Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Karam Nama
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Coercive diplomacy: What does the call between Netanyahu and al-Sharaa really mean?
The phone call between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Syrian interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa—following months of firing salvos via fighter jets, missiles, and third-party intermediaries, alongside strikes that targeted the courtyard of the Syrian Ministry of Defence and the perimeter of the presidential palace—was no ordinary diplomatic formality. Rather,…
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The politics of gratitude: The corruption no one sees
Not all political corruption begins with money. Sometimes, it begins with success. Public imagination has long been trained to look for corruption in suitcases of cash, shady contracts, and secret deals. Yet some of the most consequential distortions of political judgment emerge from a far subtler source: a politician’s emotional…
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Political failure, not economic shock, unmasks Iraq
The grievance-laden rhetoric delivered by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi before parliament is a transparent attempt to package a systemic crisis as an unpreventable “external shock.” His claim that Iraq is suffering under an “economic blockade” due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the halting of…
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Signing the protocol to surrender the world’s throne
When Donald Trump sat in the White House surrounded by Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Greg Brockman, and Dario Amodei, the scene was far more than an administrative meeting between an American president and executives of major tech corporations. It was a grand, awe-inspiring theatrical display laden…
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Withdrawal and non-withdrawal: The naivete of comparing Iraq to Afghanistan
The prevailing media tendency to draw parallels between the exit of U.S. forces from Iraq and the humiliating, chaotic collapse in Afghanistan reveals a profound analytical naivete—one that is perhaps intentionally cultivated. Such comparisons overlook a crucial structural distinction: the difference between a shattered military campaign and the institutionalization of…
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The inexhaustible commodity
Sophie Vallier, the sharp-witted innkeeper’s daughter in the quiet French village of Painponçain, was among the earliest pioneers of algorithmic dynamic pricing—long before algorithms existed. As the story goes—one we are all too fond of believing—Napoleon Bonaparte stopped at her inn in 1814 and ordered a simple omelet. When presented…
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Fierce rhetoric and cowardly pragmatism in the Iranian theatre
Nothing exposes the fragility of totalitarian diplomacy quite like the panic that precedes submission. When one reads leaks from media outlets affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—chief among them Tasnim—lamenting the fury of “hardliners” over Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s meetings in New York with envoys of the Trump…
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The dual failure: How Conservatives and Labour inherited—and deepened—Britain’s ruin
When I first arrived in London, the country stood on the threshold of a historic shift. The public mood was electric, buoyed by the anticipation of ending decades of Conservative rule—from Margaret Thatcher’s iron certainty to John Major’s exhausted pragmatism. I remember asking my university professor at the time—a veteran…
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Al‑Zaidi and the age of the unqualified politician
The age of the unqualified politician is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a reality that becomes painfully visible every time a press conference turns into a stage for intellectual shallowness. The remarks made by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al‑Zaidi during his visit to Berlin were not a slip of…
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Why the world needs faith, the only remaining sanctuary of serenity
The age-old debate between faith and atheism emerged alongside the very first stirrings of human consciousness. It is a centuries-long conflict that has consumed rivers of ink and fueled fierce intellectual battles, yet its historical calculus has yielded nothing tangible to alter the core of human suffering. Atheists have gained…
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When allies change the rules: A language Israel has never liked hearing
The United Kingdom’s decision to impose sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank was not a routine legal measure, nor a narrow trade restriction. It was a political declaration—clear, deliberate, and unusually blunt—that London, alongside eleven other states, has finally chosen to speak in a language Israel has…
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An awakening question: From Rousseau to Al-Husri
On a summer day in 1749, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was walking through the streets of Paris when he stumbled upon a question posted by the Academy of Dijon: Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification and elevation of morals? It was meant as an intellectual competition,…
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Is removing Netanyahu enough to change Israel?
The question is not an attempt to predict the outcome of Israel’s upcoming election on October 27, nor is it a wager on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fall or survive. Israel’s political landscape today is far too fractured, anxious, and ideologically rigid to be reduced to a single…
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Trump’s tug-of-war with Iran: A game of perpetual attrition
On the international political stage, war does not always manifest as a decisive confrontation that births a triumphant victor and leaves a shattered loser. Instead, the conflict between Donald Trump’s administration and the regime of Velayat-e Faqih in Tehran has devolved into a tedious, exhausting tug-of-war, a game of mutual…
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Syrian Kurds offer the region a lesson in nationhood
When I look back at my university years—sharing a dorm room with a Kurdish colleague—I am reminded of a country that once understood unity not as a slogan but as a lived experience. Iraq, despite its flaws, carried an instinctive sense of cohesion before its maps began to fracture. That…
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Rowan Williams: Guardian of the soul in an era of commercialised faith
In an age when sacred beliefs are traded in the political marketplace and theology is weaponized as a cudgel to intimidate the other, Dr. Rowan Williams—former Archbishop of Canterbury and distinguished scholar—stands as an exceptional moral and human figure. He restores faith to its pure ethical essence, transforming belief into…
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Half a million in London… millions stuffed in water jugs in Baghdad
The news that Chris Wormald, the former head of the UK civil service, has been awarded £500,000 in compensation—more than half a million dollars—after being forced out of his post without justification, is the kind of story that makes a British reader pause in disbelief. It is a large sum…
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Iraq’s electricity crisis: Fifty degrees of cold promises
In Iraq, you can replace the name of Ali Falih al-Zaidi—the current prime minister—with any prime minister since 2003, and nothing in meaning or outcome would change. Every leader has made the same promise, every leader has spoken of a “turning point,” and every leader has left office without moving…
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Political assassinations: Libya’s yesterday and today
The killing of Libyan journalist and BBC broadcaster Mohamed Mustafa Ramadan outside London’s Central Mosque in 1980, and the recent assassination of Major General Fawzi al‑Mansouri, head of military intelligence in eastern Libya, as he left a mosque in Benghazi, are separated by nearly half a century. Yet the architecture…
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Fear: The new tax on power
Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger wasn’t boasting when he said, “Cowardice is not an option in this business.” He wasn’t celebrating personal bravery either. He was simply acknowledging a reality: he no longer has the luxury of being afraid. Papperger has lived under police protection for years due to suspected Russian…
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Ali Al-Zaidi may be the failure Iraq needs
We should at least entertain the theoretical possibility that Iraq’s new prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, is not a fully formed Iranian proxy in the mold of Nouri al-Maliki or Adel Abdul Mahdi. Imagine the following scenario: al-Zaidi speaks the loud language of reform, but governs with cold pragmatism. His promises…
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Between Tehran’s defiance and Trump’s volatility: When falsehood becomes political reality
The world today feels as if it is being governed by two master fabulists—Tehran and Donald Trump—each bending reality in his own way, each forcing the geopolitical arena to treat falsehood as fact and denial as statecraft. When Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, declares that “there are currently no…
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For the first time, money is not the issue
In modern history, rarely has there been a moment of global consensus quite like this: an absolute, unified rejection by football confederations around the world of FIFA’s plan to sell a commercial stake in its tournaments, including the World Cup, to private investors through a newly proposed $20 billion entity,…
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Smart glasses that strip the world bare — and strip us with it
For decades, travellers returning from Europe to the Middle East carried stories that were more fantasy than fact—tales shaped not by reality but by the hunger of societies that knew the world only through hearsay. One of the most persistent myths of the 1940s claimed that Europeans wore special glasses…