Hazem Saghieh

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…

Since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal sent shockwaves around the world, many Western critics have warned that something has gone profoundly wrong, and that capitalism, in its contemporary form, bears much of the blame for the deterioration of politics, values, and morality. Accordingly, some outlets…

In times of transition, when everything is in flux as uncertainty and apprehension prevail, bewildering the mind and rendering it incapable of processing the strange and uncanny hotchpotches popping up everywhere, superstition and fraud become widespread, with an exponential rise in the number of…

In addressing the question of Iran and how to deal with it, Some believe that two major historical events should guide the actions of the present conduct. The first is the coup that overthrew Mossadegh’s government in 1953. At the time, Britain’s ire with nationalization of Iran’s oil fields…