Military Build Up
The world is becoming more dangerous. America, China and Russia are increasing their military capacities at a rapid rate. An arms race is in progress. The US is deploying increasing quantities of military personnel and equipment in E
Economic effects rarely happen suddenly. Usually it takes time for things to work through the system. Talk of a “cliff” is emotive, but in reality it all takes time.
The Pound & Immigration
Two main economic effects are already to be seen and their co
On Wednesday past the US congress extended legislation imposing sanctions on Russia. However, under this new legislation companies working on Russo-German joint projects that Germany regards as essential to its economic wellbeing become liable to pun
Read more…Don't Be Complacent About War in the Middle East
The biggest danger in the world at the moment is that the Middle East war transmute from a complex of minor wars into one big one. In my previous post on the region - Qatar - I tried to show how comple
Read more…Don't Be Complacent About War in the Middle East
The biggest danger in the world at the moment is that the Middle East war transmute from a complex of minor wars into one big one. In my previous post on the region - Qatar - I tried to show how comple
Read more…Macron's Remarkable Success
What can one say? So far it is a walk over. President Macron is getting what Theresa May wanted. There is still a week for things to go wrong but all the signs are that he will get the biggest parliamentary majority of the
Read more…Still a few results to come in but it looks as though there will be a weak and wobbly Conservative government dependent upon support from the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party. Several different trends seem to have emerged. Governing parties
Read more…The war in the Middle East is extremely difficult to unravel or understand. Basically the region has three Muslim power centres: Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. In addition, there is Israel which also has a very powerful military, but in the present p
Read more…Tectonic Changes
Looking at the world political scene it seems as though the dam has burst now. Trump pulling out of the Paris Accord, Merkel declaring that the US & UK are no longer dependable, news that the EU and China are moving ahead together -
Read more…President Trump is critical of Germany for "trading unfairly" with the USA and using the EU to this end. This is surely correct. Germany runs up a huge surplus on trade by exporting more than it imports. It is able to do this because the euro, consid
Read more…Lavrov (last Saturday): “Libya was bombed and its government was violently overthrown. It was turned into a backyard for terrorists and criminals. The regime was changed with the help of fighters who came from Europe. They were free to leave their co
Read more…Back in February I wrote an article Europe will Fight Back. More recently I published an analysis of the “tectonics” of political change. Now we see some evidence that these articles were, perhaps, prescient.
It is not long since many were predicting
Read more…Merkel made the comment of the G7 meeting that it was not the seven but the six and the one. This referred particularly to the split between the US and the rest over climate change but also reflected the general tenor of the meeting. I have long pred
Read more…Donald Trump's much publicised overseas trip is, so far, a bit of a washout. We have learnt that he is for peace and against terrorism - well, yes. On the other hand, we have also seen that he is pro-Israel and pro-Saud in a rather un-nuanced way tha
Read more…- USA: Impeachment? The likelihood of Trump being impeached seems to be increasing. At the moment the storm is revolving around Flynn who is refusing to co-operate with the various enquiries for fear of self-incrimination which does not impart confi
Read more…Deeper Processes
There can be very few instances in history in which breaking what were intended to be long term treaties with close allies and trading partners works out well. International relations, just as relations between individuals, depend up
Won't it soon be time to disband NATO? This question has been raised by a number of politicians recently, including Trump before he was elected. Since then he has come under immense pressure and in order to survive in his role has abandoned half the
Read more…Wikileaks and others have released a mountain of "secret" information onto the internet, yet the sky has not fallen in, world war three has not begun... Journalists have spent hours over these materials looking for juicy stories and there are very fe
Read more…The new president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has chosen his government, appointing all his senior ministers. It is half women and half men. It is half experienced politicians and half people from civic society. It is drawn from the whole political s
Read more…When I was a teenager and the Cold War was at its height we were constantly hearing about the "arms race" between Russia and the USA. This battle for technological supremacy was closely related to the "space race" and the shock in the West when Russi
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