George Friedman, the founder and Chief Executive (CEO) of STRATFOR, the internationally recognized center on world affairs, made a wide ranging presentation to the students and faculty of the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy on June 11, 2010.  What follows is a selection of his comments ...

It is a fundamental proposition of world politics that countries do not have permanent friends but only permanent interests, but it is an equally powerful reality that in an age of mass politics, the expectation of friendship as the basis of relations between countries—if not in fact friendship itself—has profound consequences for the ways in which countries conduct relations with each other.  And the tensions between the two have been very much on display in Azerbaijani-American relations during the last month. The widely reported comments in Baku by an unidentified American of...

Turkey is changing not only domestically but in its foreign policy orientation, increasingly shifting from a Western-centric approach to one that is more multi-vectored and balanced as can be seen in the accords Ankara has reached with Asian and Middle Eastern countries over the last several months.  But despite the apparent suddenness of this shift, it in fact has deep roots extending back more than 40 years and has gone through a series of stages. Turkey began to move away from its Western-centric policy after US President Lyndon Johnson wrote to Turkish Prime Minister Ismet Inonu...