World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The thing that has surprised me most since I began my job leading foreign assistance for global health at the US Agency for International Development is how much emergencies have defined my work. The bureau I oversee focuses on reducing the global burden of mortality and disease and on protecting…

Only one bullet remains in the gun. There can be no escaping the final shot. The farewell better be fitting. It must be as hopeful and joyful as possible. You are not a businessman, whose notes you can rummage through in search of a lost opportunity or wasted deal. You are not a politician,…

People have connected over food and used meals for political ends for centuries. There are good reasons for this. Historically, the dining table has been considered a neutral space where weapons are put aside, frank conversations held, consensus built and agreements brokered. Egyptian…

In politics, preferring intentions over outcomes, and action - any kind of action - over thinking, and choosing the noisy and tumultuous over the calm or measured, are among the defining characteristics of a romantic mindset. We thus see, for instance, that the call for establishing a …

Israel’s escalating attacks on Syrian territory are not an extension of its consistent attacks, rather, they are part of the Israelis’ preparations for a new war on Lebanon, which could either be launched during its war on Gaza or immediately afterward. The name of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard…

Tehran's retaliation for the assassination of its senior “military advisor” in Syria, Quds Force Brigadier General Razi Mousavi, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike near Damascus, will probably not be any more forceful than its retaliation for the assassination of the former Quds Force Commander…

If there is a pendulum that regulates world affairs it is important to know which way it may be swinging in the year that is about to start. Seen from one angle, the pendulum looks like swinging towards uncertainty. In 2024, many countries with major roles in international affairs are facing…

Richard Flacks remembers the challenges of building a protest movement during the Vietnam War as a pillar of the left-wing political and antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s. “The whole idea of S.D.S. began with the idea of, ‘We need a new way of being on the left,…

The theory of an absolute "anti" that corresponds to an absolute "pro" is based on a way of seeing things that sums up the problems of the universe by attributing them to a single cause. However, this theory, which is founded on the view that one side is totally innocent and the other is totally…

The foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan declared that the “security of marine navigation in the Red Sea is indivisible from the national security of the two countries.” The truth is it is indivisible from the security of the entire region and international marine navigation and therefore, the…

As a teenager in the 1980s, I watched the construction of the intricately designed Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza City, named after one of Gaza’s greatest public figures, and its theater, grand hall, public library, printing press and cultural salon. Students and researchers, scholars…

There resides, in this war on Gaza, a far higher dose of magic than we are used to seeing in wars. Magic, here, refers to the attempt to convince us of things that our conscience and reason could never allow us to accept. It is, in this sense, not like “lying” that falsifies a piece of information…