While President Xi Jinping has often been criticized by Western politicians, as well as intellectuals inside and outside of China, for restoring quasi-Maoist values, he has at least been consistent in his conservative agenda. On foreign policy, he has never strayed from the Chinese Communist... MORE

By 2023, Russia’s budgetary planning for civilian and military space programs was presumed to have changed compared with previous years due to the breakdown in space cooperation with the United States and Europe (with the exception of the International Space Station); the failures of Russia’s... MORE

*Read Part One Here. Ukraine’s leadership and public opinion are adamant in ruling out land-for-peace tradeoffs with Russia. Leadership statements and public opinion surveys testify to this attitude. Such tradeoffs have, nevertheless, been proposed in a recent RAND Corporation report (Rand.org, January 2023). Ukrainian territorial... MORE

The boldest prescription yet for a United States–abetted defeat of Ukraine by Russia—and, ipso facto, a Western defeat—has come out of one unit of the RAND Corporation in Washington, DC. It envisages large territorial concessions by Ukraine to Russia—in effect, more and even more land... MORE

Abu Sayyaf’s origins date to the period after the Soviet army left Afghanistan in 1989. However, its most lethal attacks began occurring in the years surrounding 9/11 and reached a peak in the 2010s. The U.S. designated Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist group in 1997.... MORE

When Muhammadu Buhari was elected Nigerian president in 2015, he notoriously stated that Boko Haram was “technically defeated” (punchng.com, February 6, 2016). A former military general who has seen civil war, coups, and other internal and regional conflicts, Buhari expected that Boko Haram would be... MORE

On January 8, voters in Benin went to the polls to select the new Parliament. The overall turnout was not particularly high at 38.66 percent, but it was still higher than the last parliamentary election held in 2019, where only 23 percent of the country... MORE

Since late 2022, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the “Pakistani Taliban,”—an alliance of jihadist networks that have fought the Pakistani state since 2007—has been regrouping. This is especially so in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on the border of Afghanistan. For example, there was... MORE

On January 23, the European Union announced it would be sending a civilian mission to Armenia for a two-year term to document tensions on the border with Azerbaijan (Consilium.Europa.eu, January 23; see EDM, February 8). The EU’s recent decision follows earlier attempts by Brussels to establish... MORE

As the standoff in the Lachin Corridor—the primary land route into and out of the Armenian-controlled areas of Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region—enters its third month, the humanitarian situation there is rapidly deteriorating, prompting ever-more ethnic Armenians in the region to consider leaving while simultaneously attracting more... MORE