Amberin Zaman, Al Monitor
Turkey has once again cut water supplies to the Hasakeh region of northeast Syria, and the autonomous administration says Ankara is risking hundreds of thousands of lives in the midst of the pandemic and soaring temperatures to placate Syrians living under Turkish occupation.
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George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures
Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s highest-profile political opponent, remains alive in a German hospital after being poisoned in the Russian town of Tomsk. The incident immediately cast suspicion on Putin himself.
O Stuenkel, Americas Quarterly
A proposal prohibiting active-duty personnel from government positions has found some support among the armed forces.
J Hamill, WPR
When Cyril Ramaphosa became president of South Africa in February 2018, many South Africans saw it as a “new dawn” for their country. In the aftermath of Jacob Zuma’s corruption-plagued presidency, Ramaphosa seemed to offer the hope of competent leadership and accountable government. Commentators spoke of “Ramaphoria,” as the new president sought to revive the spirit of idealism that informed the early...
Zhou Bo, Financial Times
The two sides are sleepwalking into confrontation in the South China Sea.
Amy Mackinnon, Foreign Policy
Russian autocracy is different, but Belarus should still be a cautionary tale.
Luis Rubio, Worldcrunch
MEXICO CITY — Resentment, especially of the poor toward the rich, is nothing new. Nor is there any novelty in politicians exploiting grievances, both real and imagined. Isocrates, a great orator of the 4th century BC, deplored hostility but recognized it as a typical emotion in democracy. Jeremy Engels, author of The Politics of Resentment, notes...
Economist
People from weak democracies are increasingly likely to support autocrats.
David Muir, The American Interest
David Stasavage’s new global history of democracy argues that it is neither a Western invention nor as fragile as today’s cynics think.
Ray Burke, Irish Times
Gordon Chang, National Interest
A crisis now simmering in the contested South China Sea, the eventual result of poor decisions in the Obama administration, could tell us a lot about Biden’s China policies.
Clyde Prestowitz, The American Conservative
Beijing was never going to democratize because of open markets. They have merely used them to push their authoritarian designs.
Council on Foreign Relations
For more than two millennia, monarchs who ruled China proper saw their country as one of the dominant actors in the world. The concept of zhongguo—the Middle Kingdom, as China calls itself—is not simply geographic. It implies that China is the cultural, political, and economic center of the world. This Sino-centrist worldview...
Lee Jones, Spectator
It is hard to remember now, but just five years ago David Cameron's No. 10 was declaring a 'golden era' of Sino-British ties. Now the US sees China as a 'strategic rival' and Britain has joined a growing coalition of Western nations attempting to limit Beijing's power. There are certainly good reaso...
C. Sabatini, Chatham House
The recent spate of sanctions limiting US travel to Cuba announced by the White House and the news that the Cuban regime has re-opened US dollar stores have sharpened the question: do sanctions work and when? Central to that question is how would they work?
Guy Sorman, City Journal
Michael Auslin, an historian at the Hoover Institution, argues that the United States has no global strategy to contain China’s overwhelming ambitions. Moreover, he believes, the U.S. does not understand the collective destiny of Asia. Local agreements, whether economic or military, with India, the Philippines, or Japan cannot balance the power of Beijing, which aims to control this part of the world.
Sam Greene, Moscow on Thames
I’m struggling to decide whether the recent events surrounding Aleksei Navalny are more macabre, or more absurd. For the moment, at least, I’m going with macabre. That seems the only reasonable conclusion, when the man is still at death’s door.