Ghassan Charbel

How harsh democracy can be; it pledges the destiny of the most powerful man in the most powerful country in the world to the will of the voters. One voter wants to punish the president for the rise in fuel prices, another for the threat to healthcare, and a third for his intolerance toward…

They go to the ballot boxes tomorrow. A harsh ambush at a dangerous turn. It is the opportunity for the disappointed and the resentful. They have sharpened their knives. The lust for revenge gleams in their eyes. Daggers peek out from beneath their leaders' smiles. The scent of vengeance, both old…

The position announced by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi regarding the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia constitutes a remarkable development in the current crisis, which transcends Yemen's borders to form a regional crisis that has lived for decades on the embers of successive Iranian coups. There is…

The horrific crime committed against travelers at Riyadh Airport requires little investigation or scrutiny. There is no need to collect fingerprints. The perpetrator had already threatened to carry it out. Such an act is hardly out of character, given its rhetoric, methods and history. It is, after…

The Houthis surged toward Bab al-Mandab after bleeding Yemen, exhausting Yemenis, and unsettling the neighborhood. More than one opportunity for reconciliation within the embrace of the state was offered to them, but they insisted on residing atop the rubble of its institutions, placing their…

The harshest punishment is for the world to forget you or to view you as a patient with no hope of recovery. This is compounded by your lack of leverage. You have no straits to threaten with closure, nor a nuclear program to brandish by raising its enrichment levels. Amid the world's…

Sessions of the United Nations General Assembly have lost much of their glow, and much of the hope once invested in them. Leaders go to renew their wager on an awakening of international legitimacy, however late. Before that, they go to address their own peoples from this international balcony- and…

An observer might get the impression that the memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Iran was closer to a memorandum of misunderstanding. The US wanted more from the war than what the memorandum provides, while Iran wanted something completely different. Donald Trump stresses that the war…

War in the field is vastly different from war on paper. Brilliance in planning does not grant immunity from surprises. Experience dictates that while a ruler knows when he goes to war, he does not know when he will return from it. The return is determined by the condition of the enemy or adversary,…

Is it true that, after six months of confrontation, the region remains trapped in a situation of near-defeat and near-victory, where near-defeat is not enough to force one to swallow the bitter pill of submission, and near-victory is insufficient to impose a surrender? Is it also true that Trump…