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       There are regular protests against the American nukes stored in the small town of Büchel Viewed from above, the fields surrounding Büchel air base stretch out like a greenish-brown patchwork quilt, punctuated by the small villages and woodlands that make up the Eifel region in western Germany. Take a closer look at satellite imagery, and you can make out several dozen camouflaged airplane hangars. Hidden deep below them lies a carefully guarded secret: underground vaults housing American nuclear bombs that date back to the Cold War. A state secret The precise number of bombs stored in the underground vaults in the air base is unclear. Estimates range between 15 to 20, and their location is a state secret. So secret that local resident Elke Koller, a now retired pharmacist, only found out about their existence through media reports in the mid-1990s — despite being a member of the local Green party at the time. She told DW that learning of their exis...

1. Introduction The collapse of the Soviet Union sealed the fate of the realist-bipolar world order and the United States of America (USA) – the leader of the so-called free world – ascended triumphantly. Afterwards, the sole superpower asserted itself as a liberal hegemon and instituted the rules-based liberal world order, which synchronized the globe for more than two decades. Nonetheless, as opposed to the liberal imaginings – which John Mearsheimer brands as “delusions” – the rules-based order proved to be even evanescent. While the liberal hegemon was engaged in costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, China – the onetime sleeping dragon – steadily transformed its latent potential into tangible economic power and by the end of the first decade of 21st century, elevated itself to supplant Japan as world’s second-largest economy only preceded by the USA. As China’s economy – an element considered central to the overall national power – underwent astonishing growth, it started trans...

The Iranian regime and the Saudi Arabian regime are longtime enemies, both vying for control of the Persian Gulf region. Part of the conflict stems from religious differences — differences between Shia and Sunni Muslim groups. But much of it stems from mundane desires to establish regional dominance. For more than forty years, however, Saudi Arabia has had one important ace in the hole in terms of its battle with Iran: the US's continued support for the Saudi regime. But why should the US continue to so robustly support this dictatorial regime? Certainly, these close relations can't be due to any American support for democracy and human rights. The Saudi regime is one of the world's most illiberal and antidemocratic regimes. Its ruling class has repeatedly been connected to Islamist terrorist groups, with Foreign Policy magazine last year calling Saudi Arabia "the beating heart of Wahhabism — the harsh, absolutist religious creed that helped seed the worldviews of...

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, French economist Let’s talk numbers, shall we? The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $23 trillion and growing. The amount this country owes is now greater than its gross national product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). We’re paying more than $270 billion just in interest on that public debt annually. And the top two foreign countries who “own” our debt are China and Japan. The national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) is projected to surpass $1 trillion every year for the next 10 years. The United States spends more on foreign aid than any other nation ($50 billion in 2...

Recent geopolitical developments in Eurasia indicate that the South Caucasus’ relative importance could be overshadowed by West-Russia competition over Belarus, Ukraine and Central Asia. This trend was quite visible during Mike Pompeo’s visit to Belarus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan which laid out the US administration’s priorities in the former Soviet Union for 2020 and well into 2021. Yet another reason for the South Caucasus’ ambiguous position is Russia’s growing concern with Minsk and Kyiv in the west and Tashkent’s maneuvers to eschew to Moscow’s attempts to expand its influence over these geographically and economically important states.  The South Caucasus plays an important role in the US/EU’s strategic calculus. One of the biggest imperatives of since the breakup of the Soviet Union was to enable newly independent Georgia and Azerbaijan to use their geographic position as a nodal point in the nascent South Caucasus energy and transport corridor. For the West t...