Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jasim Al-Azzawi
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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…
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A letter from an Arab nationalist to Netanyahu
When the knock comes: There will come a time—and history demonstrates this with cruel predictability—that the barricades will come crashing down, the slogans will fade, and the engines of oppression will go mute. It will not come with fireworks or victory marches. It will come with a knock. Silence. It…
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The Abraham Accords gambit: Washington’s high-stakes balancing act in the Middle East
As Israeli forces continue operations in Syrian territory, a public rebuke from President Donald Trump-the incursions are “counterproductive”-exposes the fault lines in America’s Middle East strategy. Yet in Netanyahu’s defiant response, maintaining that Israel will not retreat one step from territories it occupies, a deeper reality lies: even as the…
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The war no one declares: Inside the Mossad–Iran shadow conflict
In espionage, truth arrives escorted by doubt. Nothing is announced cleanly; nothing ends conclusively. Stories surface halfway formed, decorated with bravado or stitched with propaganda. In the latest episode of the deepening shadow war between Israel and Iran, Tehran claims it has achieved its long-sought counterstroke: infiltrating Israel’s most sensitive…
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Trump tried to corner MBS. He blinked first
Washington’s diplomatic theatre has always relied less on persuasion than performance: coaxing allies into submission behind closed doors, then staging their deference under televised lights. That ritual faltered on 18 November. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, a source with proximity to regional intelligence channels, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin…
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The puppeteer’s paradox: In the US–Israel relationship who is the master and who is the slave?
In the complex calculus of American foreign policy, few relationships are as contentious as that between the United States and Israel. Two competing theories attempt to explain it, each proposing a starkly different solution to a fundamental question: Who is really in charge of whom? In my recent podcast, JasimAzawiShow,…
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America at the edge: Lessons from Rome, warnings from history
Empires rarely recognize the moment their power begins to slip. The Romans didn’t. The Ottomans didn’t. The British certainly didn’t. The causes differ – corruption, revolts, economic stagnation – but as Edward Gibbon wrote in his majestic book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the through-line of imperial…
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The vanishing future of the Arab world: climate, corruption, and the AI divide
The Arab world is standing at a precipice. Climate change is accelerating at twice the global average across the region. Water scarcity threatens to erase up to 14 per cent of GDP by 2050. Illiteracy and failing education systems leave millions unprepared for the AI revolution already reshaping economies elsewhere.…
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The ruptured mirror: How 7 October broke the Israeli narrative
The world beyond 7 October 2023 is not the same. It is a world that has finally seen beyond the decades-old narrative of a perpetually vulnerable Israel, whose actions were always justified by existential fear. The brutal atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza have inflamed world condemnations. Still, more importantly,…
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Thank you, Netanyahu, for stripping Zionism of its lies and revealing Israel’s odious nature
A historic reckoning is underway in the corridors of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The South African genocide case against Israel—joined by Brazil, Ireland, Turkey, Chile, and seven other nations—isn’t just a legal proceeding but a fundamental turn of the corner, a sea change in the way…