Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Modish blockades: The Houthis, Trump and expanding the war
The naval blockade has become conveniently modish, particularly when it comes to narrow straits of water where heavy international traffic and cargo pass through. The Iranians were the first to realise an eventuality long suspected: that the Strait of Hormuz might be feasibly shut for lengthy periods of time with…
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Fee fantasies and false openings: Trump’s Hormuz delusions continue
With the Iran-US ceasefire all but retired to the infirmary of international politics, Washington has conducted air strikes on Iran for a third straight night. On early July 14, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported explosions in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas and six explosions on Kish Island,…
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Rivalries and anxieties: Reviving the Hejaz railway
History is not so much past as vigorously present, often a scab to be irritated in fitful anger, or a romantic affectation to be cherished. When it comes to controlling trade and establishing new routes, this is particularly apt. The Hejaz Railway project, seemingly long past, is now being dusted…
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Deferring a Crisis: The Iran-US Ceasefire Cracks
Ceasefires in the Middle East seem especially susceptible to revision, alteration and contradiction. Missiles still get fired; airstrikes initiated. Destruction to infrastructure, and death, follows. Yet despite the misunderstandings, the sniping and the harrying, these odd understandings are often described by those funny political coves as “holding”. In the case…
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World Cup Trump cards: Infantino, FIFA and the meddlesome US President
Yet again, FIFA, and its chief, Gianni Infantino, have distinguished the game of football by showing what it is all about. Not glorious athletes representing code and country across the globe. Not the sense of wellbeing that comes with exercise. No: it’s all about corrupt manoeuvrings, opaque decisions, and scandalous…
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White flag judgments: Palestine Action, protest and the UK courts
The justice system of the United Kingdom, represented by stout cathedral structures and solemn rituals, tends to resemble a casino rather than a priestly haven of solemn judgment. It’s the justice of the punt, the throw of the dice, not the fairness of judicial deliberation, that prevails. That, at least,…
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Ironic fates: Bolton, Trump and mishandling classified documents
Former US national security advisor John Bolton and the President Donald J. Trump share traits neither probably knew they had. The latter, for one, is far more war mongering than he let on to American voters, evidenced by his recently failed, disastrous foray into attacking Iran. Bolton, on the other…
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Back to bad beginnings: The Iran-US Memorandum of Understanding
Let us, if only briefly, give thanks for the peacemakers, whatever their poor qualifications and whatever folly drove them to war in the first place. On June 15, the secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council revealed that, based on the agreement reached with the United States, “the war and…
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The FIFA World Cup: Caught on the visa snag
The FIFA Men’s World Cup of 2026 was always going to offer visitors and spectators something different. Shared between three countries – Mexico, Canada and the United States – the latter of the three was set to be the designated font of mischief and disruptive mayhem. Add to this the…
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Repetitive folly: Israel’s futile war in Lebanon deepens
Call it a repeating script, a rusty template, or simply a creaky model to emulate time and again. The structural and homicidal destruction of Gaza undertaken by Israeli forces is now finding full expression in southern Lebanon, a cause of concern even for those in Washington. The war’s increasing savagery…
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Beyond the Yellow Line: Israel seizes more of Gaza
While eyes remain peeled on Israel’s increasingly violent and expanding campaign in Lebanon, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proving ever more predatory with the Gaza Strip. With aggrandizing impunity, more territory is being acquired for familiar reasons: Hamas is on the run and needs to be crushed…
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Acceptable till it wasn’t: Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Global Sumud Flotilla
It has been a sorry though predictable exercise. When he lived up (or down) to expectations of atrocious conduct befitting the proud bigot that he is, Israel’s Minister for National Security had to be seen as aberrant, the man who strayed, if only slightly. The conduct in question involved Itamar…
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Epic interruptus: The Iranian snare and American defeat
On May 10, Robert Kagan, the high priest of neoconservative thought, the bell ringer for muscular interventionism and general American meddlesomeness, lamented in The Atlantic that the United States had suffered a unique defeat in its efforts to subjugate Iran. The article says much about Kagan’s own identification with the…
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Epic nonsense: Trump shelves Project Freedom
The waxwork figures of the Pentagon recently glowed with excitement with the announcement that the US military would be finally called upon to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. With the ceasefire between Teheran and Washington barely holding, President Donald Trump, as far as his attention span would allow, gingerly put…
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Ideas of expulsion: Trump, NATO and Spain
Intellectual giants are in painfully short supply in the Trump administration, but if there was anyone who might lay claim to cerebral weight of any sort, Elbridge Colby might be one of them. Self-styled as a China hawk, the US Under Secretary of War for Policy must privately be bemused…
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Defiling statues of Jesus: Israel’s counterfeit outrage at cultural vandalism
They have kept their strategy of cultural and institutional vandalism generously broad in recent campaigns against their adversaries. It therefore came as something of a surprise that much febrile fuss was made about this month’s antics of an IDF soldier photographed attacking a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon on…
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Troubled relations: Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump
Depending on which historical sources you care to consult, the Pope has been a figure of obloquy, ridicule and abomination. This mediator between the terrestrial and the divine was always set for the battering. Martin Luther’s violent Protestant split from the body of the Catholic Church was merely one aspect…
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Confused closures and opaque openings: Continuing dramas in the Hormuz Strait
Reading messages from President Donald J. Trump is an exercise in taunting masochism. It is one inflicted on commentators and the press corps the world over, and they are not better for it. The latest – and here, the latest will become distant and dated shortly – is that the…
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Ceasefire exemptions and quarries of death: Israel’s war on Lebanon
In the Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines peace as a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. The Israeli version of a ceasefire might be defined as a moment of war deceptively halted to enable conflict to continue. War as cosplay and camouflage. Under such fragile conditions, military objectives…
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Trump, Hegseth and the Language of War Crimes
He’s out of ideas, a mind running on empty. Increasingly, he is also short of reason, zapped by geopolitical addling and meddling. Now that US President Donald J. Trump has reached an uneasy understanding with Teheran that a two-week ceasefire should apply to the warring parties (Israel, as usual, has…
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Executing with prejudice: Israel’s death penalty law
It was celebrated with ghoulish delight. On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists), an instrument expanding the use of the death penalty for offences of a terrorist nature. The death penalty had previously existed in Israeli law for war crimes but…
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Closing air spaces and cracking alliances: Trump’s growing problem with allies
With the Iran War groaning along, the Trump administration is getting increasingly indignant. Plumes of childish anger can be seen coming out of the White House and Pentagon. Having joined an illegal, joint enterprise with Israel in attacking Iran, allies are proving increasingly unwilling to play along. That unwillingness gurgled…
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The Iran War: A Great Carbon Emitter
Truth may well be the first casualty of war, but death, injury and environmental degradation are bound to be keeping up in the hit lists. Attacks on gas fields, oil refineries and petrochemical plants will always leave an impression once the conflict concludes. In the case of carbon emissions, the…
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Auguries of failure: Israel invades Lebanon, yet again
When will Israel realise that invading Lebanon with paralytic compulsion can never be the solution to its security ills? Having destroyed Gaza with existential, illegal fury, the Israeli Defense Forces have commenced operations in Lebanon with a similar, devastating imprint. Doltishly assuming that the Lebanon front would stay quiet as…