Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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Regime change or the end of Iran? Washington and Jerusalem are not chasing the same war
Two words get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not. “Regime change” means new rulers in Tehran. “Dismemberment” means no Tehran to rule at all. Washington has flirted with the first idea for decades. Israel, in its most candid strategic writing, has quietly built the case…
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Zero hour in Baghdad
Something has detonated in Baghdad. Not a missile. A quieter blast, felt in bank vaults and cabinet rooms. Its radius may prove wider than any single strike this region has absorbed in twenty years. At the center sits one date: 30th September. By then, every militia must disband and surrender…
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The lesson of time: What Iraq might learn from Japan’s two devastating experiences
Nations, like men, learn most from the wounds they survive. Japan learned twice. The first lesson nearly destroyed it. The second rebuilt it. Iraq has yet to learn either. Whether it still has time to internalize the hard lesson is the question this moment forces us to ask. The black…
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Two clocks, two egos, and the gods who are never late
Sophocles put it in four words the Chorus never had to repeat: “Pride breeds the tyrant.” Twenty-five centuries later, two men who believe themselves the smartest people ever to occupy their offices are proving the old Greeks right in real time, on two different continents, on two different election clocks…
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Iran is China’s indispensable partner, but Beijing will never fight its war
There is a seductive myth that China and Iran are allies bound by blood and ideology, that Beijing would ride to Tehran’s rescue the way NATO would for a member under Article 5. Nothing could be further from the truth. What binds Beijing and Tehran is colder, more durable, and…
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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…