Middle East

Six months into America’s war with Iran, the conflict is beginning to resemble another version of the “forever wars” that Donald Trump once condemned—except that this one bears his unmistakable political signature. It has no clearly defined objective, no credible endgame, and increasingly no obvious path to victory. …

Qatar is pursuing two parallel tracks in an increasingly turbulent regional environment: diplomacy on the one hand and security fortification on the other. While Doha continues to present itself as a player capable of opening channels for dialogue, mediation, and de-escalation, it is simultaneously expanding its network of …

Farhat Asif  Today 23 August 2026, citizens across Kazakhstan are electing the first Kurultai under the country’s new Constitution. This is far more than a change in the name of Parliament. The vote will create a new 145-member unicameral legislature with the authority to make laws, represent public …

HCSS – The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies The events of this year have made that abundantly clear. The war in the Middle East and the renewed risk of disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global fuel supplies, demonstrated how quickly geopolitical crises can …

Dr. Yashwant Singh Abu al-Duhur matters less for what happened there on Tuesday, August 18, than for what it revealed. Strip away the incident report and what’s left is a familiar shape: two regional powers reading the same collapsing order and drawing opposite lessons from it. Assad’s fall didn’t create a …

Ankit Panda Thinking through new information about the May 2025 India-Pakistan clash. For this issue, I wanted to turn my attention back to the May 2025 crisis between India and Pakistan. As a quick recap, the two countries—the great entrepreneurs of the nuclear age on conventional war under …

By Dr. Dan Steinbock              The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has produced precisely the kind of strategic blowback that earlier Israeli and American war-gaming had warned against. So, why the escalation? Iran has not collapsed, while Hormuz has become a global economic choke point. The central failure was not …

An Interview with Hadi Elis by AsiaOne News — August 13, 2026 AsiaOne News: The Middle East is experiencing a profound transformation in its security environment, with the U.S.–Iran conflict, the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement involving Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye, and the continuing crisis surrounding the Strait …

J. Morgan Turkey and Israel do not appear, at least for now, to be willing to test the limits of their military power against each other inside Syria. Yet recent developments suggest that the two countries are moving steadily closer to a more dangerous zone in which strategic …