... – members of four NGOs that contributed to the transition from Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime to a modern pluralist democracy. This choice should be recognized as politically correct and practically faultless. The world is focused on the Middle East. Tunisia stands out against that nightmarish background as a bright spot and the only country where the Arab Spring was relatively successful. (Many will say that the night is still young, but then it’s all the more imperative to make ...
... Mediterranean. The second priority is to prop up the Assad regime, whereas Russia’s counter-ISIL work is only a means to legitimize its approach to Syria.
РИА Новости / Дмитрий Виноградов
Irina Zviagelskaya:
Russia in a Changing Middle East
The tonality of Breedlove’s statement and its interpretation by many U.S. media indicate their willingness to discredit Russia and accuse it of “imperial ambition.” However, the idea for a country to protect its main attack ...
Interests and opportunities
The Middle East has always had a special meaning for Russia. The area provides access to the Mediterranean Sea, linking Russia with the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, North Africa. Any threat of war, a concentration of foreign armies,...
... poetic metaphor. In reality, we can only speak with some degree of certainty about two far closer forecasting horizons.
One is five or ten years away.
Let us assume that very soon somebody will win and somebody will lose the civil wars raging in the Middle East. Let us further assume that the conflicts that are tearing this world apart will be settled, or at least frozen, tomorrow or in a year’s time.
Then all the countries in the region would need about five years just to make up their minds ...
Review of the book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (Authors: Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan)
Review of the book
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror
The emergence in the Middle East of a powerful terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) which managed to seize vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria within a little over a year, came as a surprise for the world public opinion and the media. It prompted ...
The incident that occurred in the skies over Syria when a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24 got the whole world talking about how close we came to an all-out conflict in the Middle East. Some commentators have suggested that today we are closer to an open conflict between Russia and NATO than ever before since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite surprisingly while Russia watchers have insisted that if a conflict between ...
... NATO to counteract the USSR. After the USSR collapsed, they switched to fighting Islamism in Turkey and were even plotting to topple Erdogan. Perhaps now, after the truce, NATO is using the group inside the country for other purposes.
The U.S. Greater Middle East project, for example, assigns a big role to Kurdistan in various forms. If tensions arise in the region (a downed plane is a clear signal of that), then NATO troops can go in and create a Kurdish corridor along the Turkey–Syria border,...
... However, during its 70-year-long partnership with the Saudis, Washington preferred to focus on
pragmatic aspects
, proceeding from the tenet that there are two sides to every coin. Over many decades this approach suited both parties in that convoluted Middle Eastern system that operates to a brutal but still clear-cut pattern. But the Arab Spring markedly diversified the regional palette of political actors and trends, in the process throwing up many more nuances in relations between the allies Washington ...
... of settling key MENA problems.
Opening remarks were made by RIAC Program Director Ivan Timofeev and Valdai Academic Director Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of
Russia in Global Affairs
magazine and RIAC member, who said that “events in the Middle East will have far-reaching consequences and even specialists are just arriving at realization of the fact.”
The presentation was followed by a debate with participation of Research Fellow at RAS Institute for Oriental Studies Vladimir Sazhin,...
...
Boris Dolgov, Russian Academy of Sciences
The armed confrontation in Syria between the Syrian regime and the radical opposition represents, together with the actions of the “Islamic State” (IS), the main military-political crisis in the Middle East today. It has also become one of the most acute global conflicts, involving all major world powers. The leading countries of NATO and the European Union (EU), Russia, China and key regional states – Turkey, Iran, Israel, the GCC members ...
