World News Insights: Opinion Articles

“A specter is haunting America; the specter of Communism!”. Until recently this re-writing of the opening of “The Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels might have sounded like a sour joke. Now, however, we have American politicians who describe themselves alternately as Democratic Socialists or…

The ideas in circulation in Lebanon focus on the pressing present moment- the "now" - in a manner untouched by the slightest concern for "tomorrow," or for the effect that dealing with the "now" is bound to leave on tomorrow’s challenges. And because the immediacy of the "now" resembles the…

Why do we remember Ahmed Bahaa El-Din three decades after his death? Because, above all, he was a good, humble Egyptian man. Set aside his importance as a writer and thinker and his stature as a leading journalist. What people loved about him first was that he was gentle and kind, one of them. They…

Since the current war in Sudan broke out, everything that has happened at the UN Security Council concerning it has been closely tied to military developments on the ground. It was therefore not surprising that the US move, backed by European states, to expand the arms embargo imposed on Darfur to…

Anyone who has studied the concept of political geography since the Swedish thinker Rudolf Kjellén coined the term and expounded it, describing states as living organisms that grow and expand, knows why place has been put to use in conflict, and knows that the keys to the puzzle lie in strategic…

Without identifying the disease, we will never find the cure. And without acknowledging that the international order is in crisis, we will not succeed in finding a way out. Tons of ink have been spilled in studies and articles before we could understand what today's world really is, though, in my…

I hope no one has tired of the well-worn saying that if a person does not choose his parents, states do not choose their neighbors. To which one might add the region as well, since a region is made up of adjoining neighbors that have lived a shared history in which each country’s interests took…

Since President Mahmoud Abbas issued his decrees calling legislative elections for November of this year, a noisy argument has broken out among Palestinians, beginning with the question of whether the elections will actually be held- or whether the decrees are merely a maneuver to release the…

The 60-day window that the American-Iranian memorandum of understanding set aside for negotiating a final agreement has now closed. Tension is rising, and there is no visible path toward addressing the causes of the war. As the United States and Israel move deeper into their election seasons,…

Saudi-French relations have always managed to keep pace with developments — not only political and strategic ones, but technological, cultural, and artistic ones as well. Relations whose first stone was laid in the 1920s soon took on their own vitality, even amid stormy changes in the region and…

Israel is waging three wars, in differing forms and degrees of military and security operations and with differing formulations of a justificatory political discourse, particularly given the total dominance of the logic of the hardline religious and strategic right in Israeli political life, in…

At the invitation of the French president, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is visiting the French Republic on a state visit that comes at a historic moment impossible to miss — whether in terms of the fast-moving events regionally and internationally, or in terms of Saudi-French relations…