Pro-government supporters gather for a march in downtown Moscow to mark People’s Unity Day. The poster reads “the Crimea is ours,” Nov. 4, 2014 (AP photo by Ivan Sekretarev).
As the end of each year rolls around, foreign policy pundits inevitably churn out columns reviewing the past 12 months and guessing at what comes next. These pieces will make for consistently bleak reading this year. Viewed in geopolitical terms, 2014 has been egregiously nasty. It is now conventional wisdom that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, coupled with China’s increasing assertiveness in the Pacific, signal the looming implosion of the American-led international order. Like most conventional wisdoms, this may prove to be incorrect. While many analysts will make pronouncements about the future of the world in 2015, [...]
An elderly man surrounded by campaign posters sits on a bench in front of his home in Floroaica village, Calarasi county, Romania. Nov. 11, 2014 (AP photo by Octav Ganea, Mediafax).
Romanians vote Sunday for a new president after a tumultuous 10 years under incumbent Traian Basescu, who oversaw both European Union accession and an economic boom followed by a crisis, and has survived two attempts at impeachment. Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who heads the ex-Communist Social Democratic Party (PSD), is widely expected to win the vote, but he has faced a closer race than anticipated against liberal rival Klaus Iohannis. Ponta has been a controversial premier, criticized by both the EU and the U.S. for measures seen as undermining independent institutions after he came to power via a parliamentary coup [...]
Border of the U.N. buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus, Oct. 1, 2008 (photo by Flickr user peatc licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license).
Greek Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos has announced that he will visit Turkey later this month. That comes after Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades suspended peace talks with northern Cyprus last month when Turkey declared plans to search for oil and gas off the southern coast of the island. The island of Cyprus has been divided since 1974 between the predominantly Greek Cypriot south and mainly Turkish north. Only Turkey recognizes the latter as an independent country. The United Nations has maintained a peacekeeping force in Cyprus since 1964, the longest-running U.N. peacekeeping operation in existence. There was optimism for a long-sought [...]
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