World News Insights: Opinion Articles

One question I get repeatedly these days: What is wrong with the Russian military? Many in the West had a mistaken belief that the Russian war machine was a rough match for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and they are surprised at how much trouble the massive force is having subduing a much…

The 2022 parliamentary elections are not a repeat of the 2018 elections or any other election. When discussing the collapse, destitution, starvation, and people being left to die at hospital gates, the cause of these tragedies- the parties to the alliance between the mafia and the militia that…

Billions of people around the world are watching helplessly as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerates into its third week, continuing to kill more innocent people every day, while destroying infrastructure throughout the country and forcing millions of refugees into neighboring European countries…

Last week, the US Congress failed to approve $15 billion needed to continue Covid-19 precautions, even though today’s low case counts are likely to rise, as they are in Europe, with the sub-variant called BA.2. We’ve learned that some expensive mitigation measures, such as deep cleaning, are a…

You can’t buck the market, the late UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said. In a different context, US heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson observed that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Both were expressing variations of the same principle. Faced with an unopposable…

If war is tragic, it is also an opportunity for change. That is why the history of wars, especially European wars- from the Napoleonic ones to World War Two- is seen as a history of transitions from one world to another, one set of social, cultural, and artistic norms to another. Only in despotic,…

The Syrian conflict marked its eleventh anniversary on Tuesday. Putting aside the enormous suffering endured by the Syrian people, what is also striking is that international efforts to achieve a settlement have lost steam over the past few years. A few weeks ago, I had settled on the theme of…

The world's leading climate scientists have issued six assessments of the state of climate-change knowledge since 1990. The first five were influential, driving efforts to build global climate agreements. The sixth report, issued four days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has been largely…

At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable. A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and…

It’s March. Major Chinese cities are in lockdown, manufacturing is idled, shares are plummeting, and the supply chain is scrambling to make sense of it all. It is a disturbing kind of deja vu. Today’s Covid-19 surge in China appears to mirror the Wuhan outbreak that paralyzed the world in 2020…

“Democracies are rising to the moment,” US President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address, as Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his vicious war on Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama leads a band of commentators claiming that the “spirit of 1989” is back and we are about to witness…

I will have the privilege of spending today, Tuesday, March 15, with members of the Syrian community in Manchester, UK. We will be celebrating the talent and creativity of Syrian artists in the UK and Syria’s fantastically rich culture and heritage, so overshadowed in the last decade by the war and…