World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Every year, the controversy around the Nobel Prizes is centered in the same two categories: the Peace Prize and the Literature Prize. Never has there been a torrent of polemics about the award for medicine, for example, nor has there even been broad outrage about the recipient of the award in…

The proliferation of arms has returned to the forefront in Sudan once again. Shots were fired following an altercation between a man and a group affiliated with an armed faction at the entrance of Atbara City Hospital, and two people were killed and two others were injured. Although the…

The war in Gaza has ended, but the same can’t be said about the others. Three fronts remain open. In Lebanon, a fragile truce holds, while sporadic exchanges of fire continue with Yemen’s Houthis. Meanwhile, Iran remains the major front, having been on alert since last June following the twelve-day…

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) famously said that “Life begins on the other side of despair.” That is, hope often emerges in moments of despair. It is always darkest before dawn, and faith that anything is possible drives us. Is the dawn of the Middle East about to begin after a…

When Donald Trump was first elected president, foreign policy seemed like the zone of greatest danger, the place where a political novice promising to remake the world order was most likely to blunder into true catastrophe. Instead, Trump’s first-term foreign policy was broadly successful, with…

While the next phases of the Gaza agreement and its implementation are shrouded in ambiguity, the broad trajectory of the Levant, as we can gather from this agreement and others, is not obscure. The un-regrettable demise of an entire ecosystem of forces and ideas, after it had tasked itself with…

US President Donald Trump lost the battle for the Nobel Peace Prize. In another sense, however, he did not, winning his bet on a “peace deal” in Gaza, though he didn’t really win that either. This is not “a play on words;” these are the facts. As for the Nobel Prize, Trump may have taken his…

The “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent genocidal Israeli war that went on for two years were a pivotal moment for Middle Eastern politics and security. This period demanded the development of new, more effective, flexible, and robust approaches to…

The Middle East has been witnessing unprecedented developments, and today it will witness another. The analysts will debate; one will talk about the historic moment while another will say it was a new dawn. The skeptics will say that one must not rush to conclusions and must instead wait to see the…

From the Enlightenment onward, progress functioned as the secular creed of the West. For centuries our societies were defined by the conviction that the future must outshine the present, just as the present surpassed the past. Such optimistic faith was not merely cultural or institutional but all…

A few days ago, there was uproar on social media after Mousa Abu Marzouk, who heads Hamas’s International and Legal Relations Office, walked out of a television interview in protest over a question he was asked. For those who missed the story, here’s what happened: The host asked Abu Marzouk…

Only a few dispersed and reluctant voices were raised in opposition to the “Trump Plan” for ending the Gaza war. It is not that the voices believe in the plan, nor that its flawlessness exonerates it from rebuke. If the plan is indeed susceptible to being challenged, and it is, then far less…