Two decades of geopolitical analysis

Updated April 2019 I’ve been employed to analyze geopolitics and the world economy for about twenty years now, which means, alarmingly, I’ve got a track record. (Most of my publicly-available articles are now posted on this blog.) What did I get wrong, and what did I...

A Turkish turnaround?

Most reasonable people would agree that the administration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been heading, alarmingly, towards authoritarianism. Erdoğan has been accused of imprisoning journalists, censoring the media, attempting to exert political...

Could the crisis in Ukraine transform Russia?

Most of the commentary surrounding the extraordinary “euromaidan” demonstrations and fall of Ukraine’s government has focused on Russia’s influence on Ukraine, and in particular, the question of Russian intervention to support the now-deposed Yanukovich government....

Will the Tsunami Bring a Wave of Instability to Asia?

The tsunami, which left as many as 160,000 dead, hit countries with a tenuous hold on political stability – a province of Indonesia that is home to a violent separatist movement, a region in Sri Lanka that is currently at peace but has fought a long-running civil war....

Turkey Looks West, and Up

“For the Turk, freedom is life,” declared Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founding father, in 1920. But he clearly had something in mind quite different from the democratic and market freedoms frequently praised by US President George W. Bush. For Ataturk, in the name...