The warm waters of the Gulf look quiet but such tranquillity hardly reflects the conflicts this region continues to generate. The euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring is long gone, what remains is a region that is rich with resources and burdened with easily manipulated history that is in a state of reckless transition. No one can see what the …

The map of the modern Middle East, a political and economic pivot in the international order, is in tatters. Syria’s ruinous war is the turning point. But the centrifugal forces of rival beliefs, tribes and ethnicities’ empowered by unintended consequences of the Arab Spring’ are also pulling apart a region defined by European colonial powers a century ago and defended …

In the US, spying is a big business. The NSA’s new centre for stocking computer records at Bluffdale, Utah will cost on its own $2 billion, but the agency has a ‘secret-defense’ budget which, for all its cloak of secrecy, is at least five times that. It’s a slush fund involving the huge defense contractors like Lockheed-Martin and Endgame as …

Netanyahu’s speech at the UN General Assembly was a political impudence. He showed the world that he has not understood the signs of times. He seemed out of place with diplomacy and still caught up in aggressive rhetoric. He threatened Iran with an attack. President Obama should be forewarned that the US would not help Israel in a war of …

The budding rapprochement between the United States and Iran has stirred a debate among the Arab intelligentsia, especially in the Gulf region, mainly due to its geographical proximity with Iran and host of other issues. Their concerns stem primarily from the longstanding Western geopolitical interests in the Middle East and the timings of the initiation of this political flirtation between …

Given that the US retains a significant military advantage over China, America could support such a partnership without incurring significant security risks. Has the world entered a new era of chaos? America’s vacillating policy toward Syria certainly suggests so. Indeed, the bitter legacy of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by the 2008 financial crisis, has made the United …

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a Eurasian security organisation, which was founded in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Except for Uzbekistan, the other countries had been members of the Shanghai Five, founded in 1996; but after its inclusion in 2001, the members renamed the organisation. During the SCO’s June 2002 …

There is a reason to be cautious. Both sides in the Syrian civil war have committed atrocities and both sides have misrepresented photos and falsified reports. But the burden appears to be on the government’s side. Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which is above partisanship as well as devoted to saving lives, has reported that the hospitals, it supports in Damascus, have treated …

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks proceed within a framework of assumptions that merit careful thought. One prevailing assumption is that there are two options: either a two-state settlement will be reached, or there will be a “shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality — a state ‘from the sea to the river’,” an outcome posing “an immediate …

From outside China, the Bo Xilai trial looks like the Chinese news event of the year, one of the preoccupations of Western media, along with corporate corruption and the clampdown on American and European companies. Yet these issues are no more than sideshows to the most important economic event of recent times; the unveiling and ratification of a major programme …