White House and Pentagon officials have said they will hold Iran accountable for attacks on US bases by Iranian proxies. US troops in Iraq and Syria came under a spate of new rocket and drone attacks over the weekend, as the Pentagon sent an Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarine into the region …

Introduction Hamas’s surprise October 7, 2023 terror attack, in which over 1,400 were brutally murdered and another 241 (at last count) taken hostage, will go down in infamy. As Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashal boasted on October 26 on Egypt’s Sada Elbalad TV, the Russians told him that this attack …

SWI swissinfo.ch: Often using military force, Russia has imposed pro-Russian separatist movements in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and, of course, in eastern Ukraine. However, Putin has always defended himself against criticism, claiming that NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999. Is that comparison fair? Oliver Jens Schmitt: No, they’re two completely …

Lebanese militia Hezbollah will step up attacks on bordering Israeli areas and US military sites in the Middle East up to a “complete confrontation” if Israel continues its offensive in the Gaza Strip, Naim Qassem, the group’s deputy secretary general, said in an interview with NBC News. “Hezbollah participates [in …

Israeli-Saudi Normalization Is on Hold—but Not off the Table Hamas is going to be able to claim very few victories in its war with Israel, but one that it has already notched is an abrupt halt in the momentum toward a U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Israeli-Saudi …

The West Must Stop Putin From Provoking Conflict in the Balkans In late September, Serbia deployed advanced weapons to its border with Kosovo, in what amounted to one of the largest Serbian military buildups since the end of the Kosovo war nearly a quarter century ago. In the United States, …

Summary:As the war continues, deterioration at the level of governance, security, and public order will likely be deepened by the absence of a political horizon, diplomatic process, or future prospects. Initial reactions to Hamas’s October 7 bloody attack on Israelis and Israel’s declaration of war focused on the short term: …

As Israel speaks openly about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s Palestinians, Western countries are nowhere to be seen or heard. Israel has made great efforts over the decades to redefine its ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine in 1948 as being a consequence of the Arabs’ voluntary departure …

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 upended three major developments that had been taking place in the Middle East. Hamas’s surprise attack against Israeli towns around Gaza on October 7 upended several dynamics that had increasingly defined regional politics in recent years. The first and most obvious one was the …

Plenty of factors could expand the conflict in Gaza, which is why a ceasefire is now needed to avoid the worst. Hamas’s operational success on October 7 has placed Iran, and with it Hezbollah, between a rock and a hard place as they try to calibrate their response to the …