Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Kurniawan Arif Maspul
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The funeral that reveals a world divided
A casket draped in black makes its slow procession through Tehran, past millions of mourners whose chests beat in unison against the late-summer heat. Red fists—the funeral’s symbol—rise above a sea of black-clad bodies, fists clenched not in grief alone but in defiance. The slogan is stark: “We must rise”.…
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Lebanon’s Washington framework entrenches power, not order
Diplomacy often celebrates the signing of agreements. History judges whether those agreements change realities or merely rename them. The trilateral framework negotiated in Washington between Lebanon, Israel and the United States belongs, at least in its current form, to the latter category. Marketed as the ‘beginning of the beginning’ of…
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Lebanon paid the price for a ceasefire that never existed
There are moments in international affairs when language itself becomes part of the violence. Lebanon’s latest tragedy may be one of them. More than 150 Israeli strikes reportedly hit southern Lebanon overnight, leaving dozens dead and hundreds injured. Entire neighbourhoods were shattered before sunrise. Families fled once again along roads…
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Did the boomerang war prove Iran’s power to endure?
When coercion lacks clarity, the weapon turns back on the hand that threw it. One hundred and ten days of American and Israeli bombardment. A relentless naval blockade. The proclaimed objective: to cripple Iran’s nuclear ambition, shatter its missile arsenal, and break the back of the Islamic Republic. And now?…
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Iran won, power no longer looks the same
The most dangerous mistake in international affairs is to confuse military destruction with strategic success. That mistake now risks obscuring one of the most consequential geopolitical shifts in the modern Middle East. For decades, the United States and its allies defined victory through familiar metrics: air superiority, precision strikes, technological…
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Iran needs its peacemaker, not its hardliners
The world is watching a remarkable possibility emerge from one of the most dangerous geopolitical rivalries of the modern era: a potential US–Iran agreement that could ease regional tensions, reopen economic channels, reduce military escalation, and create a pathway away from perpetual confrontation. Yet as diplomats inch towards compromise, the…
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Can the US host the World Cup while shutting out the Middle East?
In March 2023, FIFA moved with remarkable speed. Indonesia lost the right to host the Under-20 World Cup after political opposition emerged to Israel’s participation, a team that had qualified on merit. The governing body’s message was unmistakable: footballers must not become collateral damage in geopolitical disputes. Players had done…
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Syria’s new buffer zone or the birth of another permanent occupation?
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 was supposed to mark the end of an era. After more than five decades of dynastic rule and nearly fourteen years of civil war, Syria finally stood before a rare historical opening: the possibility of rebuilding a shattered state, restoring sovereignty,…
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The world watches as Israel turns law into ashes
The latest exchange between Israel and Iran in June 2026 has been widely framed as another dangerous escalation in an already combustible region. Yet focusing solely on Iranian missiles risks obscuring a far more consequential reality. Iran’s strike did not emerge from a geopolitical vacuum. It arrived after months of…
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If Lebanon has no future, neither does the region
Nearly half a century after Israeli tanks first crossed into southern Lebanon, a troubling question hangs over the region: how many times can the same military strategy fail before it is recognised as a political dead end? From Operation Litani in 1978 to the invasion of 1982, from the 2006…
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What happens to the Red Sea when Somaliland is dragged into proxy wars
The world’s attention remains fixed on Gaza, southern Lebanon, and the exchange of fire between Israel and Iran’s network of regional allies. Yet another front is quietly emerging hundreds of kilometres away, on the African shore of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. It is a development receiving far less scrutiny than…
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The Hajj ceasefire the Middle East never expected
As missiles crossed the Gulf and oil traders braced for another regional inferno, an altogether different procession unfolded in Mecca. More than 1.5 million Muslims arrived for the 2026 Hajj under the shadow of a US–Israeli war against Iran, a conflict that had already rattled shipping lanes, shaken energy markets,…
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Has the Flotilla finally exposed the West’s moral double standard?
The image that ricocheted across the world was not a missile strike, nor another skyline collapsing into Gaza’s dust. It was far quieter than that. Dozens of civilians — aid workers, doctors, parliamentarians, students and activists from 44 countries — kneeling on the deck of a seized flotilla in the…
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Why the US–China Summit may decide the Middle East’s next war
There are moments in international politics when geography becomes destiny. The Strait of Hormuz—barely 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point—is once again one of those places. Nearly 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes through that narrow artery every day, carrying not just energy, but the fragile assumptions…
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Nakba is not a memory; it is a system still in motion
Every year on 15 May, Palestinians mark the Nakba — the catastrophe of 1948. Yet to describe the Nakba as history is to misunderstand its enduring architecture. It was never a single event sealed in black-and-white photographs of frightened families clutching iron keys to homes they would never see again.…
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Germany’s moral reckoning in Lebanon
Germany has long spoken of Israel not merely as a partner, but as a matter of Staatsräson — a reason of state, a moral obligation etched into the national conscience after the Holocaust. Angela Merkel declared in 2008 that Israel’s security was ‘never negotiable’. Annalena Baerbock echoed that sentiment after…
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If holy sites can be levelled, what’s next for international law?
On the first day of May, in the quiet southern Lebanese village of Yaroun, a monastery that had stood for generations disappeared in a cloud of dust. The Sisters of the Holy Saviour monastery and its adjoining school — described by Lebanon’s National News Agency as one of the region’s…
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Bab el-Mandeb cannot become a gateway for recognition politics
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has always carried an ominous name — the ‘Gate of Tears’. Today, it feels painfully literal. This narrow maritime corridor linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden carries not only more than 10 per cent of global seaborne trade, but also the accumulated tensions…
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What if the West has been misreading Iran for 40 years?
The enduring temptation in Western strategic thinking is to treat Iran as a problem to be managed rather than a civilisation to be understood. That misreading has proven costly. Beneath the daily churn of sanctions, proxy skirmishes, and nuclear brinkmanship lies a far deeper story—one of continuity, identity, and power…
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When Lebanon’s ceasefire still hunts journalists, truth becomes prey
There is a particular cruelty in silencing those whose sole weapon is a camera, a notebook, or a voice. The killing of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in southern Lebanon is not an isolated tragedy; it is part of a pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore, and even harder to…
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Why should the Middle East trust a superpower that breaks its own rules?
A narrow ribbon of water, barely 33 kilometres wide at its tightest point, has once again exposed the fragility of global order. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply flows, has become less a trade corridor and more a theatre of strategic…
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Is Sudan too far for the world to care
Silence, in international politics, is rarely neutral. In Sudan, it has become lethal. Three years into a civil war that has displaced more people than any other conflict on earth, the scale of devastation sits in jarring contrast with its absence from global consciousness. Since fighting erupted on 15 April…
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The victory Iran names, the diplomatic space it unexpectedly opens
In a world fatigued by endless war cycles and diplomatic stalemates, moments that signal even the possibility of strategic recalibration deserve careful, even hopeful, attention. The recent statement attributed to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council—asserting not merely survival but a structured Political and military outcome following confrontation with the United…
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When the world moves faster for oil than for lives
There is a peculiar moral inversion unfolding in the waters of the Persian Gulf. As oil tankers idle and insurance markets shudder, more than forty countries have mobilised with urgency and precision to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—a narrow maritime corridor through which roughly 20 per cent of the world’s…