World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The latest haggling over ending the war in Ukraine appears to be focused on three elements two of which could be labelled “promissory” and one “instant delivery." The instant delivery bit concerns an agreement to let Russia keep the chunk of Donbas it has conquered. That is what US President…

The trajectories of every country that underwent what came to be known as the “Arab Spring,” deviated radically from initial aspirations. In most cases, the result was the nightmare of war and fragmentation, from Syria to Yemen, Libya and finally Sudan. Sudan joined late but did not escape this…

Every now and then, we find, despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, someone getting up to deride Lebanon’s “sectarian system” and hold it responsible for the condition of the devastated country. The “sectarian system” is not something one can defend, nor can it be absolved…

It’s a perilous moment for creative life in America. While supporting oneself as an artist has never been easy, the power of generative A.I. is pushing creative workers to confront an uncomfortable question: Is there a place for paid creative work within late capitalism? And what will happen to our…

Among contemporary European writers, the novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In his oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on…

The narrative proclaiming the end of terrorism and the decline of fundamentalism has not abated despite the recent series of events that demonstrate the opposite. The bloody Sydney incident has proven that terrorism remains deeply rooted and effective. It was not surprising that ISIS attacked a…

Why were the forces of the “Axis of Resistance” defeated in the war triggered by the October 7, 2023, operation? Why have the regimes of the Arab Levant, along with their societies, been dragged, as a result of this defeat, into a second defeat that could prove even more bitter and cruel? Why has…

What does it feel like to constantly wake up to news that makes you feel like you belong to a bygone era, and that the principles you had lived by and believed in for decades have become obsolete? Millions, tens of millions, of us have realized that it had been a mirage. The ideals ingrained into…

Wars are no longer confined to their battlegrounds. Social media has granted them the opportunity to infiltrate far-off places. It’s enough for a person to look at their phone to learn about a massacre taking place thousands of kilometers away. The world can no longer claim ignorance over…

The collapse of the Assad regime raised many questions on the Arab world and beyond. Conspiracy theories have been dug up to explain the speed of this collapse, but the sequence of events, the conditions of the regime, the opposition’s popularity, and the regional support it received all made clear…

The reformist and conservative wings of Iran’s political elite and ruling class converge around former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Driven by imperial aspirations to retrieve Iran’s historical strategic orbit, the 1979 regime developed its geopolitical narrative by fusing imperial and…

Iraq’s designation of Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah) as terrorist organizations, whose assets must therefore be confiscated, was a warm-up for ending the era of Iranophilic militias. Swiftly walking this step back, under the flimsy pretext that the designation had been made …