World News Insights: Opinion Articles

“We will meet in the great state of Alaska,” President Donald Trump announced, choosing his words carefully. The connotation was hardly lost on Vladimir Putin, who seems to have gotten into his head the idea of reclaiming a territory that had belonged to Russia until it was sold to the United…

Spain is having a moment bucking Western political trends. The country has recently recognized Palestine as a state, resisted President Trump’s demand that NATO members increase their defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product and doubled down on D.E.I. programs. But there’s no better…

The fate of Hezbollah’s arms is no longer a domestic dispute between advocates of sovereignty and supporters of the “resistance.” Since the 2023–2024 war with Israel, this question has been distilling into an existential crisis facing the party. The slogan raised by the leader of Hezbollah’s…

Lebanon’s conundrum has entered a new phase after Hezbollah rebuffed the major political strides of the government, most notably its reaffirmation of the principle that arms must remain monopolized by state and its subsequent endorsement of the proposal that US Presidential Envoy Tom Barrack had…

President Joseph Aoun’s unprecedentedly clear and candid speech, explicitly labeled Hezbollah’s arms unauthorized by the state, was a long-awaited turning point in the complex relationship between the Lebanese state and the party. Nonetheless, this clarity was not translated into unequivocal…

The High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, co-chaired by Saudi Arabia and France, which was held over three days in New York, is among the most consequential international political initiatives…

Can a map, no matter how large, contain two armies, two authorities and two “states”? Is obligatory coexistence just a form of truce until one army succeeds in defeating the other? Is a clash inevitable between the two armies, two authorities and two “states” because the factions are impeding…

The Lebanese government's announcement that "Hafez al-Assad Avenue" will now be renamed "Ziad Rahbani Avenue" was not just the replacement of a street’s name with another; it was the replacement of one conception of the world with another. That is probably why the decision drew so much controversy…

The recent cabinet sessions of the Lebanese government were anything but easy; they were a turning point that redefined the domestic balance of power and resolved momentous questions that had not been debated since the end of the civil war. That is why Thomas Barrack’s intervention was at the heart…

Even long after Deng Xiaoping had led China out of the Marxist impasse created by Mao Zedong, official discourse was always centered on the letter P for Proletariat. The leadership emphasized its legitimacy with reference to the working class that is to say producer in supply side economics. From…

Three developments from this past week shed light on the predicament that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) find themselves in. First, Colombian mercenaries were brought in to fight alongside the RSF in Darfur, as we learned from the video found on the phone of an RSF soldier killed during a…

War, both as a concept and a tangible phenomenon, raises several contradictions. The most prominent of them is that it is a human act, in the sense that it is waged by human beings, but is also an inhumane act often mistakenly attributed to monsters. This human intellect has, since the times…