World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Much has been said and written since the signing of the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, thanks to Chinese “mediation and sponsorship,” as Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan put it in his interview with Asharq Al-Awsat on Monday. Given the distortions of propaganda, these…

Imagine sitting in President Joe Biden’s Oval Office, immersed in the debate surrounding the Beijing deal. Everyone present concurs that this is the first time China has taken the bold step of intervening in the Middle East and attempting to resolve the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and…

No discussion today prevails over the Chinese mediation and the Saudi-Iranian dialogue. There are many approaches, as well as many outstanding questions and debates about the move, even in Western discourses. As I am currently attending a conference in Berlin, I am repeatedly asked about what is…

In the responses to a recent death-of-the-humanities dirge, a long reported piece by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker on the decline of the English major, you could see an illustration of its thesis: The story’s most depressing anecdotes were plucked out and swapped around on social media by people…

A question: “Why are the Saudis succeeding as many around them fail?” It seems a simple question, but the answer is extremely complex and cannot be summed up in a newspaper column. First of all, you might end up disappointed if you think that this article is flattering, as politics is a science…

In an Arab city, a hotel employee told me: “I am waiting to leave to Sweden. This is the only solution. I will not marry here, nor will I have children. I will not repeat my parents’ mistake.” His words, weighed down by despair, seized me. What opportunities can Lebanon provide for a child…

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that to live in a time of great peril and promise is to experience both tragedy and comedy, with “the imminence of a revelation” in understanding ourselves and the world. Today our supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for…

If you’re wondering why Silicon Valley Bank, one of the biggest lenders to tech start-ups, had to be taken over Friday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one good place to look is the Federal Reserve. The Fed has raised interest rates extremely rapidly over the past year to squelch…

Watching a North Korean military parade, one is amazed by the blend of precision, alignment, consistency, and symmetry in the movements of bodies and faces, which is part of a bigger scenic painting that depicts a public square that is no less impressive, the audience clapping at the same moment as…

Saudi Arabia and Iran announced the re-establishment of diplomatic ties through a Chinese initiative. This is not the first time that relations between them have been re-established; they had been severed for the first in April 1988 before being severed again in January 2016, due to the Iranian…

I recently took part in a forum that discussed the strained Saudi-US relations. In the event, organized in AlUla by a think tank, American and Saudi figures discussed in a rather frank atmosphere several diplomatic, military, economic, technological, and cultural aspects of bilateral ties. I…

It reads like science fiction. In 93 pages, the text sketches out a strange future. In 2027, there’s a new pandemic, caused by the “Xvirus.” A year later, war breaks out between the United States and both China and Russia over bauxite deposits in Guyana. By the year 2035, Brazilians openly admit…