World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The premise suggests that in its war against Iran, the United States is trying to entangle Gulf states alongside it, only to later abandon them. The question is: Could President Donald Trump walk away from the war with Iran, leave the region, and abandon Gulf countries to face Tehran on their own? …

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…

Despite the alarm stirred by Goldman Sachs's recent forecast of a regional recession this year, state revenue may be a more useful benchmark than GDP for assessing the impact of the US-Israeli war on Iran on Saudi Arabia's economy and the Gulf states more broadly. Indeed, the primary driver of…

Despite the anger of the MAGA base, President Donald Trump has not acquiesced to their demands. Despite the repeated claim that Trump does nothing without the approval of his base, he has shown that he does not always comply with the wishes of this powerful constituency. He showed in Gaza,…

The war between Iran and Israel, and behind it the United States, is another armed conflict in the Middle East. At its core, this crisis reflects a series of straits the region is traversing: straits of geography, the straits of ideology, and the straits of international law. If the Strait of…

Merchants of rumors and conspiracy theorists, much like merchants of war, feed off people’s fears and anxieties. With the first shot fired in the conflict, a wave of theories emerged. The most prominent being that the war is nothing more than a US strategic plan against China, aimed at…

Last week, my esteemed colleague Hiba Nasr and Asharq News correspondent in Washington, wrote a post that reflected palpable anguish, on her account on "X,” about the receding shadow of the Lebanese state in her village in southern Lebanon after the army's withdrawal in the face of a new Israeli…

Date: January 9, 1991 Location: The Intercontinental Hotel, Geneva The world fixed its eyes on the venue. Journalists landed from near and far. The Security Council resolution was unambiguous, demanding Iraq's immediate and complete withdrawal from Kuwait, which it had overrun. The deadline…

For its first retaliation to the American–Israeli attack of February 28, Iran struck several Arab capitals with ballistic missiles, and Tehran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to maritime navigation, leading to a highly predictable spike in oil prices. When President Donald Trump…

The bangs of Israeli airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburb interrupted an evening discussion about the future of our country after the war. Even so, the barrage of updates about strikes in the south, and the mass evacuation orders that have nearly emptied out the region south of the Litani River,…

“He is injured but alive!” That is the message that Islamic Republic authorities passed on about the newly anointed “Supreme Guide” Mojtaba Khamenei who survived an Israeli air attack that claimed the lives of his parents and his wife at the start of the current war. Speculation about Mojtaba…

Talk of restoring the shah’s monarchy has surged since the start of the current war, more than at any time since the fall of the Pahlavi regime in the late 1970s. Support for the return of Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s son, has been estimated at around one third of Iranians, though such figures are…