Judy Dempsey, Carnegie Europe
A British "no" to remaining in the EU would spell ruin for a bloc so adrift and divided that its influence is rapidly diminishing.
Hassan Hassan, National
Broadly speaking, much of the punditry about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states at large tends to rely on old facts and myths mostly dating back to the 1990s. Perpetuating old stereotypes about Saudi Arabias foreign policy ignores the progress and indeed the drastic changes that have taken place over the past decade. More importantly, they also reduce Irans role in the neighbourhood to a geopolitical rivalry with its neighbours, rather than casting this role in its true light... Читать дальше...
Washington Post
The announced implementation of the Iranian nuclear deal on Saturday came with an important bonus: Tehran's release of four U.S. citizens it had imprisoned, including The Post's Jason Rezaian. The Americans were exchanged for seven people charged or convicted of crimes in the United States, and the dropping of U.S. cases against 14 others whose arrest was sought. Rezaian, who was held for 544 days, committed no crime and should have never been arrested. He was not a convict but a political hostage. Читать дальше...
Blanchard & Hung, Reuters
For China, whose President Xi Jinping is already taking an increasingly muscular approach to claims in the East and South China Sea, the question of Taiwan trumps any other of its territorial assertions in terms of sensitivity and importance. After eight years of calm in what had been one of Asia's powder kegs, the landslide election of an independence-leaning opposition leader, President-elect Tsai Ing-wen, has thrust Taiwan back into the spotlight as one of the region's most sensitive security issues.
Michael Crowley, Politico EU
Managing the nuclear deal’s aftermath could be nearly as hard as striking it was, U.S. officials say.
Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker
For several years now, there has been grimly regular news of waves of Latin Americans seeking refuge in the U.S., mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where gang and drug violence have surged. At the same time, a stream of Cuban migrants has not commanded the same attention, but has revealed some of the vagaries and inconsistencies of American immigration law. Last year, forty-four thousand Cubans sought asylum in the U.S., an eighty-three-per-cent increase on the previous year. Читать дальше...
Yomi Kazeem, Quartz
You may have read many an article about the growing penetration of smartphones and increased internet access in the large and mid-sized African economies of countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. That doesn’t mean as many people have access to the kinds of robust internet networks that people in the United States, Europe, or countries like South Korea take for granted. That’s a major challenge if you had planned on tossing out your DSTV satellite dish to “Netflix and Chill.” In fact... Читать дальше...
Ty McCormick, Foreign Policy
Media houses have been shuttered, journalists attacked, and critics of the government murdered. But one broadsheet is still covering the African country's descent into chaos.
Nick Cohen, The Guardian
The Shia Arab government in Baghdad refuses to give Kurdistan the tax revenues it is due and the Peshmerga soldiers have not been paid for three months. Yet Britain has not invited a representative of Iraqi Kurdistan to next month’s international aid conference in London on helping the victims of the Syria/Iraq war. In other words, the west expects much and gives little in return. Most notably, it will not acknowledge the moral argument for an independent Kurdish state... Читать дальше...
Blair, Telegraph
For one brief moment it seemed the USA could conquer anywhere in the world. 25 years on, we've learned how wrong that was.
Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg View
Russia extended its presidential term from four to six years and the parliamentary one from four to five years in 2008, under President Dmitri Medvedev. Thanks to a provision in the Russian Constitution that allows a president to serve more than two terms so long as the third isn't consecutive to the first two, Putin has been eligible to serve a total of 12 years so far and faces the next election only in 2018. That's a problem because two more years with him... Читать дальше...
Emily Dyer, NRO
Europe has fallen into this trap, not out of hatred for the victim, but out of fear of confronting the perpetrator, particularly when the latter belongs to a minority religion or culture. It took days for police to confront the mass attacks in Germany, and weeks for the left-wing media to do so. The Guardian, for example, a British newspaper that is often vocal about “rape culture” in Western institutions such as university campuses, took almost two weeks to publish any opinion pieces on the matter. Читать дальше...
David Sanger, NYT
The United States and European nations lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran and released roughly 0 billion of its assets after international inspectors concluded that the country had followed through on promises to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.
Cengiz Candar, Al-Monitor
Following the arrests of Turkish academics who had signed a petition in support of the Kurds in southeastern Turkey, the country is facing an unprecedented 'civil war.'
Bill Murray, RealClearWorld
President Barack Obama has taken heat throughout his second term for having an incoherent Mideast political strategy; one ill-suited to addressing the cycle of civil strife and sectarianism that has broken out across the region. Critics see no common thread linking decisions to exercise U.S. military power in Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2014 while avoiding confrontation in Syria over chemical weapons in 2013 and reaching a settlement with Iran over its nuclear program in July 2015.
