Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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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,…
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Iraq: A gaping enigma and a global laughingstock
The Joke That Wrote Itself There is a particular category of political absurdity that defies satire, not because it is too subtle to mock, but because it is so shameless that any satirist attempting to embellish it would only shrink it. Iraq has once again gifted the world with such…
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When words become weapons
On Easter morning, April 5, 2026, the President of the United States reached, not for diplomacy, but for the obscenity. His message to Iran, broadcast to the world in the language of a street brawl, read like a threat scrawled on a prison wall: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy…
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Operational suicide? Inside the military revolt against a ground war in Iran
The dismissal that tells the story Gen. Randy George, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, was removed from his post by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and ordered to retire immediately last week. Ostensibly, the sacking seemed like one more entry on a long list of Pentagon house cleanings. It was…
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The inevitable decline and fall of Zionism
There is a moment in the moral life of nations when the lies that sustained them can no longer hold. Israel is living through that moment. The images that came out of Gaza were not evidence of war’s brutality. They are the autopsy of the painstakingly constructed myth of Israel…
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Two leaders, two quagmires
The unravelling of America’s Iran policy began with a single act of demolition. When Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018, he dismantled a framework that — whatever its imperfections — had extended Iran’s nuclear breakout time from two to three months to well over…
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The death of denial: Why the Middle East’s “Gray Zone” just vanished
Three weeks ago, this region operated under a set of assumptions that had held, more or less, for forty years. Iran would threaten. Proxies would fight. Oil would flow. And everyone would continue doing what they do best. For 30 years, the Middle East operated in what strategists called the…
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“Schadenfreude, how sweet it is”
There is a word that describes what is unfolding across screens in the Middle East at night: Schadenfreude. The feeling of immense, indescribable pleasure to see your enemy suffer pain, destruction, and death. When Iranian missiles arc across the skies over Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat—trails of fire cutting through…
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No exit: The global stakes of the Iran-Israel war
The war consuming the Middle East is, at its core, a zero-sum contest between two incompatible survival imperatives. Israel’s long-term security, as defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, requires not merely the degradation of Iran’s proxies but the dismemberment of the Iranian state itself — a fragmentation into six or…
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The relentless war on Iraq
For months, a war has been unfolding across Iraq with little of the fanfare that once accompanied American military campaigns in the region. There are no embedded journalists photographing convoys rolling through the desert, no prime-time presidential addresses. Instead, American warplanes and drones have been systematically dismantling the infrastructure of…