Opinion

The United States is backing the wrong outcome in Syria not because it lacks leverage, but because it lacks courage to define what kind of regional order it actually wants. For years, Washington has relied on Kurdish forces as the most reliable, secular, and pro-Western partner on the ground, especially against ISIS, and then quietly stepped back the moment the shooting … [Read more...] about Stop Treating the Kurds as a Temporary Tool: The West’s Strategic Blind Spot in Syria

Trump’s grotesque gestures, his theatrical aggression, the half-formed policies and sudden reversals, all feel like noise at first glance, but they are actually signals. Ugly ones, yes, but signals nonetheless. They point less to his own strength and more to the hollowness that has been allowed to grow inside other Western democracies. The EU, Canada, and Australia like to see … [Read more...] about Stale Democracies and the Rise of the Grotesque

The idea of an alternative United Nations is already floating in the same strange space where Greenland, Ukrainian rare earths, and Chinese soybeans once lived: big enough to sound historic, vague enough to avoid definition, and emotionally satisfying to a specific audience that doesn’t require follow-up. It’s the perfect next bubble. By invoking a parallel UN, Trump gets to … [Read more...] about The Next Bubble: Trump’s “Alternative UN” and the Politics of Imaginary Institutions

What the U.S. Treasury released on January 21, 2026, reads less like a routine sanctions notice and more like an autopsy report on a long-running deception. For years, Hamas has hidden behind the language of humanitarianism, wrapping its military machine in the moral insulation of clinics, aid groups, and diaspora organizations, and this announcement pulls that cover away with … [Read more...] about Treasury Exposes Hamas’s Charity Fronts, and the Mask Finally Slips

Saudi Arabia did not wake up one morning and suddenly decide to attack Israel in the media; the turn is the product of several very concrete calculations that all ripened at the same time, and together they explain why Riyadh flipped from quiet coordination to open hostility. The first and most immediate reason is that normalization lost its strategic value for the Saudis. For … [Read more...] about Why Saudi Arabia Turned Against Israel: The Specific Reasons Behind the Shift