The latest figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show a precipitous decline in the volume of Russian weapons sales to the Chinese military. Although Beijing remains the single largest recipient of Russian arms, the figures show a 63 percent decrease in the value of major Russian weapons deliveries to China, which is [...]

read more....

By Barry Rubin
It’s become fashionable to match celebration of Israel’s founding (though part of the media can’t even admit Israelis are celebrating) with Palestinian marking of their 1948 “nakba” catastrophe.
Yet whose fault is it that they didn’t use those six decades constructively? And who killed the independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that was part of [...]

read more....

The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran.
That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence [...]

read more....

The American Textbook Council recently published a review on how many text books in public schools give a light touch to Middle Eastern history, Islam and Jihad. (FSM published it; you can find all five parts here.) If public school texts are alarming, what should we think about texts being provided by the Saudi government [...]

read more....

Vladimir Putin hails stability among his greatest achievements as president of Russia. But stability in Russia exists in appearance only, supported by enormous oil revenue and massive propaganda from the government-controlled mass media. Behind the facade lies an unprecedented increase in corruption, a population largely mired in poverty, and a bureaucracy and domestic intelligence apparatus [...]

read more....

The population of western Europe is aging steadily, and the region’s birthrate is well below the replacement level, but Europe’s elderly are exceptionally healthy. That means they could be more productive for longer than their predecessors were. If western European governments learn to tap this potential, healthy aging could become the region’s next great economic [...]

read more....