Society

Owen Kirby The Middle East – for many Western observers – is something akin to Long Covid. One day you believe you are through the worst of it, turning a corner, and the next you are back reliving all the headaches, fatigue and brain fog, short of breath …

In March, Israeli F-35s struck three sites in central Syria that Turkish planners had quietly earmarked for a future airbase. No Turkish soldier had set foot there yet — Ankara had not finished the paperwork. But the message needed no translation: Israel would rather bomb a location pre-emptively …

Dr. Dan Steinbock The United States and Iran traded new attacks overnight into Thursday, intensifying an exchange that has threatened the collapse of their agreement to end the war. According to President Trump, the ceasefire between the United States, Israel and Iran was “over.” The deadly exchanges included …

Arthur Michelino Vessels at the Strait of Hormuz, as seen from Musandam, Oman, July 8, 2026. REUTERS In late May, with the talks to end the Iran war stalled, the US president threatened to blow up Oman if it did not, in his words, behave like everybody else. …

Sachin Yadav America’s retreat from the developing world happened fast, and the numbers back that up. Foreign aid from OECD countries dropped by about 23 percent between 2024 and 2025, and most of that fall came from the United States, whose foreign aid shrank by nearly 57 percent …

Hadi Elis “Who cares about the NATO agenda? I’m here to see my good friend—an authoritarian, sure, but a loyal friend to the US—President Erdogan. I stopped him from attacking Israel. And just in case anyone disagrees too much, I gave everyone a handgun to shoot each other …

Dr. Yashwant Singh Turkey’s contemporary foreign policy is better understood as a project of “middle-power revisionism,” in which imperial symbolism serves the pursuit of strategic indispensability rather than imperial restoration Empires do not die the way states die. A republic can be founded on a single date, a …

Sidharth Reddy U.S. President Donald Trump attends a working session during the NATO leaders summit at the Bestepe Presidential Compound in Ankara, Turkey, July 8, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst The NATO Ankara summit is a eulogy for one model of liberal internationalism. It should become the cradle of a …

When U.S. President Donald Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week, it symbolized more than another presidential appearance on Wall Street. It reflected a defining feature of his second term: making the stock market one of the clearest measures of his administration’s …