The shocks from COVID-19 likely to affect energy and the climate are multiple and unprecedented in scale and scope.

Shocks from collapsing prices due to plummeting and then paralyzed demand combined with overproduction: this is the case for oil, but also to a lesser extent for electricity and gas. Other raw materials are also being affected.

Shocks to investments, because oil as well as electricity companies are experiencing dramatic falls in earnings while waiting for the peak of the pandemic to pass. They are cutting spending and revising or postponing projects. Jobs and smaller company survival are under threat.

While the coronavirus health crisis is currently intensifying in Europe, it does not seem to be affecting France and Germany at the same pace or with the same intensity. The crisis is putting both countries' respective hospital systems to the test in different ways.  France and Germany's economies are being mobilized, and social cohesion is enhanced. The crisis also impacting Franco-German and European solidarity.  

Turkey has undergone significant transformations since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, as illustrated by the notable growth of its airline industry. Turkish Airlines (THY) is the main company based in the country, and has dramatically extended its network of destinations in the past 15 years. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare a series of troublesome truths, both about healthcare infrastructures in Western nations and the state of their democracies.

The quarantine they prescribed, albeit after periods of irresoluteness, drew embarrassing parallels to measures taken by China just a few weeks earlier. Social life has come to a near standstill without citizens being given a chance to deliberate, as procedures were discussed for the most part in closed-door meetings between the executive branch and appointed experts: the White House Coronavirus Task Force in the United States, the Scientific Council of France, etc. The general public has been hardly more involved in the West than in China.

In contrast, South Korea has thus far been the only significantly affected country to contain the spread of Covid-19 without shutting itself down or compromising even temporarily democratic institutions.

It is not easy to step back and gain perspective on a battle that is raging on the home front for all of us and has not yet reached its peak. However, I do want to share some of my thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic, especially its context.

Northeast Asia has emerged as a critical theater of Russian foreign policy in recent years.

Moscow’s historical Westerncentrism is giving way to a new awareness about the vital importance of the region. The “turn to the East” now has genuine substance and impetus. Yet Russian policy is a work in progress, more opportunistic than strategic. The security landscape is complex and fluid, and Moscow has struggled to manage its contradictions.

Waste-to-energy plants appear as an effective means of dealing with two problems of electricity access and waste management at once.

If Iran is a key player in the Middle East, it is in no small part because of its extensive network of armed militia, which it uses as proxies.