U.S. President Joe Biden’s “reset” of Washington’s approach to the Middle East increasingly looks like a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, with an added measure of piety and evasion about what’s really driving the administration’s decision-making process. But an unwitting admission might have come last week when a White House reporter asked Biden why he changed his mind about meeting Saudi Arabia’s once-blacklisted de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, known as MBS. “The commitments from the Saudis don’t relate to anything having to do with energy,” Biden responded, despite the fact that [...]
When U.S. President Joe Biden decided not to invite Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to last week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Venezuela leader—whose presidency was for years deemed illegitimate by the U.S, the United Kingdom, the European Union and many of Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors, among others—set out on a whirlwind international trip aiming to show he still has support in other parts of the world. One of his first stops, unsurprisingly, was Iran, another country targeted by Western sanctions, where he and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi gushed about their deepening friendship. More noteworthy was Maduro’s visit [...]
Nine years after the Gezi Park protests erupted in Istanbul and quickly spread to many other parts of Turkey, the “culprits” behind the demonstrations were sentenced in April. Civil society leader and philanthropist Osman Kavala was convicted of having attempted to overthrow the government and sentenced to life imprisonment; seven other co-defendants received 18 years. Like many other prosecutions in Turkey these days, the Gezi case was based not on evidence, but pure conjecture. Kavala has long been a target of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. He had already been imprisoned for four years based on spurious accusations that [...]
