When US President Joe Biden took office early this year, no shifts in US foreign policy and its global alliances were noticed. Instead, the United States altered its orientation and stance on many…
Around 4 years ago, Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdul Aziz paid a historic state visit, the first by a ruling Saudi monarch, to Russia, which heralded a shift in global power structures according…
Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Washington was coalescing around a new bipartisan consensus: great-power competition, especially with China, ought to be the main organizing principle of U.S…
More than a year and a half into a global pandemic that has caused at least four million deaths, the world is still debating two competing hypotheses about the origins of the novel coronavirus that…
Russia-China military cooperation continues to deepen. On August 9th the two sides kicked off five-day-long joint military exercises in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The exercise includes…
The unprecedented global challenges that the United States faces today—climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, massive economic inequality, terrorism, corruption, authoritarianism—are…
Is a nuclear power plant on the edge of China’s 60 million-strong Pearl River Delta megalopolis on the verge of an emergency? It doesn’t look like it — but that doesn’t mean there’s no cause for…
A corollary to the scientific truism that "nature abhors a vacuum" is that nature tends to fill the void with any garbage near at hand.
For example, consider the surge of interest in the claim…
The United States and China are locked in a contest for influence over the rest of the world. The new great-power competition looks in this sense very much like the one that took place during the…
The Three Seas Initiative (3SI) was launched in 2015 as a massive infrastructure investment project involving 12 European countries from the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Sea regions. Austria, Bulgaria…
Any disruption in the Hormuz has cascading knock-on effects that extend far beyond energy markets, impacting international trade. Al Majalla explores all this and more.
The current conflict is unlikely to go global for now, but the speed at which it has spread regionally is alarming. A look at history shows the geopolitical factors that led to world wars.