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Analysis

Can Iran Be Defeated?

The overwhelming military, intelligence, and technological superiority possessed by the United States and Israel in their war against Iran has led many cheerleaders for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to assume that crushing Iran is merely a matter of operational sequencing. Yet such assumptions ignore a range of …

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Why a War Between Turkey and Israel Remains Deferred

Jack Sullivan The headlines suggest inevitability: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemns Israel as a “terror state,” while Benjamin Netanyahu warns those who dream of rebuilding empires to forget it. The rhetoric is sharp, theatrical, and often personal. Yet behind the thunder of speeches lies a quieter truth: Turkey and …

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Infrastructure Attribution and the Invoiced Passage at Hormuz

The Persian Gulf Strait Authority, launched by Iran on 5 May 2026, is the institutional capstone of a longer manoeuvre. Its visible apparatus reduces to an email address, a logo, and a permit form. Its operating significance is the formalisation of a coherent instrument for discretionary, sanctions-resilient pricing …

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The Trump–Xi Summit and the Decline of American Crisis Management

The upcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing is not a bilateral summit between two competing powers. It is a test of whether the United States can still manage major international crises on its own terms.  The agenda is expected to include Iran, Taiwan, trade, …

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Trump and Xi Meet: The Key Issues Behind America’s Most Important Summit of 2026

Trump is heading to Beijing for the most consequential foreign policy meeting of his second term. He arrives as the first US president to visit China in nearly nine years — the last visit was his own, in November 2017, when Xi rolled out a “state visit-plus” with …

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Al-Makahleh: The Beijing Summit: Trump’s High-Stakes Pilgrimage to the Court of Xi Amid a Fracturing World Order

Dr. Shehab Al-Makahleh On the eve of his arrival in Beijing, Donald Trump chose a phrase that was deceptively simple: “I respect Xi, and I hope he respects me.” Beneath that carefully calibrated diplomatic phrase lies a far more consequential reality: this is not a courtesy visit between …

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Beijing’s Persian Gambit: How the Iran War Became China’s Strategic Opening — and America’s Diplomatic Trap

Dr. Shehab Al-Makahleh In war, the first casualty is not truth. It is hierarchy. The missiles over Iran did more than rupture military installations and redraw escalation maps across the Gulf. They exposed something larger and far more consequential: the quiet disintegration of the geopolitical order that governed …

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Will Turkey Ever Lay Down Its Arms Against the Kurds?

Hadi Elis For decades, Turkey has systematically created problems for the Kurdish people. Those problems did not emerge from thin air. They forced the Kurds to form the PKK as a resistance movement against deliberate, state-driven assimilation policies—policies that many would argue amount to an effort to exterminate …

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US Senate minority leader vows to push new vote to end Iran war

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused President Donald Trump on Monday of dragging the US into war with Iran and announced that Senate Democrats will force another vote on legislation seeking to end US military involvement. Speaking on the Senate floor, Schumer said that the Trump administration …

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