USA

At last, the big day of the Bahrain workshop on the Palestinian economy is coming. After two years of negotiations and secret plans, the Trump administration should soon propose a US framework of guidelines for resolving the oldest struggle in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The location of this event will be Manama (June 25-26), the capital of Bahrain and focal point of some important Middle Eastern dynamics. The conference will bring together government and business leaders from Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

As the first Democratic presidential primary debates rapidly approach, observers of American politics both domestically and around the world are increasingly focused on one key question: Will Donald Trump be re-elected president in 2020?  Many of the academic models that historians and political scientists use to predict presidential elections are favorable for a Trump re-election, and most of the global betting markets have him as close to an even-money proposition.  On some level, this makes sense; incumbent presidents typically win re-election barring economic recession, an unpopular maj

As Ukraine prepares to hold its second presidential election since the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity”, there is less focus on the country in the United States now that at any point in the last five years. That is not to say that it has fallen off the radar or that US policy circles no longer care about what is happening there, but rather that the situation in Ukraine is seen as being a fair way along the inevitable process of moving from crisis to normalisation.

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address last week was, according to the overnight polling, generally well received by the American public (or at least by those who watched). His acknowledgements of various individuals in the gallery were poignant and moving. He invoked proud, unifying achievements from the nation’s past, like the liberation of Dachau and the Moon landing. There were even moments of bipartisan celebration, as when Trump acknowledged the record-setting number of women serving in Congress.

No. Among all the unknowns that 2019 might have in store for us, one development we need not expect is a collapse of the Islamic Republic due to the Trump administration’s policy of “maximum pressure”.

The meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Donal Trump of the US in the G20 Buenos Aries in November resulted in a reprieve of sorts – a three month pause on the imposition of further tariffs on goods exported from China to the US. This was despite fears already issued by some of Trump’s administration that over USD200 billion of goods would have taxes introduced and that in some cases these would rise to over 20 per cent by the new year. 

When we trace China’s efforts in international standard-setting over the past decade, two interesting patterns emerge