To understand the October 26th re-election of President Dilma Rousseff, we must analyze the somewhat special politics of Brazil. Brazil’s politics are in many ways closer to those of western Europe and North America than almost any other country in the global South.
Turkey will have to come to a more coherent policy in the very near future. Otherwise, its claim to be a major actor in the region will fall flat. And its internal struggle with the Kurds will probably explode into violence again. Ambivalence is not admired in a zone of such hot struggles.
Afghanistan has continued for two centuries to reject the outside interventions, in ways open and covert. Whenever the outside interveners seemed to win for a while, it soon became clear that they had not. Worse yet, their interventions seemed to turn the very Afghans they supported against them. There is little reason to assume that the outsiders will be any more successful now than in the past.
The United States is in serious decline. Everything is going wrong. And in the panic, they are like a driver of a powerful automobile who has lost control of it, and doesn’t know how to slow it down.
There is an immense amount of diplomacy going on these days concerning the quasi-civil war in Ukraine. But the only actors who really matter are Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
In the endless geopolitical realignments of the Middle East, the Caliphate of the Islamic State (formerly ISIS or ISIL) seems to have frightened just about everyone else involved in Middle Eastern politics into a de facto geopolitical alliance.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019