Two elements stand out in the present situation in the Middle East: the intelligence failure in not seeing the attack coming and the ongoing attempt to hijack the political agenda in many Arab countries. The intelligence failure is the second in less than two years by most Western countries, particularly the European countries. In early […]
Israel has warned the population of northern Gaza, some 1.1 million people, to move south as the army, the IDF, prepares to enter. Hamas may stop the move to show proof of local support and use its own people as human shields in the forthcoming offensive. Hamas may be proudly spreading the recordings of the […]
There are deep stirrings beneath the surface of the Hamas vicious slaughter against Israel on October 7. A political victory by Hamas and its sponsors, perhaps an extremist wing in Iran, might frighten almost every Muslim government in the world. Over the past decades, and especially in recent years since the war against ISIS, many […]
The ongoing war against Hamas needs a strategy and a political horizon before a military one. What is Israel’s future: a state integrated within itself, in the region, or under siege? There has clearly been an Israeli intelligence failure with the Hamas attack, but more profoundly, there has been a strategy failure.[1] The idea that Hamas […]
China’s present troubles with the US might be rooted in a misperception of what should have been done in the past. What did China do when America struggled in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004-2005? Rather than helping it in these difficulties, Beijing kept aloof politically and slowed down the economic and political reforms it had […]
The perception abroad, and not only in Western countries, is that often China is a threat. Yet, many have a hard time pinpointing why it is so and, thus, what kind of threat China is. China has no vaunted goal of Hitlerian global conquest, nor does it have the old Soviet ambitions for universal communist […]
In theory, it is a peninsula, but actually, for all practical purposes, it is an island. South Korea is separated from the rest of the Asian continent by its intractable half-brother to the North, making any land contact with its neighbors impossible. The gap between the reality (being an island) and the theoretical aspiration (being […]
