World News Insights: Opinion Articles

As some Lebanese were busy publicly outbidding one another: There are two million Syrians in Lebanon, even three million, and in some popular talk, there are four... We saw the emergence of figures that aroused envy put forward by some Turks: There are ten million Syrians in Türkiye, Erdogan’s…

While a bipartisan majority of the American public believes Russia’s war in Ukraine is unjustified, support for providing Ukraine with weapons has dropped over the past 12 months, according to a new poll released this week by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and NORC at the…

The Turkish electorate has made its decision, and President Erdogan received 52.14% of the vote. He will begin his third term, which will leave him in office until 2028 and will be his last, as the country’s constitution does not allow for a fourth term. In discussing these elections, we cannot…

The Jeddah Declaration issued after the 32nd Arab League Summit last week coincided with the 23rd anniversary of Lebanon’s liberation from Israeli occupation on May 25th. In Articles Five and Six of its statement, the Declaration stressed the Arab League’s solidarity with Lebanon, urging all…

The leader of al-Mokhtara has endured tumults over the decades. I recalled the day when Walid Jumblatt recounted to me the developments that happened on that long and painful day in March 1977. He was still in his twenties - a time when youths dream of freedom and living their life to the…

In the fall of 2010, when the columnist Christopher Hitchens was dying of cancer and publicly chronicling the process, he said he wished that he could stick around long enough to write Henry Kissinger’s obituary, telling NPR, “It does gash me to think that people like that would outlive me, I have…

The world has faced massive crises in the last few years, starting with the Corona pandemic, which the World Health Organization declared weeks ago no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, to the ongoing war in Ukraine. This caused major disruptions in supply chains…

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…