Gerald Robbins is a foreign affairs analyst and writer who contributed articles to The Weekly Standard between 2002 and 2009. His coverage focused on European politics and Central Asian affairs, with particular attention to Turkey, Germany, Italy, and the energy-rich states of the former Soviet Union. He brought regional expertise to topics ranging from Turkish political dynamics to Azerbaijani governance and Turkmen energy policy.
It's an eventful autumn in Germany. Besides Oktoberfest, there has been a general election and events commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demise. The Germans celebrate their national unity today, but do so amid a tenuous economic picture and societal unease.
Rare is the politician who cites Ali G to explain a touchy situation. Cem Ozdemir, co-chairperson of Germany's Green Party, was detained by security personnel upon his stateside arrival at Washington's Dulles International Airport recently. No official explanation has been given concerning…
Turin
Amsterdam
JUST TWO MONTHS ago, the name Gurbanguly Berdimukhamedov would have seemed a desperate attempt to win a Scrabble contest. He is now the president of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian republic renowned for it's largely untapped energy resources and human rights repression. The California-sized nation of…
TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS are plagued by conceptual differences, the role of American power perhaps foremost among them. Lately, though, the role Turkey might play in an expanded European Union has become a point of some contention. The American foreign policy community has long viewed Turkey from a…
TURKEY'S PRIME MINISTER Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to meet with President George Bush in Washington today. Among the topics that will be discussed are Iraq's political future. While the aim of this parley is to correct the recent dissonance in U.S.-Turkish relations, recent signals from…
A MAJOR DEVELOPMENT in post-Soviet affairs recently occurred when Heidar Aliyev, the ailing octogenarian leader of oil-rich Azerbaijan, ceded authority to his son Ilham. Although the dynastic aspect of this transition is less notorious than Saddam Hussein's clan or Syria's Assad family, it is…
UNDOUBTEDLY the Turkish parliament's rejection this weekend of basing U.S. troops on their soil was a blow to Washington's Iraq game plan. Contrary to pundit's predictions that Turkey would join the "coalition of the willing," the motion to allow a foreign presence fell short by three votes of an…
ANKARA
Studs Lonigan A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day by James T. Farrell Penguin, 912 pp., $20 JAMES FARRELL is not exactly forgotten. Last year, in its much-ballyhooed list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, the…