Epstein Secrets

bate is taking place in the Iranian establishment over whether its regional policies—backing Shi'a and Shi'a-friendly forces like Hezbollah and the Assad and Maliki governments to the hilt in brutal civil wars-is working. According to The Wall Street Journal, Iranian doves are pointing to the recent

Bye, Bye, Sykes-Picot." In other words, they are out to bring down not only the Syrian and Iraqi regimes but also the Arab system itself. President Bashar Al-Assad had said, in an interview with a Lebanese paper two weeks ago, that Damascus has received messages from Western governments lately. The Saudi roy

ic regional powers that have at time challenged the protocols of the postwar order. And that pushback has allowed weaker nations- such as Poland or the Baltic States-to escape the orbit of post- Soviet Russia, while in the Pacific ensuring that an Australia, New Zealand, or the Philippines is not bullied into sub

ago. But Obama's er jection of U.S. military involvement in Syria's civil war, in which 140,000 people have died since he first called on President Bashar al-Assad to step down, is the leading example of his second term. So, too, is the Pentagon budget proposal outlined this past week that would cut the size o

. EFTA00705926 At a G-8 meeting the following year in Northern Ireland, Obama and Putin met and made no headway toward resolving differences over Assad's leadership of Syria. The two exchanged an awkward back-and-forth over Putin's passion for martial arts before the Russian leader summed up the m

repeatedly echoed the need to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin's rhetoric about Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the fall of the Soviet Union, in Decembe

ce with respect to the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and a stabilizing force with respect to keeping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in place in the absence of any attractive alternatives. Syria would not have made as much progress in pushing back ISIL and the rebels without Russia

eads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO} member countries agreed, at a summit in Warsaw in July 2016, to deploy as many as 4,000 troops to the Baltic States and Poland in early 2017 as a deterrent to further adventurism in Eastern Europe.” The risks of accidents and intentional skirmishes will inevitably