... shoe to fall will likely be the New START Treaty, which the Trump administration seems happy to let expire next February.
Accusations of Russian infringements of the treaties and agreements, as well as the condemnation of Iranian activities outside the ... ... element of global strategic stability; it will be the only one.
Reliable round-the-clock communications between the military and security headquarters of the major powers and hotlines between their leaders would help deal with incidents: U.S.-Russian deconfliction in Syria has demonstrated the effectiveness of maintaining contacts. Yet deconfliction has to be balanced against the profound lack ...
... eclipsed the armed conflicts in the Middle East, which drop off and flare up from time to time. The temporary disappearance of Syria from front page news and new Russia-Turkey agreements on a ceasefire in Idlib are far from comforting. This is merely a ... ... territory to the north of the M-4 road by using the anti-Assad militants under its control. In doing so, Turkey wants to ensure the security of its borders and gain more room for the relocation of Syrian refugees. This time, temporary agreements between the ...
... cause and an outsize geopolitical ambition. The Russian Federation has learned from this. When it travels abroad, it goes for security buffers as in Ukraine, status as in Syria and mostly money elsewhere. There is no grand design, but a lot of opportunity-seeking, based on the merits of each potential ... ...
The choice to weaponize internet technologies to influence other countries’ domestic politics, for instance, has provoked accusations from such important partners as Germany and France but failed to advance Russia’s political goals. Regarding elections ...
The Syrian Crisis: A Thorny Path from War to Peace
The second decade of the 21st century ... ... control. The Iranians regard Syrian territory as a key component of their national security strategy, which is focused on pushing back against Saudi Arabia and its claims... ... tool to pressure Damascus and its allies. Apart from political considerations, the refusal to cooperate directly with the Syrian government is justified by citing the need...
... area.
Grigory Lukyanov, Ruslan Mamedov:
Russia and Turkey: Approaches to Regional Security in the Middle East
The rationale seems to be that the start of Turkish military... ... sees the Kurds as having adopted “maximalist positions” in their dealings with the Syrian government. “Of course, we’d like to avoid casualties. But the Turkish operation... ... latter more flexible in terms of reaching an agreement with Damascus.”
Bye-bye, USA
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov voiced Moscow's view of the desired outcome...
... the profound systemic crisis is yet to be found. Most countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) have launched the needed socioeconomic reforms, albeit belatedly, but outcomes are difficult to predict. In other parts of the Arab world (Syria, Libya, Yemen), civil war has been the means of resolving questions of power. In these countries there is an inextricable tangle of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ governments, numerous militias, terrorist groups, and foreign military contingents,...
October 1st began what could be one of the more interesting Chairships of the United Nations Security Council, with Russia taking over and being charged with a rather delicate balancing act: between conducting the numerous ... ... business front, Russia will see issues dominating the Middle East and Africa at the top of the schedule: · developments in Syria; · settlements and their legality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; · implementation of resolution 1559 ...
Media outlets and government circles both cringe and squirm when the subject of Westerners leaving the West to go fight in Syria and Iraq with the Islamic State arises. While acquiring data and calculating accurate numbers wildly diverges from source ... ... century, making its reach and scope far beyond anything the West could ever think plausible.
Against this backdrop, it is inexcusable that American agents find themselves at a loss to understand the appeal of that small percentage willing to abandon the ...
... force on the part of ISIS. The ISIS movement in Iraq has been bolstered by the hardened fighters located largely in eastern Syria, where there has always been a heavy population of Sunni Muslims. The reality of life in Iraq, however, is that Sunnis do ... ... will see ISIS as a risk to its foreign-policy strategy in the region but also perhaps as a direct threat to its own national security goals, given the open declarations from ISIS that it wants to create something akin to a de facto Sunni caliphate. It ...
The Intelligence Community, regardless of regime type, has famously always tried to co-opt and ultimately adopt advancements and evolutions in technology, especially in terms of media. Newspapers, radio, and television have long been appropriated in order to influence, massage, and outright manipulate messages and events important to the national interest. Often the question is not so much whether a country’s intelligence community engages in such activity but rather how explicit and open will...
