Nicholas Dungan, The World Today
The institutions of the European Union – the council as the forum of the member states, the commission as the permanent civil service, the directly elected parliament – all bear witness to the political nature of the European project, as do other EU institutions such as the European Central Bank. Yet Europe today is failing to fulfil its role as a political actor, overwhelmed by events which have slowed the impetus towards unity and instigated a kind of permanent crisis management.
Bulos, Hennigan & Bennett, LAT
Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.
N. Samaha, FP
Although there has been little coverage of the SSNP — a secular Lebanese-Syrian party and one of the oldest political movements in the modern Middle East — it has been playing an active role both on the battlefield and in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. As a result, it has gone from a relatively unknown group to one of the most popular alternatives to the ruling Baath party in government-controlled areas.
L. Downes, New York Times
Ireland is marking the centenary of the Rising this year with programs and parades the island over. It does so gingerly, knowing that its path from 1916 to the present day is strewn with agonies: years of civil war and terrorist bloodshed. And though there has been courageous peacemaking, sectarian hatreds still smolder, buried, like a coal-seam fire.
Matthew Goodwin, Politico EU
Amid a Euroskeptic movement divided into warring factions, influential campaigners and donors are beginning to talk openly about how — should they lose — they could emerge from defeat with a new movement that has much broader appeal. Those around the UK Independence Party (UKIP) have been inspired in part by the Scottish National Party (SNP) that despite experiencing defeat at the 2014 referendum went on to force a complete realignment of politics in Scotland in the 2015 general election.
Nina Krushcheva, Project Syndicate
One of the saddest ironies of this year’s commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is that Hungary and Poland, always the most restless of the Soviet empire’s captured nations, are now led by men mimicking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s governing style. They, too, are hollowing out independent democratic institutions and suppressing citizens’ fundamental freedoms. As the old saying goes, we become what we hate.
Paul Gillespie, Irish Times
The German, Russian Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed after that European war, even if the British one survived for another generation. The Irish Rebellion which gave rise to the Irish Free State in 1922 in due course influenced the emergence of the smaller European democracies carved out of those empires in the 1920s and 1930s, in the Balkans, Baltics and central Europe.
Noah Rothman, Commentary
It takes a desperate commitment to ambiguity and moral equivalence to avoid calling the unspeakable terror meted out to the members of a tiny Christian minority in predominantly Muslim Pakistan out for precisely what it is, but America’s diplomatic establishment specializes in such obfuscation.
Saleem Al Jubouri, New York Times
As we look toward the liberation of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, we face a stark choice. Mosul has a population of more than a million people, a majority of them Sunni. If we grant free rein to sectarian militias, there will be a humanitarian and refugee crisis of incomparable scale. Civilians will flee the mayhem and bloodshed created by the terrorists and the militias, and head north toward Turkey — and the countries of the European Union. The international... Читать дальше...
Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg View
Donald Trump seems to have grasped this better than the pundits as he accuses China of stealing U.S. jobs, and trumpets a nativism built around lost American glory and grandeur. And for all his talk of reconstituting U.S. exceptionalism, Trump’s proposed solution has a clear European pedigree.
Kaj Leers, RealClearWorld
In the past decades, political parties of all stripes have used the bitter linguistic divisions to their own benefit in a cynical game of divide-and-conquer.
Hassan Hassan, National
ISILs hold on territory in Iraq and Syria is still key to its relevance regionally and internationally, and its hold will probably continue for many years even if that territory is steadily shrinking. However, its loss of territory has little impact on its ability to build influence elsewhere. As an international organisation, ISIL has come of age.
B. Christensen, Notes on Liberty
There is simply no logical coherence to the idea that, in a world where stateless mercenary firms are the prominent form of security, violence and lawlessness will reign supreme; nor is there any evidence whatsoever to suggest that “[m]ore mercenaries means more war, as they are incentivised to start and expand wars for profit, and turn to criminality between contracts.”
