Iran’s greatest strategic success is not defeating the United States or Israel but demonstrating — through a war that ended not in “unconditional surrender” but in a negotiated peace deal — that neither can unilaterally impose a new Middle Eastern order without Iranian consent. The Failure of Coercive Regional Engineering For years, American and Israeli […]

At the 23rd Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 held in Singapore and attended by 44 countries, the real story was not the reaffirmation of the US-led Indo-Pacific order but its slow, public unraveling. The Speech That Misread the Room The opening plenary belongs, by Shangri-La tradition, to Washington. This year, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared, […]

Donald Trump’s attempt to tie an Iran peace settlement to a mandatory expansion of the Abraham Accords reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how dramatically the Middle East has changed since the Gaza war and why old diplomatic formulas no longer work. Donald Trump has a habit of mistaking the décor of diplomacy for its substance. […]

Iran exposed the fragility beneath American air dominance. Beijing is studying every loss. When the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran on February 28, 2026, Washington anticipated swift, overwhelming dominance. The arithmetic seemed straightforward: the world’s most advanced air force against a sanctions-hobbled regional power. The result was a cataclysmic failure. A […]

The I2U2 — that much-heralded “West Asian Quad” of India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States — is gathering dust. Launched with fanfare in July 2022 and billed as a transformative framework for regional integration, it has produced little of consequence since its inaugural summit. Progress stalled through 2024, and its April 2025 revival […]

The back-to-back summits in Beijing revealed not only China’s growing diplomatic confidence but also the emergence of a deeper Sino-Russian axis that increasingly challenges the foundations of the US-led global order. Donald Trump flew home from Beijing with Boeing orders and a framework label. Forty-eight hours later, Vladimir Putin touched down at the same airport, […]

The Middle East is not being remade; it is being contested widely and publicly. The emerging alignment between Israel and the United Arab Emirates appears, at first glance, to signal a decisive geopolitical shift. Yet beneath the optics of normalization and wartime cooperation lies a more complex struggle: not over whether the region will change, […]

New U.S. sanctions against Chinese companies just before Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing highlight the growing tendency to use economic pressure as a primary instrument of American diplomacy. Donald Trump plans to visit China from May 13 to 15. His baggage includes a load of sanctions instead of concessions. Days before his visit to China, […]