Until recently, a serious geopolitical working hypothesis was that West Asia and Ukraine were two vectors of the standard Hegemon modus operandi, which is to incite and unleash Forever Wars. Now both wars are united in an Omni-War. A coalition of Straussian neo-cons in the US, hardcore revisionist Zionists in Tel Aviv and Ukrainian neo-nazi... Read More

Nothing to see here. Just a hypersonic demo. Well, not really. The average American is only capable of making (some sort of) sense of the world through movies. So let’s go back to a classic: the opening sequence of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now – the Vietnam war counterpart to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, set in... Read More

President Putin’s plenary session performance (address + Q&A) at the annual Valdai Club meeting in Sochi felt like a high-speed train on cruise control. Totally cool, calm, comfortable, in full command of a Himalaya of facts, no political leader anywhere – recent past and present - would even come close to delivering what amounts to... Read More

Something quite extraordinary happened at the plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week – very much in tune with the forum’s main theme: “Far Eastern 2030. Combining Strengths to Create New Potential.� The stage was shared by President Putin; Vice-President of China Han Zheng; and Prime Minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim.... Read More

HONG KONG – There can hardly be a better place to track the four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China than dynamic, “one country, two systems� Hong Kong. Hong Kong is right at the heart of East Asia – halfway between Northeast Asia (Japan, the Koreas) and Southeast Asia. To the west is... Read More

The idea, by Kazan mayor Ilsur Metshin, was as simple as quite revolutionary. Why not profit from the year of the Russian presidency of BRICS – with the first BRICS + summit taking place in Kazan next October – to come up with a new association uniting BRICS+ cities? Mayor Metshin is a big fan... Read More

The warning by President Putin could not be starker: “In the event of the use of long-range weapons, the Russian Armed Forces will again have to make decisions about expanding the sanitary zone further (…) Do they want global conflict? It seemed they wanted to negotiate [with us], but we don’t see much desire to... Read More

A Holy of the Holies was shattered in the Holy Land as Iran staged a quite measured, heavily choreographed response to the Israeli terror attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus, a de facto evisceration of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity. This game-changer will directly interfere on how the Anglo-American system manages its simultaneous... Read More

The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation. In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market... Read More

The Russia sanctions bill that passed the US Senate by 98:2 on June 15 is a bombshell; it directly demonizes the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, under the Baltic Sea, which is bound to double Gazprom’s energy capacity to supply gas to Europe. The 9.5 billion euro pipeline is being financed by five companies; Germany’s Uniper... Read More

US President Donald Trump could not possibly have predicted the game-changing after-effects of his triumphal sword dance in Riyadh. Or could he? The fact is the House of Saud went amok, in a flash, going after Qatar and bombing from the inside that glorious Arab NATO project – call it NATOGCC — sworn with pomp... Read More

Let’s start with 28 EU leaders discussing the Western Balkans at a recent summit and blaming – what else – “Russian aggression� in the EU’s backyard. Cue to a Montenegro prosecutor raging that “Russian state bodies� staged a coup attempt during the October 2016 elections to stop the country from joining NATO. And cue to... Read More

In the end, there was hardly a reset; rather a sort of tentative pause on Cold War 2.0. Interminable days of sound and fury were trudging along when President Trump finally decided NATO is “no longer obsolete�; still, he wants to “get along� with Russia. Just ahead of meeting US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson... Read More

Anticipating an outcome of the US presidential election as a remix of the 1972 Nixon landslide, Hillary has also coined, George “Dubya� Bush-style, a remixed axis of evil: Russia, Iran and “the Assad regime�. Clinton Claims Russian Aggression Keeps War in Syria Going On That’s not even counting China, which, via “aggression� in the South... Read More

The stakes could not be higher. Not only the future of the BRICS, but the future of a new multipolar world is in the balance. And it all hinges on what happens in Brazil in the next few months. Let’s start with the Kafkaesque internal turmoil. The coup against President Dilma Rousseff remains an unrivalled... Read More

The Doha summit this past weekend that was supposed to enshrine a cut in oil production by OPEC, in tandem with Russia – it was practically a done deal – ended up literally in the dust. The City of London – via the FT – wants to convey the impression to global public opinion that... Read More

It’s spy thriller stuff; no one is talking. But there are indications Russia would not announce a partial withdrawal from Syria right before the Geneva negotiations ramp up unless a grand bargain with Washington had been struck. Some sort of bargain is in play, of which we still don’t know the details; that’s what the... Read More