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Thu
Nov
14

GlobalFocus Center, partner for 2019 #NATOEngages conference

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Rounding off NATO’s 70th anniversary year, heads of governments will convene in London on December 4, 2019 to examine how the Euro-Atlantic Alliance adapts and maintains security for its Allies in a rapidly changing world.

GlobalFocus Center partnered with the Atlantic Council, GLOBSEC, King’s College London, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) London and the Munich Security Conference for this year’s #NATOEngages, a special “Town Hall” event on December 3, the eve of the summit. The debates will set the scene and facilitate a broader conversation by bringing together policymakers and officials with other institutions such as think tanks and universities, as well as the public.

Sun
Aug
25

Iran would not lose a war. Everyone would

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By Alec Bălășescu | Hong Kong

When Iran claimed to have downed a US drone for the first time in 2012, an Iranian friend gifted me a new toy bought in Tehran: a plastic, low quality model of the said drone, bearing on its box the inscription in Farsi and in English: “We will crush Amrican (sic!) hegemony!” My friend commented that if they were to use the same technology that produced the toy, the chances of success would be minimal.

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Tue
Aug
20

Israel’s complicated relationship with Europe: between Japheth and Esau

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By Owen Alterman | Tel Aviv

May 2019 featured three major European events. One didn’t even take place in Europe. The first happened on May 9, Europe Day, when European leaders gathered for their summit in Sibiu, Romania. The second: the set of European Parliament elections across the 28 European Union member states. And the third major European event of May 2019 was the Eurovision song contest, which took place not in a quaint Transylvanian mountain town or across the villages and downtowns of the Continent or British Isles, but in a convention center on the edge of Tel Aviv, Israel. In the city’s beachside park, some 500,000 people packed the largest Eurovision village in the history of the competition.

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Tue
Aug
20

The ambivalence of the Zelensky presidency

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By Andreas Umland | Kiev

Many political experts both in and outside Ukraine have reacted negatively or very negatively to the meteoric political rise of Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Indeed, Zelensky’s presidency could prove problematic in various ways. His 2019-2024 term as Ukraine’s head of state may prove to be an even more ambivalent enterprise than those of the other two top contenders in this year’s presidential elections, the opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko and the former president Petro Poroshenko, would have been. Still, for all the apt scepticism, there is also – as in the case of certain positive aspects of Tymoshenko’s and Poroshenko’s unsuccessful bids for president – a bright side to Zelensky’s victory. One can identify at least three major risky or negative, but also three relatively encouraging dimensions of his rule.

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Tue
Aug
20

Ze! Ukraine’s foreign and security policy

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By Mykola Kapitonenko | Kiev

In the pre-election rhetoric used by all the front-runners in Ukraine’s presidential campaign, issues of national security and foreign policy ranked high. The conflict – referred to by many as ‘war’ – with Russia, the question of annexed Crimea, aspirations for NATO and EU membership, became topics of specific concern and points for emotional political discussions. The overwhelming majority of presidential candidates – there were 39 on the list in total – highlighted the restoration of the country’s territorial integrity and moving closer to EU and NATO membership as their foreign and national security policy priorities. 

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