Is Tunisia Abandoning Morocco for Algeria? - 0 views
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Power balances in North Africa are shifting. The latest indication that Algeria’s star is rising—along with European demand for its natural gas—as Moroccan influence wanes was all but confirmed by Tunisia’s decision to include the leader of the Western Sahara independence movement the Polisario Front in an investment conference, a move seemingly designed to ruffle feathers in Morocco.
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For decades, Tunisia has looked on, maintaining its neutral stance as both sides jockeyed for dominance. However, by appearing to have unilaterally invited Brahim Ghali, the Polisario leader and president of the self-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, to a conference it was holding in tandem with Japan, that neutrality has come into question. Moreover, for many observers, the invitation confirmed what many suspected: that Tunisia is growing increasingly close to Algeria, potentially at the expense of its historically close ties with Morocco, while Rabat’s relations with Japan, which Tunis enjoys a burgeoning relationship with, are cast into doubt.
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His presence appeared to take many by surprise, not least Morocco, which swiftly issued furious missives of the “hurt” caused to the Moroccan people by Tunis’s action. Ambassadors were withdrawn by both countries while Morocco’s newspapers denounced Tunisia’s shortcomings.
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Ahead of COP27, Egypt is highly vulnerable to climate change - 0 views
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Adel Abdullah cultivates a subsistence living off of six acres of peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and pomegranates. He is one of millions of smallholder farmers working in the Delta. He walks barefoot in his farm as a show of reverence to the land. The soil is pale and thin, almost as sandy as the beach, and choked by mounting concentrations of salt, left behind by periodic coastal flooding and pushed into underground aquifers by the rising sea.“This is the first place to be affected by climate change,” Abdullah says. “The barriers help a bit with flooding, but the salty soil is still really killing us.”
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he takes irrigation water from the nearby Kitchener Drain, one of the largest and most polluted canals in Egypt that aggregates wastewater from the farms, businesses, and households of an estimated 11 million people in the Delta. By the time water reaches Abdullah’s farm, it may have been reused half a dozen times since entering Egypt in the Nile, each time accumulating more salts and pollutants and losing beneficial nutrients.
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Abdullah is forced to douse the farm in fertilizers, pesticides, and salt-suppressing chemicals, all of which further degrade the soil. Those inputs, on top of the rising costs of irrigation systems and machinery, eat up any potential income Abdullah might earn
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Egypt vows to cut military's outsized role in economy under IMF bailout | Financial Times - 0 views
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Egypt has committed to reducing the military’s role in the economy as part of its $3bn IMF bailout package, as the Arab state grapples with a foreign currency crisis, a weakening pound and rising inflation.
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Under the policy, the government would define sectors that are “strategic” while gradually withdrawing the state from “non-strategic sectors”, including through asset sales.
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Sisi’s regime has previously pledged to reduce the military’s role in the economy and privatise army-owned companies, but little progress has been made. Businessmen hope the scale of the current crisis will now force the authorities to act.
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The Eastern Mediterranean in 2023: Escalation or Resolution? | Majalla - 0 views
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The Eastern Mediterranean has been stuck in an infinite loop of unilateral sovereign decisions on maritime demarcations by the countries on three of its coastlines since the early discoveries of the massive hydrocarbon wealth in the seabed about two decades ago. The domestic political troubles in most Eastern Mediterranean countries, the uneven geo-political intricacies of the region, and the long-term conflicts between the neighboring countries have added extra layers of complications to the growing tensions over maritime rights.
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geo-economic threats posed by these conflicts have generated unexpected collaborations between the southern countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. Prominent examples include the recent Israel-Lebanon maritime border deal and the five years of cooperation between Egypt and Israel on extracting, liquifying, and exporting natural gas to Europe
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unresolved long-term conflicts between Turkey and Greece are still setting the region on fire
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Biden signals rethink over Saudi ties amid anger at cuts in oil output | US news | The ... - 0 views
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The Biden administration has said it is ready to consider tough new measures against Saudi Arabia after its decision last week to side with Vladimir Putin and cut oil production.Observers said the move signalled a dramatic abandonment of the US president’s recent attempts to seek a rapprochement with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and casts doubt over the future of the US-Saudi security relationship.
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The congressional backlash against Saudi Arabia escalated sharply this week after Robert Menendez, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, threatened to freeze weapons sales and security cooperation with the kingdom, saying Prince Mohammed was helping to “underwrite Putin’s war through the Opec+ cartel”.
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The move by the Opec+ group of the oil cartel and its allies to cut oil production over the objections of the White House, was a double blow to Biden, undermining his attempt to cut Russian revenues by lowering the oil price, and threatening a spike in domestic petrol prices weeks before congressional elections. It was all the more stinging as it followed a reconciliatory trip to Jeddah by Biden in July, when he was photographed fist-bumping with the crown prince.
