By the 3 Musketeers, we mean Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. The Shanghai 5 & The Grand Chessboard The first Chechen war ended in mid-1995. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was worried that unrest in the Caucasus would spread to other Russian provinces in its south-the so-called “soft underbelly of Russia. He flew to China, met […]
The election of Donald Trump as the next American president has added a major new element of uncertainty to a Middle Eastern picture that had already achieved its highest state of confusion, violence, and uncertainty in its modern history. The factors that will determine the policies Trump will pursue there are many, and they are all […]
Introduction Europe and the West faced an unprecedented social crisis as shock waves of a brutal war in Syria spread around the world. The ISIS or Islamic State erupted violently onto the world stage in 2014 proclaiming a Global Caliphate. War and terror in Syria created a massive refugee crisis across Europe. In September 2015, Russia […]
Following World War 2 and the defeat of Germany, the very word geopolitics became taboo as it was linked in many eyes with Hitler, and the Nazis. Geopolitics however is larger than that, the study of integrating politics, economics, and geography. The father of British geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, first unveiled his concept of that […]
Moscow Goes East At the end of 2009, precisely as planned and to the surprise of Washington, Russia opened the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline, a 4-year construction project costing some $14 billion. The pipeline now allows Russia to export oil directly from its East Siberia fields to China as well as Korea and […]
(The following is extracted from the original report prepared by the author in August 2001. A few more notes have been added to the original report, in September 2001) Afghanistan The landlocked state of Afghanistan sits at the crossroads of Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. It is geo-strategically and economically important […]
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