Geopolitics
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On occasion I have been asked to comment about events or affairs in countries that I know little about. I have always respectfully declined to talk about things I have not read about or studied from a historical perspective. We really should not comment on things we don’t know about. In recent years there has…
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Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in 1880 to a liberal Russian Jewish family. He worked as a journalist in Rome and Vienna and at an early age began to devote his energies and skills as a writer, orator, and polemicist to the Zionist cause. During the Great War he persuaded the British to…
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George Friedman has always been an outsider within the US foreign policy establishment. Some would say he is not part of the establishment at all, since the Council on Foreign Relations has barely tolerated mention of his name over the past couple of decades. One presumes this is because Friedman has resisted the constraints that…
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The events of October 7 were the consequence of the brutish conditions of life Israel has imposed on the Palestinians over generations. Those conditions produced Hamas and produced October 7. Israel was, and is, content in imposing these brutish conditions of life and it expected the Palestinians to endure them until their will was broken…
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It is the anniversary this month of the complete liberation of Karabakh by the armed forces of Azerbaijan. Most of the regions of Azerbaijan taken by Armenian forces between 1991 and 1994 were reclaimed in November 2020 by the Azerbaijanis during, and as a result of, the 44 Day War. The rump of the former…
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On 15 October the Sunday Times reported that “five former British Defence Secretaries and the ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson have urged Sir Keir Starmer to supply Ukraine with long range Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep inside Russia, even without US backing.” This joint statement was preceded by a week or so of high-profile media…
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During the Great War of 1914 Britain invaded neutral Greece and occupied Salonika with a large force. This operation, far away from the Western front where the war would be decided, was called a “sideshow” by many in England and the French Premier even referred to the army as the “Salonika gardeners”. In Ireland a…
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Hobbes famously wrote about the “state of nature,” when the state fails to provide order and security for individuals. Under the “state of nature” there would be “no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported…
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Two years ago, on 18 July 2022 Ursula von der Leyen, head of the EU Commission, issued a Memorandum of Understanding statement in Baku, noting that because Russian gas supplies were “no longer reliable”, “The European Union has therefore decided to diversify away from Russia and to turn towards more reliable, trustworthy partners. And I…
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James Sharp, former British Ambassador to Baku, was recently interviewed on Caliber, by Orkhan Amashov. The interview dealt with some similarities between the ‘Northern Ireland’ peace process/1998 Belfast, aka Good Friday Agreement, and the current, stalled Armenia-Azerbaijan peace negotiations. The focus of the interview was on the reluctance of Yerevan to meet Baku’s demand to…
