Middle East

Via GEFIRA,

The First and the Second World War were the culmination of rivalries that go as far back as over a thousand years, when Charlemagne subjugated the Saxon tribes inhabiting modern Germany, and creating the Carolingian Empire. The political successors of Franks, France, and Saxons, the latter morphing into the Holy Roman Empire, then Prussia, then Germany, would continue to fight border wars until the bloodiest of them all, World War 2, inflicted enough destruction to both to force them to give up military means for the reciprocal arrangements.

Gold Up 8% In First Half 2017; Builds On 8.5% Gain In 2016

Authored by George Friedman and Kamran Bokhari via MauldinEconomics.com,

If geopolitics studies how nations behave, then the nation is singularly important. Nation-states are the defining feature of the modern political era. They give people a collective identity and a pride of place… even when their borders are artificially drawn, as they were in the Middle East.

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

As widely anticipated, tensions between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are slowly corroding the unity of Washington’s allies in the Middle East

Via Disobedient Media

Has Saudi Arabia's brinkmanship and heavy-handed policies of intervention in the Middle East come back to haunt the desert kingdom?