Soyen Park & Yizhe Daniel Xie, The Diplomat
More than anything else, East Asians have valued building credibility and creating a win-win environment, devising and implementing public policies in accordance with these values. Stability and predictability of policies was an overriding objective of policymakers, who refrained from making big promises. Various incentives were also put in place to attract foreign investment and create an environment where domestic industries can learn from foreign... Читать дальше...
Robert Fisk, Independent
Poor old Barack. Off he goes to Riyadh to talk to his so-called ally, Saudi Arabia. The Sunni Wahhabi kingdom long ago run out of patience with the US president, who befriended Shiite Iran and who failed to destroy the Alawite (read: Shiite) regime in Syria. So why is Obama even bothering coming to the Gulf? Does he have any friends left among the kings, emirs and princes of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirates and Oman?
Semih Idiz, Al-Monitor
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used the recent Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit as a grandstanding opportunity to pitch his qualifications to lead the Islamic world.
Romer & Hamalainen, Der Spiegel
The many small elements of the Seinjoki Project have been successful despite a lack of outside funding: No money was made available by the Finnish government. All of those involved emphasize that success has been a product of the way the various institutions involved complement each other, from the school to neuvola. There is no fighting over resources and nobody gets in each other's way. Critics have noted that it is impossible to isolate the effects of each individual element. Читать дальше...
Peter Foster, Daily Telegraph
Europe is a multi-currency union and the dream of a post-nationalist European super-state has soured. To ignore this reality, as Brussels has tended to do in recent years, is to invite destruction with or without a Brexit.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Globe & Mail
One might think that Ms. Fujimori, as heir to an organization with close ties to many people who were part of her father’s regime, might have trouble obtaining a respectable result, let alone dominating the first round of a presidential election. What happened? The common explanations are not without merit. Yes, Ms. Fujimori has worked hard under the radar to turn her father’s highly personalized, informal structure into a political machine with national... Читать дальше...
Michael Pregent, Foreign Policy
While Tehran continues to sow anti-American terrorism across the Middle East, Riyadh holds the key to regional stability. This is not the time to back away from the House of Saud.
Thijs Roes, Vice
On March 10, a 23-year-old man's severed head was displayed at the entrance of a hookah lounge in Amsterdam where drug dealers are known to gather. The rest of the victim's body was found in a burned-out car on the other side of the city. It was the latest grisly episode in a conflict between rival gangs that authorities say has produced roughly 20 percent of all murders over the past three years in the Netherlands, a country that has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.
Eli Lake, BV
Saudi Arabia began to seriously target radicals after it suffered three major bombings in Riyadh in 2003, Riedel said. Since then, the Saudis have steadily improved their own campaign against jihadi networks. In August, the Saudis arrested Ahmed al-Mughassil, a key plotter of the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, a barracks for U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia. In 2010, Saudi intelligence helped foil a plot from Al Qaeda's Yemen affiliate to place printer cartridge bombs on airplanes. Читать дальше...
David Coghlan, RealClearDefense
It’s easy to understand why most of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs want the idea of Iraq to work. If Iraq were trifurcated, the Sunni Arabs would be left with mostly desert, no access to the sea, no large oil deposits, and little arable land. The question isn’t whether Sunni Arabs want to be part of Iraq; the question is whether Shi’a Arabs want Sunni Arabs to be part of Iraq. If and when Iraq breaks up, the Shi’a leading it will have caused it, not the Sunni Arabs.
Binyamin Appelbaum, NYT
If Saudi Arabia follows through on its recent threat to sell off its investments in the United States, the financial maneuver could be painful — mostly for Saudi Arabia.
Max Hastings, Daily Mail
One of many reasons for us being frightened stiff about the future of the monarchy when she dies — and Prince Charles presumably inherits the throne — is that he is temperamentally incapable of keeping his mouth shut.
Joan Smith, Guardian
Institutions have changed to reflect the modern world, but not the monarchy. And she is to blame.
Max. Popp & Selahattin Demirtas, Der Spiegel
Kurdish opposition leader Selahattin Demirtas, 43, says that his HDP party wants a cease-fire in the ongoing battle between Turkish troops and Kurds in southeastern Turkey. But, he says, Turkish President Erdogan isn't willing to listen.
American Enterprise Institute
UK Business Secretary Sajid Javid traces the roots of the movement for Britain to withdraw from the European Union and explains that regardless of their individual positions on Brexit, nearly all Britons agree that the UK's relationship to the EU will need to change.
Tiola Javadi, National Interest
Although China’s rise plays a major part in setting Indonesia’s foreign policy agenda in the region, Jakarta’s stakes in the issue are relatively lower compared to some other ASEAN states, which are either closely engaged with and highly economically dependent on China (Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos); have fundamental conflicts of interests with China and maintain formal alliances with the United States (the Philippines); have fundamental conflicts with China and ambiguous... Читать дальше...
Anthony Mirhaydari, Fiscal Times
While we're sure to get additional details of the inner workings, early indications are that Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela had prepared a draft agreement on Saturday heading into the meeting but that things fell apart on Sunday morning. The draft would have committed signatories to freeze output at January levels through October — albeit with no enforcement mechanism.
Christopher Chivvis, RAND
It is hard to take seriously the argument that NATO will end up doing too much in the Middle East and will crowd out others. The threat is the opposite—NATO is doing far too little, and in an area where there is far more left to do and where NATO is primed to do it. All of NATO's major post-Cold War operations, whether in the Balkans or Afghanistan, were geared toward the state-building and counterterrorism challenges now facing the Mediterranean and the Levant. Politics in the Balkans may be messy today... Читать дальше...
Georgi Gotev, Euractiv
“Brexit can become the real starter of the EU’s disintegration process. After the referendum in Netherlands on the Ukraine-EU association, Brexit is pushing the trend on European Union’s internal conflict. No doubt it is done with the help of Russian influence, especially political, financial and informational resources. The issue of the UK referendum, irrespective of its result, is already making EU weaker as a political player. It has negative impact on EU’s ability to... Читать дальше...
Mark Galeotti, Vox
The more we buy into the notion of Putin the "bold strategist," who is "acting like a grandmaster of chess while Obama stumbles at checkers," the more we empower him and disempower ourselves. We need to be honest and realistic. Putin has often played a weak hand very well. But that does not always mean he gets it right. His intervention into Ukraine has become a messy, expensive stalemate; he is lucky his Syrian adventure has not blown up in his face. But in foreign affairs in particular... Читать дальше...
Pietro Shakarian, Nation
Overall, these commentators condemned Washington for failing to see that “America’s interests are fundamentally opposed to Mr. Putin’s” and that Moscow is “part of the problem, not the solution.” However, by virtue of history and geography, the reality is that Russia is part of the solution. It was Russia that brokered the 1994 cease-fire on Nagorno-Karabakh, and it was Russia again that brokered the April 5 cease-fire, which ended the most recent clashes. The reality... Читать дальше...
