Xi Returns to Cairo: Why Israel Should Pay Attention
A decade after his previous visit to Egypt, Chinese President Xi Jinping has returned to Cairo at a markedly different moment in both Egyptian-Chinese relations and Middle Eastern geopolitics. His visit, following the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek and coinciding with the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Egypt, is more than […]
Iraq After the Fall of Iran
The post-2003 order in Iraq has rested on a fragile and unstable balance of power. The political dominance of Shi’ite political parties and their militias has been underwritten by powerful Iranian support and influence, a semi-autonomous Kurdish north, and residual U.S. ties that coexisted uneasily with Tehran’s outsize role. The eventual collapse of the Islamic […]
Legitimacy Is a Front in the War – But the Present Israeli Government Effectively Abandoned It.
Upon the third anniversary of the Hamas attack, practically every Israeli thought back to October 7th and the days that followed. Our memories. How it felt. How that day found each of us and how it changed our lives forever. What fewer of us remembered – at this point in time – is how our […]
It’s Time for Israel to Declare Defeat
The PR war is lost. Owning it may be the strongest move Israel has left. Late last year, Benjamin Netanyahu told a room of evangelical leaders in Palm Beach that Israel had fought on seven fronts since October 7, but that there was now an eighth: the war for Western opinion. Israel has since allocated […]
Sewage Without Borders
Gaza’s sewage has reached Israel’s taps. We had thirty years of warnings and chances to prevent it. The squills are up on the hills, white and upright as surveyors’ stakes — which is more or less what they were since antiquity. Farmers here planted them in rows to mark where one field ended and the […]
Should Vance or Rubio be the Republican nominee in 2028?
The Failure of American Isolationism in Iran and the Republican Choice for 2028 The case against JD Vance is not about a memorandum. It is about a policy, and about the kind of failure that falls on the leader who argued it into being. A policy is different from a deal. A deal has terms […]
Is Russia A Country or a Terrorist State?
For more than a decade, Russia has waged a war of aggression that is directed against Ukraine while systematically terrorizing its civilian population. Missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure have become increasingly systematic. Since August, air-raid alerts have at times seemed almost continuous. Schools, hospitals, energy facilities, transportation networks, and other […]
Nuclear Deterrence Needs Time, Not Just a Human in the Loop
Governments increasingly promise that artificial intelligence will never be allowed to decide whether nuclear weapons are used. The principle is important. A machine should not authorize an action capable of killing millions and transforming the international system. Yet preserving a human “in the loop” does not necessarily preserve meaningful human control. Long before a national […]
Hamas’s billion-dollar financial network
The September 2026 elimination by the IDF of two Gaza-based money changers, Jabr Moqbel, head of the Moqbel currency-exchange network, and, days later, Shadi Abu Hasira, a central money changer in Hamas’s military wing who ran the Geneva exchange network, highlights an important reality: Hamas’s financial system is under sustained pressure, but it remains functional, […]
DANGEROUSLY IGNORED DIFFERENCES<br>DONALD TRUMP, “FRICTION” AND NUCLEAR WAR
“Friction is the difference between war on paper and war as it actually is.”Carl von Clausewitz, On War From the start of his war against Iran, US President Donald J. Trump has misunderstood nuclear war and nuclear deterrence. Conspicuously, he has assumed, without tangible evidence or sound logical argument, a direct correlation between the magnitude of his […]
