Remember how innocently the Syrian rebellion began? In March 2011, as part of the Arab Spring which started in Tunisia, Syrians engaged in mostly peaceful demonstrations, though they did demand the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad. Ironically, his heavy-handed...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was a triumph of nationalist passions over political interests. If the latter had prevailed, the process...
President Obama announced in a speech to the nation on Tuesday night that he will delay a congressional vote on authorizing U.S. strikes on Syria. This comes in light of a Russian-brokered deal that has seen Syria commit to giving up its chemical weapons. “It’s too...
From the Partial Test-Ban and nuclear Non-Proliferation treaties through Reykjavík in the eighties to START I in 1991, arms control was beginning to look like it might corral nuclear proliferation by other countries and on our own soil. Instead, institutional...
Syria’s devastating civil war is unfortunately nothing new in the Levant. A similar civil war, in fact—marked by sectarianism, the involvement of foreign states, and the loss of tens of thousands of lives—ravaged Syria’s smaller neighbor Lebanon for over 15 years....
On Sept. 8, Secretary of State John Kerry made the offhanded suggestion that if Syrian President Bashar al Assad were to "turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week," the United States would call off its plans to...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989. It’s already been nearly a quarter of a century since the two Germanies were reunified. An entire generation that never experienced life in a...
Suddenly it seems as if the United States is competing with Russia to find an alternative to attacking Syria. As we posted this morning: “The Syrian government has accepted a Russian proposal to put its chemical weapons under international control to avoid a possible...
“The Syrian government has accepted a Russian proposal to put its chemical weapons under international control to avoid a possible U.S. military strike, Interfax news agency quoted Syria's foreign minister as saying on Tuesday,” reports Reuters this morning. Russian...
Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS), still under development, is a weapons system designed to provide the military with the option to strike fast, even on the other side of the world. It affords the speed of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, but...