The pace of Moscow and Beijing’s involvement across the country picked up the more it looked like the U.S. might withdraw from the ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ (JCPOA, or colloquially ‘the nuclear deal’), which it eventually did in May 2018. Just before then, Russia had stepped into the chaos caused by Iraqi Kurdistan’s vote for independence in September 2017 to enable Rosneft effectively to take control of the northern region’s oil sector through means analysed in full in my latest book on the new ...