Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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The raging bull in the chinaware shop
Donald Trump is not a strategic thinker but an incredible force of nature. He is, at best, a reactive tactician. He enters complex situations with blunt force, mistakes disruption for strength, and leaves others to calculate the damage. This pattern has defined his domestic politics. It now defines American power.…
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Unleashing the spear: Why Hezbollah is joining the fray
During the Twelve-Day War last June, Hezbollah remained conspicuously sidelined while Iran faced the United States and Israel alone. Critics suggested Tehran was deliberately preserving its “crown jewel” for the inevitable future showdown. Tehran did not want to burn its Ace. Now, facing the consequences of past military miscalculations, the…
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The armada and the trigger: How the US-Iran standoff could ignite a regional catastrophe
The threats from both sides now echo with the finality and decisiveness of irreversibility. “A massive Armada is heading to Iran,” declares President Trump. “It’s heading there with speed and violence, if necessary.” These words hang in the balance against Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s retort: “Our brave Armed Forces…
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Mr Trump, Iraq’s kleptocracy must be dismantled: cutting aid is a laughable and naïve approach
If Nouri Al-Maliki returns to power, the United States cutting support to Iraq would be a moral half-measure. Iraq does not suffer from a shortage of ultimatums. It suffers from a systemic criminal enterprise masquerading as governance. What Iraq needs is not punishment by neglect, but surgical dismantling of the…
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The ring of fire: From Tehran to southern Lebanon, the battle lines are drawn
US aircraft carrier strike group reaches the Middle East. The region holds its breath. Six months have passed since the June 2025 twelve-day war that allegedly destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Trump have renewed their threats of a military strike on Iran. At the…
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Trump, Tehran, and the trial: The countdown to the unknown begins
Benjamin Netanyahu is facing the battle of his life in Israel’s general election set for May, with his liberty at stake. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is trapped in a high-stakes balancing act, weighing his legal battles and the risk of imprisonment against the stability of his fragile coalition. The legal…
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The Davos contrast: Precision vs. Provocation
In the 1920s and ’30s, the unthinkable was put in writing in the form of “War Plan Red,” America’s plans for an invasion of Canada, and “Defence Scheme No. 1,” Canada’s plans for a preventive war with America. The former allies had secretly been planning their mutual annihilation. One hundred…
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In 1953, the CIA walked the streets of Tehran; today, they walk with Mossad and MI6
The humidity of an Iranian summer is heavy stuff indeed, but in August 1953, the air in Tehran seemed to vibrate with something far more explosive than heat and moisture. It was the scent of a manufactured revolution. Kermit Roosevelt, a man whose bloodline carried a president of the United…
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The paralysis before the storm: How fear of war may guarantee one
The corridors of the Pentagon and the Iranian camps are shrouded in a strange silence. This is not the silence of intent but of an impending conflict, acknowledging that the next attack in the Middle East may set off a chain reaction that war game planners are unsure of. The…
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The dangerous parallels between Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2026
The Iran rhetoric that is current today has a disquieting similarity to what happened prior to the Iraq War. Once more, Iran is portrayed by American officials as a Middle East adversary that is on the verge of gaining nuclear capabilities. Indeed, as political scientist John Mearsheimer predicted in the…
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Netanyahu’s childhood friend breaks silence, warning of “ruined state” and personal obsessions
Nations do not always fall to invading armies. More often, they are fractured from within, hollowed out by leaders who confuse their own survival with the state’s fate. Israel has reached that precipice. The country is no longer governed in the public interest; it is being sacrificed to the needs…
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The presidency as theatre: America’s age of False Fronts
In “False Front,” historian Kenneth Lowande exposes one of Washington’s most deeply embedded legends: that today’s president serves as an “imperial” ruler, exercising their authority through orders and actions that require no authorization from Congress. Lowande opens a window, however, onto something far more ominous and far more barren. Today,…
