Hazem Saghieh

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…

Many things have changed in Iran over its modern history, but one thing has not changed: its imperial consciousness and inclination. The country’s name changed in 1935, and what had been “Persia” became “Iran,” and it then became an “Islamic Republic” in 1979. Throughout, the balance of the state…

Traditionally, the strongest response to those who argue that resistance represents a bulwark against “Israel’s ambitions” was that diplomacy and friendships would protect Lebanon from such “ambitions” and also from similar challenges. During the brief civil war of 1958, for example, arms that the …

It is a sign of the times that the word “revolution” now refers to something different from what it once did. The term does not, in this brief column, imply any prior value judgment, be it negative or positive, nor does it carry any of the connotations that various ideologies have assigned to it. …

It seems all but certain that the Levant, and Iran, are turning the page on the defiance era. As well as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime, the regime in Tehran is itself on the precipice of a decisive phase that threatens its survival, while Iraq finds itself compelled to reconsider its…

Two voices have been rumbled globally since the Venezuelan event: one questions the need for international law as such, with the negative answer implied in the question, and the other loudly decries its absence with feigned innocence. The law is a process of contention and a framework assessed…

While it goes without saying that political phenomena are linked to domestic factors in the countries and regions where they emerge, it is also true that external shared and reciprocal factors also help explain those phenomena and their dynamics. The fact is that the kidnapping of Venezuelan…

Borrowing the opening lines of Marx and Engels' famous “Communist Manifesto,” we could say that the specter of rethinking the state is haunting the Arab region. The number of states whose unity is being contested continues to rise. The regional context within which each of these movements is…

Until the 1970s, a proclivity for one-size-fits-all solutions to the region's problems had shaped Arab political thought, particularly in the Levant. "Unity,liberation," and, occasionally, socialism initiated by a "national democratic regime," were presented as the pathway for realizing the…

One can confidently say this that year was the autumn of illegal arms. The trade in illusions and lies of the hollow “resistance” of Hezbollah was exposed. Non-state actors’ failures have shown that they neither deter nor protect. Their arms could not even protect the men who carry them, let alone…