World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Today, the citizens of Türkiye will vote in the second round of the presidential election. Incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the strong favorite, meaning that the region has to deal with a third decade of Erdogan, who is now 69 years old. Now, the question is which Erdogan will we…

Those who see “the Enlightenment” as the stringent and dry dictatorship of reason should read David Hume (1711-1776). The Scottish philosopher, alongside his friend Adam Smith, is the largest fruit of the “Scottish Enlightenment,” the roots of which go back to the sixteenth century. That is when,…

On coming Sunday Turkish voters go to the polls to elect their president while a special task force works on ceremonies to mark the centenary of the establishment of the Turkish Republic on 29 October 1923. But what would the man who founded the republic think of Türkiye today? The man in…

“We’re like a bunch of blind bats. We human beings are, we millennials are, we Americans are,” Vivek Ramaswamy riffed. “We can’t see where we are.” Bats send sonar signals, which bounce off objects and allow the mammals to navigate. “So we do that, we send out our signals, and it bounces off…

In 1995, a book of mine entitled “The Generals of the Middle East” was released (by Dar Al Saqi) in London. The conclusion I come to in its 58-page introduction, in which I try to define the “Middle East,” is that every empire saw the region geographically. Paris and London dubbed it the “Near East…

Stories of Syria using Captagon as a bargaining chip to secure funds for reconstruction and regain its seat in the Arab League have been making the rounds ever since the country’s return to the Arab fold was announced. Normally, such false stories dissipate just as quickly as they emerged. How…

Some Western intellectuals have voiced their frustration with certain ideas about artificial intelligence and robots as a threat that could “invade our territory, displace us from our homes, consume our resources, and even marry our women.” Such fantastical notions were initially spread by science…

Mohammed al-Hammadi Emirati journalist The style and manner of the 32nd Arab Summit were those of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. With its emphasis on work and achievement, it became successful. Everyone who attended or watched the Jeddah Summit recognized that there was something very…

By Niki Kitsantonis The party of Greece’s conservative prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was on track to win a decisive victory in the general election on Sunday but fell short of the majority required to lead a one-party government, setting the stage for another ballot within weeks since Mr…

By Alexandra Glorioso and Nicholas Nehamas As a 44-year-old, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida might be an unlikely candidate to wrest his party’s older voters away from Donald J. Trump, a 76-year-old baby boomer. But he is trying anyway. As Mr. DeSantis closes in on the official rollout of a…

In the many recent discussions I’ve had with journalist friends from Europe and the US, or even some from the Arab world who have not visited Saudi Arabia before, our conversations have centered around understanding the secret of Saudi Arabia’s rise. These discussions were especially focused on the…

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio I know all too well how some Americans feel about immigrants: I was undocumented for 25 years, and I am a child of immigrants who remain undocumented. I also wrote a book about the daily lives of migrants during the Trump years. At the time, the Trump…