Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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Israel’s relentless quest for a next enemy
For most of the past year, Israeli officials have described the aftermath of the war with Iran in confident, almost triumphant terms: a weakened adversary, its nuclear program set back, its regional proxies dismantled one by one. But even before that campaign had fully wound down, a new threat was…
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Two scorpions in a jar
There is an old parable about two scorpions in a jar. Neither can leave. Neither trusts the other. And sooner or later, one strikes, not because it wants to kill the other, but because the jar has become unbearable. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are those scorpions now, and the…
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The Green Zone always wins
Counter-Terrorism Service sealed every entrance to Baghdad’s Green Zone and moved with military precision through the residential compounds within. When the sun rose, 47 people were in custody. Among them: twelve sitting members of parliament, a former governor, a senior adviser to the outgoing prime minister, and an array of…
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Not in our names
Something historic is stirring inside the American Jewish community. Not a murmur of dissent, but a seismic re-evaluation — of identity, of loyalty, of the weaponised invocation of Jewish safety in defence of mass destruction. Gaza did not merely divide opinion. For a critical and growing fraction of Jewish Americans,…
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The banker of Baghdad: How Tom Barrack plans to starve Iran’s militia machine
When President Donald Trump announced on 31 May that Tom Barrack would serve simultaneously as US Ambassador to Ankara, Special Presidential Envoy to Syria, and now Special Presidential Envoy to Iraq, the diplomatic community in Baghdad greeted the news with the mild interest one accords a routine reshuffling. They were…
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The war on Iran: Through the lenses of pragmatism and realpolitik
Two Doctrines, One Conflict When the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran in June 2025, the world’s strategic analysts reached instinctively for two of history’s most enduring frameworks to make sense of what had unfolded: Pragmatism, the distinctly American philosophical tradition that judges actions by their consequences,…
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The next Iran? Why Israel’s Turkey anxiety is becoming doctrine
On 17th February, addressing the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, former prime minister Naftali Bennett delivered a line that has since become shorthand for a shift in Israeli strategic thinking: “Turkey is the new Iran.” He accused Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of seeking to “encircle Israel.”…
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The wild card: How Netanyahu could still wreck Washington’s Iran deal
There is a particular kind of danger in Middle East diplomacy that no memorandum of understanding can fully insure against: a leader with nothing left to lose and an army still under his command. That is Benjamin Netanyahu today. Washington and Tehran have signed a framework meant to end the…
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The boomerang: How America’s semiconductor war backfired
There is an ancient Chinese proverb that Washington strategists should have remembered: “When you shoot an arrow of revenge, dig two graves.” They didn’t listen. And now we are watching the most spectacular economic boomerang in modern history. Three years ago, the United States launched what its architects called the…
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Trump’s strategic mistakes in his war against Iran
In January 2026, flushed with the swift, covert removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration rolled the dice on a far more volatile and deeply rooted adversary. President Donald Trump operated under the seductive assumption that a high-tech, stealth excursion against the Islamic Republic of Iran would yield…
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The ghost that haunts the Caribbean
The sea does not forget. Sixty-four years ago, Soviet missiles pointed at the heart of an American empire from a sliver of a Caribbean island, and the world held its breath at the edge of annihilation. The crisis passed. The missiles were removed. However, the punishment never ended. What Washington…
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The end of American forward presence in the Persian Gulf
Something fundamental has shifted in the Persian Gulf, and the analysts who have spent careers watching American power projection are now saying what was once unsayable: the era of U.S. forward military basing in the Middle East is effectively over. Whether Washington chooses confrontation or withdrawal, the strategic outcome appears…
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China’s Treasury gambit: A decade in the making
When China reduced its holdings of US Treasury securities in the spring of 2026, mainstream Washington commentators reflexively reached for the word “routine.” They should not have. What is unfolding is the culmination of a decade-long strategy, methodically engineered to give China the option to weaponize US borrowing costs at…
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The man who defeated nobody: Netanyahu’s theatre of ruin
Benjamin Netanyahu has defeated nobody. Not one enemy. Not one objective. After Gaza, after Lebanon, after Syria, after Iran, after all the airstrikes and the assassinations and the pager operations and the ground incursions and the flag-waving declarations of historic triumph, he has defeated absolutely nobody. Strip away the propaganda.…
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Escape or escalate: Trump’s tactical crossroads in the Iran conflict
The war that Donald Trump declared won last month looks rather different from the inside of the Pentagon. The resulting stalemate has drained American military stockpiles, emboldened Iranian commanders, and left the US with far worse options than before the conflict began. The administration’s triumphalist framing has struck a jarring…
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The bell tolls in Beijing: Xi’s warning and the shadow of Thucydides
“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Two thousand five hundred years on, the trap is being set again — and this time the stakes are nuclear. When Xi Jinping stood on Chinese soil and asked Donald Trump whether…
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The twenty-five minute premier: How Trump forced a banker onto Baghdad
The transition of power in Iraq usually moves with the glacial, agonizing pace of a desert sandstorm, choked by the competing interests of Tehran and Washington. But when the Coordination Framework—the coalition of Iran-aligned Shiite parties—finally settled on Iraq’s next prime minister, the process took exactly twenty-five minutes. The result…
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Why Trump decided to back Iraq’s prime minister-designate, Ali al-Zaidi
The decision by United States President Donald Trump to back Ali al-Zaidi as Iraq’s next prime minister may have surprised some quarters. But when one looks into whom Trump was trying to keep out, his motivation becomes clear. Iraq’s dominant parliamentary bloc, the Coordination Framework, a coalition of Shia parties aligned with…
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Iran’s pipe dream: Why US bases are not going anywhere
For more than eight decades, the United States has maintained a formidable military presence across the Arabian Gulf. US bases are dotted across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. This military presence did not emerge by accident. It was shaped by three enduring strategic goals…
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Israel’s inevitable failure to disarm Hezbollah
Since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to expel the PLO, Hezbollah has been a thorn in Israel’s side. Born of that very invasion, the Party — as it is called — waged a relentless guerrilla war against Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon, backed, financed, and trained by Iran. Its…
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The alliance breaker: How Trump is torching the West’s friendships
Something remarkable is happening in the corridors of Western power. America’s closest allies are no longer whispering their frustrations behind closed doors. They are shouting them from parliamentary podiums and press conferences — and Donald Trump is shouting back. The transatlantic alliance, built painstakingly over eight decades, is cracking in…
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Trump, the creator of national heroes and global icons
There is a delicious irony at the heart of Donald Trump’s presidency. In his relentless pursuit of dominance, he has done something no opposition movement, no editorial board, and no diplomatic summit could have engineered on its own. He has minted heroes. Not reluctant ones, not accidental ones, but leaders…
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What a president, a movie star, a congressman, and a cell phone all dared to say
Richard Nixon was not a man given to moral clarity. But in the privacy of the Oval Office, away from the choreography of statecraft, he spoke with a bluntness that history rarely forgives and seldom forge “Let me explain something about the Jewish lobby in this country. They believe that…
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Starving the militias: Washington’s smartest move against Iran’s proxies
Tehran’s regional hegemony was not forged through the deployment of its own conventional divisions, but through the cultivation of a sprawling network of proxies and paramilitary franchises, funded, trained, and commanded by Iran to wage its battles. In Iraq, these groups have lobbed missiles at Israel, sent drones across borders,…