If our relations with China have taught us one thing, it is that politics is politics and business is business. Lowy Institute fellow Dr Rodger Shanahan reports at The Interpreter.
Kofi Annan has thrown in the towel on Syria, recognising his "peace plan" is a dead letter. In our devotion to peaceful outcomes we lose sight of the fact that sometimes there is only fighting.
Recent developments in the increasingly fragile Iraqi and Syrian states have ignited hopes for a Kurdish homeland, writes Jack Davies, an Australian freelance journalist based in Turkey.
The threat of a war with Israel coincides with a failure by Syrian rebels to make serious gains on the ground. Australian journalist Antoun Issa reports from Beirut.
After 115 died in bombings this week, the view that the Iraqi government is inept and dysfunctional appears to be shared by the majority of Iraqis, writes Donna Mulhearn, an Australian advocacy journalist in Iraq.
For decades throughout the 20th century, the idea of famine had two dominant uses in the West.
Damascus is now fully embroiled in the civil war, with open fighting across the sprawling neighbourhoods of the Syrian capital, writes Dr Benjamin MacQueen. And there's no sign of an improvement.
Democracy in the Middle East continues to be something of a hard slog. But Libya this week looks like a good news story.
Russia's infamous weapons expo, aka the 'Forum of Technologies', is a one stop munitions shop for world dictators. One of its best customers is Syria, and there's nothing the Western world can do to stop them from buying big, writes Simon Shuster.
Egypt, the established leader of the Arab world, celebrated its first democratic election of a president this week, writes Charles Richardson.
