re-emerging as a significant regional power. In some sense, it is in the process of returning to its position prior to World War I when it was the seat of the Ottoman Empire. But while the Ottoman parallel has superficial value in understanding the situation, it fails to take into account changes in […]

The Investigative Project on TerrorismIt’s the dawn of a new age in Egypt for Salafist presidential contender Hazem Salah Abu Ismail. The confidence exuded by the popular 50-year old lawyer-turned- preacher says as much.  He has praised al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden as a “martyr,”called on the United States to release convicted terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman […]

For centuries, the dilemma facing Iran (and before it, Persia) has been guaranteeing national survival and autonomy in the face of stronger regional powers like Ottoman Turkey and the Russian Empire. Though always weaker than these larger empires, Iran survived for three reasons: geography, resources and diplomacy. Iran’s size and mountainous terrain made military forays […]

During the first year of the revolution the army took over from the president, but it had always been kept away from politics by Mubarak, so when power was transferred to them, they had no experience in domestic politics and they started to make mistakes. In all my meetings with President Mubarak, together with Israeli, […]