S Heller, WOTR
This is complicated, but bear with me. The Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are not a monolithic force. Like nearly every other faction in Syria, theyre spread across an archipelago of enclaves nationwide. The SDF units clashing with Syrian rebels reportedly supported by the CIA are not supported by the Pentagon theyre from a different enclave. The U.S. military is exclusively supporting the SDF in northeastern Syria on the other side of the Euphrates River. The... Читать дальше...
William Astore, TomDispatch
In the decades since the draft ended in 1973, a strange new military has emerged in the United States. Think of it, if you will, as a post-democratic force that prides itself on its warrior ethos rather than the old-fashioned citizen-soldier ideal. As such, it's a military increasingly divorced from the people, with a way of life ever more foreign to most Americans (adulatory as they may feel toward its troops). Abroad, it's now regularly put to purposes foreign to any traditional idea of national defense. Читать дальше...
Nuray Mert, Hurriyet
After the controversial Iranian-Turkish citizen businessman Reza Zarrab was arrested in the U.S. last week, it was not only cheered by thousands of ordinary Turkish citizens but also welcomed by all circles of opposition and dissidence as a fresh chance to weaken the ruling party. This reaction from ordinary citizens who have lost trust in the Turkish judicial system is understandable. But it is quite problematic to expect U.S. justice to compensate for the injustices of Turkey’s... Читать дальше...
John McLaughlin, Ozy
Because cheap gas is great for some countries, and ruinous for others.
S. Karam, NG
None of this is true because demography is not destiny. Population size alone does not set a country on a predictable course. Still, demography is, among other factors, an important determinant of destiny. While the rate of demographic growth (or decline) is important, what is more important is the age distribution of the population. Too many old people means an elevated dependency ratio and less income available for spending and investing. Too many young people means an overburdened education system and high unemployment.
Alexander Kirss, National Interest
American and Western observers would do well to note the reasons why Putin is able to declare victory in Syria, because they also illustrate why the United States and its allies will never be able to do so. Putin’s intervention was decisive, relatively unencumbered by public opinion, adhered to limited aims and possessed no baggage of humanitarian idealism that precluded an easy exit. In contrast, Western countries have only responded to the violence in Syria with halting... Читать дальше...
Adnan Abu Amer, Al-Monitor
A Hamas visit to Egypt ended on a positive note, which might push the Egyptians to stop the incitement campaign against the movement.
S. Hattis Rolef, J-Post
Last Thursday, Haaretz published its most recent opinion poll, in which it checked what the election results would be if held today, should Moshe Kahlon, Gideon Sa'ar and former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi decide to run together in a single list (to be referred to in this article as KSA).
C. Deerin, Daily Mail
It takes one to know one: Nureyev recognised a fellow artist in the deepest sense. Indeed, listening to Cruyff talk about football was like listening to a painter or a writer discussing their craft. He was able to dismiss one player’s technique without even looking at the pitch: ‘When he kicks the ball, the sound is wrong.’ He wanted to win – and usually did - but if the choice was between beauty and victory, he’d take the former: ‘Football must be played beautifully, it... Читать дальше...
Boris Johnson, Telegraph
The victory of Assad is a victory for archaeology, a victory for all those who care about the ancient monuments of one of the most amazing cultural sites on Earth. The monsters of Isil were not just content to murder anyone who refused to accept their barbaric version of Islam. They were so small, so narrow, so stunted in their understanding of the will of God that they regarded any pre-Islamic building or structure – no matter how beautiful – as being somehow a blasphemy. Читать дальше...
Christian Caryl, Foreign Policy
For many years, Europeans used the tantalizing prospect of future membership to urge the Turks toward democratic reforms — a strategy that also seemed to work wonders in Eastern Europe, where countries that dreamed of EU membership bent over backward to implement the sorts of changes that would make them more palatable to their new friends in the West. Turkey, too, made remarkable progress — at least until Erdogan began putting it into reverse gear a few years ago. Читать дальше...
A.L. Miller, Daily Beast
“This is historic. The chamber of deputies has brought down the last ideological wall of the dictatorship,” the lower chamber president Marco Antonio Nez said, referencing the law as a vestige of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which was responsible for recriminalizing abortion 26 years ago.
