Lebanese politicians are scrambling at home and security chiefs are conferring abroad to form a new government in line with French-set deadlines. The new government is expected to embody a new political pact called for by French President Emmanuel Macron during his first visit to Beirut after the deadly port explosion on 4 August. Macron…
The British press seem to be doing a rancorous business of late of fabricating stories about Iran, Hezbollah and China. It’s almost as though these subjects are fair game for the old newsroom saying, once repeated often by hacks at the Daily Express in the 80s “make it sing, make it dance, but above all,…
Time was in the 1990s, even after 2000, that any country in danger of political chaos or “implosion” – a word I still instinctively loath, along with “epicentre” – was in danger of being “Lebanised”. Djibouti would become “the Beirut of the Horn of Africa” and the Balkans, inevitably, subject to “Lebanonisation”. For a…
What I think of as the cynical left are once again berating the progressive critical left, myself included, for failing to write what they want written about Covid-19. I take this as a kind of unintended compliment: that they think we can write about their concerns better than they can themselves. But even if I…
Iran has an extremely rare opportunity to greatly improve its regional reputation by offering to host peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan to replace the failed OSCE Minsk Process, though it might experience intense Russian resistance if it opts for this course of action unless Tehran can convince Moscow that its proposal stands the credible…
Remember the Brezhnev Doctrine? The informally named foreign policy put forth by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968 following the Prague Spring, by which no communist country was to be allowed to abandon communism or even leave its sphere of influence, at the cost of armed intervention by other communist countries? It was supposed to…
