Hazem Saghieh

During the season of diatribes against the Camp David Accords and President Anwar Sadat, "separate peace" was the dominant catchword. Most of those making these accusations had not been aware that, under the leadership of Lenin, the Bolsheviks in Russia concluded the most consequential "separate…

When we are hit with the bitter truth that Iran has launched fivefold more strikes on the Gulf than it has on Israel, we go back decades searching for the roots of this behavior. The origins are probably found in the early days, 1979, and the trajectory is peaking this war season. From its…

Seeing an unfamiliar face, we sometimes tend to liken it to someone familiar and think to ourselves: “like father, like son” or “he clearly got that from his uncle”... The same happens with politicians we like or dislike: if someone admires an emerging politician, they could, depending on the…

I ask the reader to pardon me for recalling an image I had used years ago to characterize the relationship between Lebanon and Hezbollah: For decades, the Iranian and Assad Syrian regimes fed and stuffed a beast inside a small room, Lebanon. And the beast grew indeed, so much so that it hardly…

Many Lebanese are reaching for well-known historical episodes these days: the repeated partitions of Poland resulting from its position between Russia and Germany, for example, or Belgium's neutrality in the Second World War, which the Nazis disregarded in their sweeping assault on its democratic…

Rarely have things been like this; there are few instances in history where any party felt that confronting the entire world was a condition for its survival and victory. The strikes of Iran, with almost no interval between one strike and the next, have hit Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab…

Since Benjamin Netanyahu, after being shown a map of a so-called “Greater Israel” during a television interview last year, voiced his support and sentimental attachment to the “historical and spiritual concept,” we have seen a series of additional statements and events pointing in the same…

The “Al-Aqsa Flood” war, the “support war,” and the fall of the Syrian regime were not just seismic events of war; they were also a momentous ideological event that brought down the militant narratives that had reigned over the region for decades. The Sunni Islamist ideology, through Hamas, was…

In 2003, as the Iraq War was driving a wedge between Europeans and Americans, the American historian and commentator Robert Kagan published a book that sparked mass controversy. In “Of Paradise and Power,” Kegan elaborates his conservative view of global politics through the developments of the…

In large swaths of European political culture, and to Europhile American intellectuals, American affairs often seem incomprehensible, unacceptable, or irrational, as well as encapsulating a dose of violence that had been assumed obsolete. Among many other factors, lies an "aberrational" historical…