by M. K. Bhadrakumar,* India
(14 February 2025) Seldom, if ever, one gets to pick up the threads of what one had written 3 days back as conjectures. But my prognosis that “the sea side view” of Gaza is mesmerising President Donald Trump and his special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff, two great real estate developers of modern times, is literally so. See my blog “Trump turn is bad news for West Asia”, Indianpunchline.com, February 3, 2025.
by M. K. Bhadrakumar,* India
(7 février 2025) Russia and Iran, as two immediate neighbours and great powers with a glorious history, had a difficult, chequered relationship through centuries. It goes to the credit of Iranian pragmatism that it learned to live with the consequences of Tsarist Russia’s expansionism rather than getting locked in eternal enmity. In some ways, it also shared the plight of China at the hands of predatory powers. Such bitter experiences inevitably get embedded in a nation’s psyche.
by Karin Leukefeld,* Germany/Syria
(7 février 2025) The US, the EU, Israel, Turkey and their Arab partners in the Gulf – Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have achieved what they set out to do 20 years ago. The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad no longer exists; the new rulers are those who have been armed and trained by the “Friends of Syria” since 2011 with tens of billions of US dollars. “Sanctions are a slow-acting poison, like arsenic” explained Joseph Borrell, then EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to the EU Parliament in February 2023. “It takes time for them to take effect, but they are irreversible.” Unilateral economic sanctions imposed on Syria by the European Union and the United States have destroyed the country’s economy. Millions of US dollars paid to government and military defectors have paid off.
by Professor Glenn Diesen,* Norway
(2 February 2025) The international system during the Cold War was organised under extremely zero-sum conditions. There were two centres of power with two incompatible ideologies that relied on continued tensions between two rival military alliances to preserve bloc discipline and security dependence among allies. Without other centres of power or an ideological middle ground, the loss for one was a gain for the other. Yet, faced with the possibility of nuclear war, there were also incentives to reduce the rivalry and overcome the zero-sum bloc politics.
by Pierre Lévy,* France
(2 February 2025) (CH-S) In the past months and in the months to come, government elections have been and will be held in several EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe. This concerns Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic.
Pierre Lévy is a French journalist who has been critically following and describing developments in the European Union for many years.
In this article, he analyses the political situation in the aftermath of the recent presidential election in Croatia.
by Jean-Pierre Saw
(2 February 2025) This January 2025, we all wake up with a dull feeling – something is wrong. There are more and more latent and open crises that herald major upheavals. As Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis notes in the “Tamedia” newspapers, “the world is not doing well” – a brief foray.