Economics

A Tale of Two Navies In the churning waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, a new strategic equation is taking shape—one defined not by the clash of air forces or armies, but by the silent arithmetic of hulls, tonnage, and maritime geography. Recent reports of a close-quarters encounter between …

Dr. Shehab Al-Makahleh The Genesis of a Doctrine In 1978, a 28-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu—then operating under the Americanized appellation “Ben Nitai”—stood before an assembly in Boston and articulated what would become the animating principle of his political existence. “The obstacle to peace,” he declared with crystalline clarity, “is …

The wars that have engulfed the Middle East since October 2023 were widely portrayed as the birth of a new regional order. Israel fought Hamas in Gaza, confronted Hezbollah in Lebanon, and—together with the United States—launched an unprecedented military campaign directly against Iran. Syria witnessed the collapse of …

Dr. Mustafa Al-Tal Introduction: From the Strait of Hormuz to Gaza The previous installments of the Engineering Fear series argued that conflicts in the Middle East are increasingly managed rather than resolved. Ceasefires, economic pressure, strategic corridors, and political legislation have become instruments for containing instability instead of …

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rand Paul each have reasons to run in ’28. Chances are good that the Republican nominee for president in 2028 will be named either J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio (as I write, the prediction markets put the odds at around 70 percent). Yet …

James Fanelli,  Joshua Chaffin, Eliza Collins and Kevin T. Dugan Megan Romer likes to spend her free time sewing costumes for school plays, picking blackberries in her backyard in rural Cayuga County, N.Y., and watching her partner play the fiddle in folk bands. In her day job, she …

Few concepts are used more frequently in political discourse than sovereignty. Yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. Sovereignty is often reduced to the simple idea of territorial independence and non-interference. However, in today’s interconnected world, sovereignty has become far more complex. A sovereign state is …

One of the greatest mistakes in contemporary debates about the Middle East is the tendency to analyze every crisis separately while overlooking the deeper structural transformation reshaping the international system itself. The world in which states define security today is no longer the same world that existed during …

Lisdey Espinoza Pedraza In early March 2026, Donald Trump convened a select group of Latin American and Caribbean leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida, under the banner of the “Shield of the Americas”. Trumpian optics, no substance The optics were deliberately chosen to symbolize strength, unity …