Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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Saudi Arabia has the weapons. What about a strategy?
A Houthi ballistic missile targeted Riyadh on Saturday. The Saudi-led coalition said its defenses intercepted it. Later, a plume of smoke rose near the capital’s airport. It was the first strike on the city since the fighting escalated this summer. The attack exposed a hard truth. Saudi Arabia owns one…
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Pakistan’s bet: Power without becoming a pawn
Small and middle powers rarely choose their geography. They only choose what to do with it. Pakistan sits at the seam of South Asia, the Gulf, and China. It cannot out-produce Beijing. It cannot out-spend Riyadh. It cannot match Washington’s reach. But it can make itself impossible to bypass. That…
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Israel wins the battlefield. It is losing the bench and the ballot box
Israel can still win the war in Gaza. It cannot win the argument that follows it. That is the gap accountability advocates keep pointing to, and it is the gap Israel’s own allies in Europe are now widening. The war has split into three fronts. The military one, in Gaza,…
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The Aegean’s new arms race isn’t about weapons anymore
For decades, Eastern Mediterranean security debates centered on who bought what—fighter jets, missile batteries, submarines. The transaction was the story. That era is ending. A new contest has begun, and it is architectural rather than transactional. The question is no longer which country owns the best missile. It is which…
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Burnham apologised. Britain’s arms licences tell a different story
Andy Burnham said sorry. He didn’t stop the weapons. Britain’s new prime minister built his early image on contrition. In July, before he even reached Downing Street, he called Gaza’s suffering “a scar on our collective conscience.” He admitted Labor “didn’t get it right.” He promised more pressure on Israel.…
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The China paradox: A giant built on cracked foundations
For three decades, the West told itself a comforting story about China. Admit it into the global trading system, the theory went, and market forces would do the rest: prosperity would breed a middle class, and a middle class would eventually demand a political voice. Beijing joined the World Trade…
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Operation Economic Outcast: Washington swaps missiles for money, but the math still doesn’t add up
Washington has changed weapons. It has not changed its problem. On 24 August, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before reporters and announced what officials had spent ten days branding as an “economic D-Day” against Iran. He called it “Operation Economic Outcast.” He promised to “sever every economic lifeline that sustains…
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Washington’s Iran war: Three tracks, one deadlock, and a revolution that never forgot 1953
Six months into a war that began on 28 February 2026, with strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Washington has stopped choosing between diplomacy, economic siege, and military force. It runs all three at once. The Trump administration frames this as a sequential strategy. It is not. Diplomacy has collapsed…
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Iraq is negotiating away its militias’ guns. It is not negotiating away their impunity.
On 26 June, Faleh al-Fayyad, the chairman of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, inaugurated a new “Department of Human Rights” within the organization he leads. The announcement would be almost darkly comic if it weren’t so consequential. Washington designated Fayyad a human rights abuser years ago for his role in one…
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The bombs over Abu Duhur: A warning shot at Ankara
The runway at Abu Duhur had been quiet for many years. Old MiG jets were corroding in the Syrian dust in the north of the country – relics of the civil war that ended when Assad fled to Moscow. On 18 August, in the middle of the night, eight Israeli…
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When the men with stars on their shoulders are told to sit down
Augustus never recovered from three words. When news reached Rome that three legions had been annihilated in the Teutoburg Forest, the emperor is said to have wandered his palace for months, striking his head against the doorframe and crying, “Quintili Vare, legiones redde!” Give me back my legions, Varus. Varus…
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The Mecca Pact: A new Sunni security architecture born of American doubt
Three men stood together in Islam’s holiest city on a Friday, the day of prayer, and signed a document that may outlast the war that produced it. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif put their names to the Mecca…
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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.”…