Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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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…
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More parleying nonsense: Trump, Iran and promised negotiations
It’s almost not worth considering, but precisely because it comes from the White House, the mad manoeuvrings and silly airings of the US President must be taken seriously. But only to a point. Over the last week, a series of events have taken place demonstrating the growing alarm within the…
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Tremors in MAGA: Joe Kent, the Iran war and the antisemitism smear
Joe Kent, the now former US Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, always seemed a bit off, especially to liberals. As a combat veteran of MAGA pedigree, he found favour with President Donald J. Trump, who rewarded him for his conspiracy blustering in a manner befitting other nominees baptised in…
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No naval escort for Trump: US allies and the Strait of Hormuz
With each dragged out day, President Donald Trump begins resembling a mad emperor who has not only taken leave of his senses but leave of everything else. Having hitched his wagon to the Israeli program of chaos and destabilisation in the Middle East, he is stuck in a war he…
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Opportunistic asylum: How Australia exploited the Iranian women’s football team
When it comes to asylum seekers, the Australian political machine has prided itself on using cruelty and a purposely obtuse understanding of international law. Bolted sovereignty has been elevated over rights and humanitarianism, while political interests have abominated the dark, hungering hordes heading to the island continent on unseaworthy boats. …
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Blocking fertilisers: The Hormuz Strait and agricultural shock
The closure of virtually all commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz occasioned by the Iran War is not merely a matter of oil and gas, the usual prized duo that feature in the nervous chatter of global markets. There are other less conspicuous products that have also been snared…
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Costly and depleting: The growing problems of Operation Epic Fury
The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. …
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Existential attrition: Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz
“The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.” Alex Mills, The Atlantic Council, March 12, 2026 With each day of glorified actions against Iran, with each cloudy press session claiming supreme success…
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Middle power nonsense: Australia, Canada and capitulating to the Iran War
In his January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the impression of a banker turned soothsayer, a Daniel coming to judgment. Here was a born-again man of international relations who would rally the middle powers (from the middle) and try to assert…