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A New History for a New Turkey: What a 12th-grade textbook has to say about T... - 0 views
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Rather than simply serving as crude propaganda for Erdoğan’s regime, Contemporary Turkish and World History aspires to do something more ambitious: embed Turkey’s dominant ideology in a whole new nationalist narrative. Taken in its entirety, the book synthesizes diverse strands of Turkish anti-imperialism to offer an all-too-coherent, which is not to say accurate, account of the last hundred years. It celebrates Atatürk and Erdoğan, a century apart, for their struggles against Western hegemony. It praises Cemal Gürsel and Necmettin Erbakan, on abutting pages, for their efforts to promote Turkish industrial independence. And it explains what the works of both John Steinbeck [Con Şıtaynbek] and 50 Cent [Fifti Sent] have to say about the shortcomings of American society.
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Turkey has long had competing strains of anti-Western, anti-Imperialist and anti-American thought. In the foreign policy realm, Erdogan’s embrace of the Mavi Vatan doctrine showed how his right-wing religious nationalism could make common cause with the left-wing Ulusalcı variety.[5] This book represents a similar alliance in the historiographic realm, demonstrating how the 20th century can be rewritten as a consistent quest for a fully independent Turkey.
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Ankara is currently being praised for sending indigenously developed drones to Ukraine and simultaneously criticized for holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Contemporary Turkish and World History sheds light on the intellectual origins of both these policies
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More than Genocide - Boston Review - 0 views
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Mass state violence against civilians is not a glitch in the international system; it is baked into statehood itself. The natural right of self-defense plays a foundational role in the self-conception of Western states in particular, the formation of which is inseparable from imperial expansion. Since the Spanish conquest of the Americas starting in the sixteenth century, settlers justified their reprisals against indigenous resistance as defensive “self-preservation.” If they felt their survival was imperiled, colonizers engaged in massive retaliation against “native” peoples, including noncombatants. The “doctrine of double effect” assured them that killing innocents was permissible as a side effect of carrying out a moral end, like self-defense.
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By the nineteenth century, the Christianizing mission had been augmented by a civilizing one of the “savage” natives. More recently, this colonial ideology has manifested itself in the project of “bringing democracy to the Arab world,” with Israel designated as the “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the proverbial “villa in the jungle.”
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Without imperial possessions and the lucrative trade in sugar and other commodities predicated on the Atlantic slave trade, European states would not have generated the surpluses necessary to pay for their military establishments and the bureaucratic apparatuses required to sustain them. And while European powers and settlers in their colonies did not set out to exterminate the peoples they conquered, they killed any who resisted, claiming that their hands were forced.
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The Changing Strategic Importance of the Middle East and North Africa - 0 views
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an overview of the key factors shaping the region’s changing strategic importance. It then focuses on the oil and gas exports, which are the key factor shaping the region’s strategic importance, its role as a group of major trading partners, its role as a key line of global communication between regions, and its role in global migration
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provides a country-by-country overview of the key quantitative and trend data on oil and gas exports. It shows that there is only a limited consensus between various sources and just how different the resources and exports of given countries are.
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several key issues affecting the future of the region’s exports of fossil fuels in detail, with supporting graphs, maps, and charts. These issues include major changes in the patterns of future energy demand and the potential impact of global warming, the changing expert needs of developed and developing states, the impact of the war in Ukraine on energy demand, the impact of strategic competition with Russia and China on energy security, and the real level of U.S. dependence on the stable flow of oil and gas exports from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
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Iran says US strikes are a 'strategic mistake' - 1 views
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Iran's foreign ministry said the strikes on Iraq and Syria "will have no result other than intensifying tensions and instability in the region".Earlier, Iraq said the US retaliatory strikes would bring "disastrous consequences" for the region.At least 16 people, including civilians, were killed as a result of the strikes, Iraqi officials said.A spokesman for Iraq's prime minister said the strikes were a "violation" of his country's sovereignty and that they would impact "the security and stability of Iraq and the region". While Syria said the US "occupation" of Syrian territory "cannot continue".
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There have been no strikes on Iranian soil.
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Iran has denied any role in the attack on the US base, saying it was "not involved in the decision making of resistance groups".A spokesperson for Iran's foreign ministry said US strikes on Iraq, Syria and Yemen "merely provide for the goals of the Zionist regime", referring to US ally Israel.
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I thought this article had two very important themes. It is odd how Iraq is ok with Iran violating its sovereignty by fomenting terrorism within Iraq. Iraq, however, is not ok with the U.S. retaliating against these strikes. It was also ironic that Russia called an emergency meeting to discuss the U.S. threat in the region. Russia is likely trying to further assert its power in the region, as well as support Syrian allies. It is also possible that Russia could be moving to push its influence in the UN to distract from failures in Ukraine.
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