In late December, Chinese authorities reported an outbreak of a type of pneumonia of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan. The causative agent of the disease was a new variation of the coronavirus. On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization named the disease COVID-19. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) then described the virus as “severe ...
Following Brexit, France wants to proclaim itself the new pan-European nuclear guarantor. During a speech at L’École de guerre in Paris, Macron announced that he had ambitious plans to put French nuclear weapons at the heart of EU defense policy. By declaring the French doctrine of nuclear deterrence in the current geopolitical environment, Macron clearly outlined the boundaries of what ...
An emergency meeting of European powers took place in Munich, Germany, on September 29–30, 1938, and an agreement was quickly reached– on Hitler’s terms. Mechanisms of dialogue have often opened the door to radically new formations in Europe, for better or worse. Four decades later, the Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, triggered the Cold ...
The Berbers are the indigenous people of North and West Africa, the ethnic substrate on which Arabization was later superimposed. Despite the fact that Arabs make up the majority, a significant part of the population from Libya to Mauritania has Berber roots. The size of the Berber (Amazigh) population is estimated to be between 30 and 50 million people, making ...
On February 11, the Iranian Guardian Council, which is in charge of approving the competency of the candidates running for election, named the candidates for the upcoming parliamentary elections on February 21. According to the Iranian Interior Ministry’s statistics, 16,145 candidates registered to run, but as many as 9000 (according to nonofficial statistics) were disqualified. The exact number will be ...
Last year, a movie called “Sabre Dance” came out about an episode in the life of Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978), a Soviet composer with Armenian roots (born and raised in Tbilisi-Georgia under Russian rule). Kachaturian most famously wrote the music for the “Sabre Dance” section of the ballet “Gayane”, which was partially synthesized from an unnamed Armenian folk song and tied ...
The 56th Munich Security Conference this year convened around the topic of ’Westlesness’. The conference report stressed that ‘the world is getting less and less Western’, while debate between the US and European leaders around the ‘collapsing of the Atlantic Alliance’ took center stage at the conference. At the Munich Security Conference (MSC 2020) this year, 30 heads of states ...
A country’s foreign policy is a complex synthesis, matured and distilled with the accumulation of experience over many years. Therefore, if an extraordinary change in the global balance of power does not occur, there will likewise be no radical change in a country’s foreign policy. Because Turkey was unable to fully grasp the global paradigm changes of the post-Cold War ...
An annual security conference was held in Munich from February 14 to 16. This international forum, which takes place every year in the capital of Bavaria, was originally conceived as a joint event between NATO and the conservative Christian Social Union. Today it is more informal, but the agenda and high level list of participants demonstrates that the problems of ...
Turkey, which has based its economic growth on export development and made significant strides in recent years (especially during the AKP administration) has taken a strategic approach to the African continent in search of new markets. Moreover, it is seeking to expand its political, economic and commercial presence on the continent. Turkey, as a country that has a positive outlook ...