China was quick to aid coronavirus-stricken Sri Lanka. Chinese magnanimity and speed in responding to the Indian Ocean Island’s request contrasted starkly with Beijing’s more measured response to Africa’s needs, widely expected to be the pandemic’s next hotspot.
A Turkish-US business council is projecting Turkey as a trading alternative to China with the help of influential US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close associate of President Donald J. Trump.
The Firefly, an Israeli-built loitering kamikaze drone, part of the Spike family of missiles that the Jewish state has sold to various European nations, may be one reason why Gulf states, and particularly Saudi Arabia, have cozied up to Israel in…
One thing is certain, the recent US military pullback from Saudi Arabia will fuel a brewing arms race in the Middle East at a time when the region, struggling with the public health and devastating economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, can least afford it.
The coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout may rewrite the security as well as the political and economic map of the Middle East. The crisis will probably color Gulf attitudes towards the region’s major external players: the United States, China,…
On 14 April 20, Iranian troops boarded and briefly held a Hong Kong-flagged tanker and its Chinese crew in the Straits of Hormuz. The next day eleven vessels from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy approached six US military ships…
The question is not if, but when the long-standing American defence umbrella in the Gulf, the world’s most militarised and volatile region, will be replaced by a multilateral security arrangement that would have to include China as well as Russia….
Television news summarizes daily what a new world order shaped by civilisationalists entails. Writer William Gibson’s assertion that “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” is graphically illustrated in pictures of hundreds of thousands, if not…
Saudi Arabia may have been getting more than it bargained for when authorities in Khujand, Tajikistan’s second largest city, ordered that the city’s largest and most popular mosque be converted into a cinema. The order followed the closure of some 2,000…
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has confirmed four cases of the new deadly coronavirus. On 29 January 2020, the UAE’s Ministry of Health and Community Protection said it had diagnosed the coronavirus in a four-member Chinese family. The infected patients…