World News Insights: Opinion Articles

On the eve of the Iranian–American war, US relations with its European allies had not been at their best; tensions were rising, marked by confusion and confrontation, especially after US President Donald Trump decided he wanted to seize Greenland. The war against Iran has only deepened the rift…

Some intellectuals and commentators argue that while the Iranian regime is waging a war against the Gulf states, it is not necessarily an enemy of the Arab world. They claim that Gulf states seek to drag other Arab states into needless hostilities with Iran. In reality, however, Tehran is more of…

Those taking part in war bear the pain during military operations, as their full attention is devoted to winning it. Once it winds down- whether due to exhaustion and fatigue, the despair of one side fully crushing the other, or a compromise settlement over demands and objectives - do combatants…

It would be fair to say that Israel’s current government is the most extreme since the country’s founding in 1948; I believe that this is indeed the case, though I was not a witness to the founding event itself. Since that time, like many others, I have had the opportunity to read about Jewish…

Amid the uncertainty surrounding the war in Iran, it is premature to speak of “the day after.” At this stage, it is more useful to draw lessons from six weeks of fighting and to assess the possible implications for the region’s future. The war has confirmed what many observers already believed:…

This was years ago. Commander of the Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was frank and adamant. He told his visitors that the “American troops had no choice but to leave Iraq. Baghdad was on fire under their boots, just like a carpet made of fire. Their withdrawal will damage their image and…

When we are hit with the bitter truth that Iran has launched fivefold more strikes on the Gulf than it has on Israel, we go back decades searching for the roots of this behavior. The origins are probably found in the early days, 1979, and the trajectory is peaking this war season. From its…

For three days now, Artemis II has been on its flight around the Moon, signaling the return of crewed missions to that enchanting orbit, fifty years after the first astonishment. Half a century on, humanity is still circling restlessly among the planets, searching for a drop of water on Mars or a…

An Iranian official said that “we have prepared a vast arsenal of weapons, missiles, and drones for this promised day.” When Iran came under Israeli-US attack on February 28, we assumed that arsenal would be directed at the enemy that struck it. That, after all, is what this “promised day” was…

This war was not meant to last. That is how its parties entered it, each confident that its tools could deliver a swift outcome. What began as a limited confrontation with a defined timeframe has instead become an open-ended war, exceeding all expectations and draining the capacities of those…

On October 28, 2023, in the early days of the Gaza war, also known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, I published an analytic piece in this newspaper that sought to go beyond the immediate event and anticipate not the limited confrontation but possible trajectories that it could precipitate. At the time…

It is natural, in times of major crises like the current moment, for new ideas to emerge, or for old ones to be revived. The most prominent proposal we are now seeing is the call to establish an Arab national security force. The best thing promoters of this idea can do, however, is to stop…