Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East. The first nugget... Read More

There was a whiff of Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' at the 20th Valdai annual meeting this week at a hotel over the gorgeous heights of the Krasnaya Polyana. north-west of the picturesque resort Sochi. But instead of a deep dive into the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community in the Swiss... Read More

The geopolitical chessboard is in perpetual shift – and never more than in our current incandescent juncture. A fascinating consensus in discussions among Chinese scholars – including those part of the Asian and American diasporas – is that not only Germany/EU lost Russia, perhaps irretrievably, but China gained Russia, with an economy highly complementary to... Read More

It was a photo op for the ages: a visibly well-disposed President Xi Jinping receiving centenarian "old friend of China" Henry Kissinger in Beijing. Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971, preparing Nixon’s... Read More

Tank warfare has evolved. The large force-on-force armored battles that were the hallmark of much of WWII, the Arab-Israeli conflicts, which served as the foundation of operational doctrine for both NATO and the Soviet Union (and which was implemented in full by the United States during Operation Desert Storm in 1991), has run its course.... Read More

NATO has raised the stakes by flooding Ukraine with heavy weaponry and trying to prolong the conflict, says Scott Ritter, a military analyst and former US Marine intelligence officer. Sputnik: In a recent interviews with Sputnik you said that if Russia is "able to achieve some sort of demonstrable battlefield victory of such a large... Read More

With the situation in eastern Ukraine deteriorating each day, the West keeps on promoting its "Russian threat" rhetoric and pledges "never-before-seen" sanctions on Russia should it invade Ukraine. Meanwhile, Kiev keeps violating the Minsk accord and continues to shell Donbass, forcing thousands of people to flee to Russia. Nick Griffin, political analyst and former Member... Read More