Analysis

Noureen Akhtar It was no normal day in Kabul on the 20th of August 2025. The city, once ravaged by war and suspicion, welcomed an event that could redraw the region’s map, the sixth Pakistan-Afghanistan-China trilateral meeting. For decades, Afghanistan has been considered a theater of disorder, characterized …

Bushra Ikram The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the only remaining bilateral arms control agreement between the United States (US) and Russia, is set to expire on February 5, 2026. The New START, which accounted for 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, was signed in …

Good governance is imperative for successful private sector operations. Stable, predictable, and efficient business operations relyon a strong enabling environment with predictable rules and practices. How to ensure that such conducive conditions continue was the subject of a pair of roundtables hosted in July at the Center for …

Israel has long been defined by its security imperatives, but rarely has the price of war been so steeply visible in its economy as it is today. In 2024, Israeli military expenditure soared to 8.8% of GDP—a staggering figure for a developed economy. Projections suggest that defense spending …

Eldar Mamedov While the region’s nations have reasons to pursue closer ties with Israel, they will most likely stop short of full diplomatic recognition.  President Donald Trump has often voiced support for expanding the Abraham Accords—the US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states—to include Azerbaijan and …

Dimitra Staikou On August 5, 2025, Nobel laureate and interim leader Mohammed Yunus announced that Bangladesh would hold parliamentary elections in February 2026. The Election Commission quickly confirmed the plan, promising an exact date later this year. At first glance, this may look like the return of democracy …

The confluence of two accelerating trends augurs poorly for critical mineral-rich economies in the Global South: the rise of economic nationalism in advanced economies and the return of territorial conquest as a normalized—if not yet fully legitimized—tool of statecraft. The United States and the European Union are aggressively …

Brian Hudson In a world where the foundations of international law are being eroded under the weight of geopolitical interests and strategic calculations, the European Union finds itself at a historic crossroads: Are the values it claims to champion—human rights, justice, and multilateralism—truly guiding its foreign policy, or …

By Dr. Shehab Al-Makahleh In a private meeting with geopolitical analyst George Friedman in 2022, and during an earlier conversation with the late Henry Kissinger in 2021, both thinkers alluded to the strategic inevitabilities of conflict in the Middle East. Strategist Friedman warned that the region was heading …