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The American paradox: A nation simultaneously ascending and descending
The United States is a paradox that defies the typical categories of power analysis. Is the United States an empire on the brink of decline, or is it still the world’s greatest concentration of human innovation? The answer is perhaps both. Thesis: The inexorable descent The Rise and Fall of…
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The psychological profile of a president whose IQ is “off the chart”
The pattern is no longer subtle. It is not policy. It is a pathology manifested as power. Donald Trump rules through a series of shock waves meant to disorient, exhaust, and dominate. One after another, the punches come: mass ICE raids first in Washington, then across America; a world tariff…
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The predicament of the Islamic Republic: Why 2026 is different
By January 2026, “cumulative erosion” will begin to characterize Iran’s Islamic Republic, defying the classical rhythms of reform and repression. Though the Rial’s collapse ignited the protest movement within Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, this nationwide mass revolt is characteristic of a crisis encompassing financial bankruptcy, ecological “Day Zero” projections, and a…
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The Arctic ultimatum: Greenland and the end of sovereignty
In the opening weeks of 2026, the tundra of Greenland has become the hottest fault line in global politics. Fresh from the brazen capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has pivoted north, treating the world’s largest island not as a people or a territory, but as a strategic…
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The return of the plunderer: Why Iraq cannot survive another Maliki
In the Green Zone’s shadow, where the reek of treachery is as heavy as the air in a Baghdad summer, a specter is rising. Nouri al-Maliki—the man who oversaw the intentional dismantling of a nation—seeks a return to the prime minister’s office. This is more than a political calculation. It…
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The Trilateral Fortress: “Why the fall of Damascus didn’t end the Middle East’s long war”
The geopolitical shorthand for Iranian power used to be the “Land Bridge”—a 1,000-mile artery of influence stretching from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean. In December 2024, that bridge collapsed into the rubble of the Assad regime. With rebels pouring into the capital of Damascus, Washington-Tel Aviv orthodoxy held that…
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From Gaza to Caracas: Trump’s Maduro abduction signals a new era of lawless power
The abduction of Nicolás Maduro is part of a larger pattern. It belongs to the same doctrine that flattened Gaza under the language of “self-defence” and threatened Iran with “locked and loaded” retaliation while bypassing diplomacy and international law. In each case, Washington has used force not as a last…
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Iran’s greatest threat isn’t Washington. It’s the generation that refuses to bow.
While Western policymakers obsess over centrifuges, sanctions, and proxy militias, they are staring past the Islamic Republic’s greatest existential threat: its own children. Iran is no longer a revolutionary state; it is a terrified, cornered theocracy clinging to power, frightened not of American warships or Israeli jets alone, but of…
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Israel and Turkey are no longer feuding allies; they are strategic rivals
What began as a diplomatic rupture has hardened into a regional power contest with direct consequences for US strategy from Gaza to the Eastern Mediterranean and to the Horn of Africa. For years, the Israeli-Turkish split was dismissed in Washington politics as diplomatic theatre concealing an underlying strategic partnership. Such…
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A letter from David to Goliath
I write to you as David once wrote to the idea of Goliath— not as a warrior with an army behind him, but as a body already bruised, already counted among the dead, already dismissed as too small to matter. I am the one you have spent your life trying…
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Trump’s diversion: Why Venezuela’s oil is the ultimate
Washington didn’t abruptly discover Nicolás Maduro on 3 January. It didn’t suddenly open its eyes to Venezuela’s narcotics and corruption. It chose this opportunity to apprehend Maduro because of the nexus of four compelling forces: a reborn Monroe Doctrine mentality, the lust to control Venezuela’s oil, Trump’s plummeting approval rating,…
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The winter of their discontent: When a theocracy freezes
With the chill hitting Iran’s bones in December, that cold has done much more than close schools and government services. It has also revealed the fragility of an Iranian regime that is currently finding itself in its most desperate crisis since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The Iranian Rial, which…