Middle East

The core reason is straightforward: the ruling coalition wants to control the timing and narrative of its own collapse, rather than allow the opposition to claim it brought the government down. What is unfolding inside Israel is not simply a parliamentary procedure. It is a calculated political maneuver …

Amid a dense cluster of contentious files—foremost among them Iran—Donald Trump arrived in China on Wednesday ahead of a summit with Xi Jinping, in a visit shaped by escalating trade tensions and intensifying geopolitical crises, including the war involving Iran and the fallout from disruptions in the Strait …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …