Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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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…
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The price of war
Wars are not won by courage alone. They are sustained by money. Strip away the rhetoric, the flags, and the televised heroics, and every prolonged conflict reduces to three essentials: soldiers to fight, weapons to kill, and cash to keep both moving. When the money dries up, defeat follows, sometimes quietly, often catastrophically. “In…
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The Quad’s paper tiger problem: Why the Indo-Pacific strategy is faltering
In February 1946, George Kennan sent his “Long Telegram” from Moscow, providing the intellectual blueprint for the “containment” of the Soviet Union. Kennan argued that the West needed a strategy of “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment” based on a clear-eyed understanding of the adversary’s psychology. Today, Washington is…
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Mr Trump, Gaza does not need your ballroom. It needs tents. It needs life.
Mr Trump, You will meet Benjamin Netanyahu. Cameras will flash. Words will be exchanged in polished rooms, polished suits, polished lies. You will talk about “security,” “alliances,” “regional stability,” and all the hollow, sterile phrases that sanitize horror and suffocate truth. But I want to talk to you about tents.…
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Egypt’s economy: When infrastructure outpaces production
The international debt of the government of Egypt was estimated at 161.2 billion US dollars in June 2025, while it spends almost half of its budget to meet this debt. But behind these alarming figures, a much scarier picture is looming. How did Egypt, which has designs to be a…
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Follow the money: A ruthless guide for Mark Savaya, America’s envoy to Iraq
There is a whispered line within the corners of American history, which was delivered inside a parking garage to The Washington Post journalist duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from Deep Throat, Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt: “Follow the money.” It was more than investigative advice. It was a revelation.…
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Turkiye’s expanding footprint in Lebanon: Ambition, constraint, and the new sunni landscape
With Iran’s “Land Bridge” fractured by the new Syrian leadership, Turkiye is not merely seeking influence; it is seeking to fill the strategic vacuum and secure its Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan) doctrine. Ankara views Lebanon as the final “missing piece” in the Eastern Mediterranean energy map. With its declared ambition…
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MAGA implodes: Will Israel’s power over Washington collapse next?
The MAGA empire has turned inward. Its warriors no longer march shoulder to shoulder in lockstep but carve at one another like rival warlords. The movement that once roared in unison now splits along a single, explosive fault line: America First versus Israel First. Two convictions, two armies now face…
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Iraq’s three vulnerable pillars: A blueprint for dysfunction
Iraqi sovereignty is undermined by the “Triad” of instability inherent in its structure. The Iraqi government is now a house divided: it has two rival standing armies with rival loyalties, a fragmented energy system in which the Iraqi Kurdistan region has a self-governing, legally recognized oil economy, and a political…
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America’s double game with international justice: When power poses as principle
The US likes to cloak itself in moral terms. It likes to envelop its policies with the trappings of “human rights,” “democracy,” and “a rules-based international order.” However, the disconnect between what America preaches around the globe and what America practices has become so wide that it cannot be obscured…
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Europe’s high-stakes gamble
Europe is faced with one of its most critical choices since the Russian attack on Ukraine. There are about €210 billion of Russian sovereign assets frozen across the entire European Union, of which €183 billion are held by Euroclear, headquartered in Brussels. This choice aims to assess Europe’s financial solidity…
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The unmasking of an illusion: Britain’s reckoning and America’s last stand
The masks are off. Eight decades of American support to maintain the myth of a virtuous Israel have finally come crashing down. September 2025 marked a new stage in this brutal saga when Britain, the original sinner behind the Balfour Declaration, took a tangible step of admitting its guilt by…
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From Sykes-Picot to Silicon Valley: Why Middle East fault lines now run through American tech
In 1916, the Middle East was partitioned by its rulers with ink between Britain and France. A hundred years later, with borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, territories continue to contend with claims to legitimacy, sovereignty, and foreign intervention. The Middle East holds a reset, but not in a conference…
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Netanyahu: I am the law, and Israel is Über alles. When leaders treat accountability as optional
When a leader insists on operating as though the rules did not apply to him, it isn’t simply an affront to a set of abstractions. It’s the proclamation of a philosophy. The leader asserts that might trumps right, that the brute fact of their power immunises the powerful, and that…
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Iran’s shadow diplomacy: The art of winning without showing
As the conflict escalates between Israel and Iran to an unprecedented degree, with Iran and Israeli missiles clashing in June 2025, representing the most tangible military conflict ever witnessed between these two nations, it will be argued that the actual might that Iran poses doesn’t lie within what we can…
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No room for toxic Blair on Gaza peace council
There are moments when history rises from its long slumber and delivers a verdict with the clarity of a hammer striking iron. Tony Blair’s exclusion from the proposed Gaza peace council was one of those moments—unambiguous, unforgiving, almost biblical in its finality. A man who once strode the world stage…