World News Insights: Opinion Articles

A series of US, British, and European sanctions against Iran were imposed last Monday. These sanctions targeted individuals and entities, including the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the “Basij” militia, and its deputy commander. Despite all of that, we saw…

When the Spanish Civil War of 1936 broke out, the Hungarian communist Arthur Koestler, who had been a member of the German Communist Party since 1931, headed to where the war was being fought. His objective was spying for Moscow under the guise of a journalist, and there, he was arrested and had …

Militias are enemies of the Libyan people. We will see the day when they are gotten rid of and each and every one of their members is held accountable. Tripoli, the bride of the Mediterranean, which has always been praised by poets and adored by its visitors, set a precedent with its civilized…

Is the door completely shut to the possibility of reaching regional and international understandings with Iran that would help tame the mullah regime? One of the latest blows received by those who have an optimistic view on the negotiations with Iran came through the European Parliament’s…

Türkiye’s sharp shift in its Syria policy has become the centerpiece of the recent diplomatic traffic regarding Syria. On December 28, the ministers of defense of Russia, Syria and Türkiye met in Moscow for the first time in 12 years. Afterwards, the highest-level Turkish officials laid down a…

In recent weeks, considerable speculation has focused on whether Türkiye might be on the verge of a game-changing re-engagement and normalization with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. The summit held in Moscow on December 28, which convened the Syrian and Turkish military and intelligence…

In 1955, Beirut witnessed a debate between “the dean of Arabic literature,” Taha Hussein, and the leftist Lebanese writer Raif Khoury. The debate title was “For whom does the writer write: the elite or the people?” It had been assumed that Taha Hussein would defend the argument for “writing for the…

The West is a massive and provocative force, with its history, progress, prosperity and stability and attempts at imposing its model on others. It can also add technological superiority to its fleet and arsenal. Animosity to the West and its hegemony is nothing new. Depleting the West has long…

At a guest lecture at a military academy when the price of a single Bitcoin neared $60,000, I was asked, as finance professors often are, what I thought about cryptocurrencies. Rather than respond with my usual skepticism, I polled the students. More than half of attendees had traded…

Hassan Nasrallah came out with a televised address in which he tried to incite his followers and Lebanese people against Saudi Arabia by saying Riyadh could pay a sum of money to help Lebanon out of its crisis, the same way it spends on the Saudi national football league or bring in players like…

The Future Minerals Forum, recently held in Riyadh, carries important connotations in a capital that usually hosts energy conferences, as the largest oil exporting country in the world. In addition to being another proof of the seriousness in implementing policies to diversify the economy, this…

The interconnectedness of Libya and Tunisia did not emerge recently. Their link is historical, and Libya’s instability is thus impacted by the economic - and even the political - conditions of Tunisia. They share a 460 km-long border, which is significant for mobility and economic exchange between…