Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Ronny P Sasmita
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Revitalizing Indonesia’s economic diplomacy engine in the Middle East
Over the past decade, Indonesia’s economic engagement with the Arab world and Turkey has remained trapped in a traditional pattern, heavily reliant on fossil energy trade and the export of domestic labor. Yet entering the 2025–2026 period, a fundamental shift is underway. Under new national leadership, Indonesia is recalibrating its…
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Dimona’s shadow: How Israel’s nuclear monopoly warps Middle East security
The skies over Tehran and Natanz may still carry the lingering haze of joint U.S.-Israeli operations. Yet the world, filtered through the dominant voice of Western media, continues to be fed a singular narrative: the latent danger of Iran’s uranium enrichment, perpetually described as being “one step away” from a…
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Dick Cheney and the birth of America’s forever war
The death of Dick Cheney at the age of eighty four closes a chapter in American political history that continues to cast a long and often troubling shadow across the world. Few figures of the twenty first century came to define the projection of American power, the tactics of national…
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The shallowness of the Gaza Plan is finally showing
In the wake of the so-called Gaza Plan, both Israel and Hamas have once again crossed the boundaries they had vowed to respect. The plan, presented to the world as a humanitarian breakthrough, was supposed to mark the beginning of a fragile calm after two years of unimaginable devastation in…
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The hypocrisy of India’s democracy and why the Middle East should rethink its ties
The recent case reported in international media of Muslims in India being harassed over their religious identity once again reveals the uncomfortable truth that India’s democracy is steadily eroding its moral foundations. It is no longer credible to argue that these incidents are isolated or accidental. They reflect a systemic…
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Israel’s latest strikes on Gaza expose the fragile illusion of peace
The latest Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have once again exposed the frailty of what the world had hoped would be a lasting truce. Barely days after the so-called Gaza Plan was endorsed in Cairo as a new framework for postwar reconstruction and governance, the region is back to the grimly…
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Rebuilding Gaza, undermining Palestine?
When the Gaza Plan was first introduced, it was hailed as a bold humanitarian and diplomatic initiative, a roadmap to reconstruction after one of the most devastating wars in recent memory. Backed by Washington, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and a coalition of Western and Arab donors, the plan promised to rebuild…
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Hamas could fight the war, but not the Arab history
History in the Arab world moves in circles. When Hamas announced that it would accept parts of the Gaza Plan proposed by Donald Trump’s administration, many analysts interpreted it merely as a tactical move, a desperate attempt by a battered movement to survive. Yet, beyond the surface of politics and…
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Trump’s Gaza Plan: America’s silent occupation for Israel
When Donald Trump unveiled his so called Gaza Plan, it was framed as an initiative for stability and reconstruction after years of bloodshed. But beneath the glossy diplomatic packaging, the plan is not a vision for Palestinian self determination. It is, instead, a strategy of silent occupation. Through the Gaza…
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The fragile peace of Trump’s Gaza plan
The Gaza plan unveiled by Donald Trump and reluctantly accepted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been described as bold, controversial, and even theatrical. And indeed, it is all of these things. But it is also something else, perhaps the only available mechanism, however imperfect, to bring a pause…
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Settler colonialism continues, the world will become a new hell
The tragedy unfolding in Gaza today is not merely a military clash or a short lived war between Israel and Palestinian armed groups. It is the most acute expression of settler colonialism, a mode of domination that, as Lorenzo Veracini explains in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), does not…
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Trump’s UN speech, Palestine and the futility of Western recognition
Donald Trump’s 23 September speech at the United Nations General Assembly was never going to be subtle. True to form, the US president turned what is traditionally a stage for diplomacy into a spectacle of nationalist swagger, disdain for multilateral institutions, and open contempt for the very ideals the UN…
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Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the United States’ waning credibility
The latest round of violence in Gaza has once again revealed the unrelenting brutality of Israel’s military operations against Palestinians. In recent months, Israeli strikes have devastated civilian infrastructure, killed thousands of non-combatants, and deepened the humanitarian catastrophe in the besieged enclave. As the UN Secretary General António Guterres recently…