International Policies

This paper was prepared based on a dialogue session convened by the Politics and Society Institute with journalist and U.S. affairs expert Imad Al-Rawashdeh, with the participation of a group of researchers, politicians, and journalists, to discuss the U.S. elections and their regional implications. Introduction The ongoing transformations in American politics reveal a landscape far more complex than the traditional…

The question today is no longer whether Israel’s war on Gaza has changed Israel’s image in the West — that much is already evident in opinion polls, on university campuses, in the streets, and in the media, and most clearly among younger generations. The more important question is: has this shift moved from the moral and protest arenas into the…

The war that began on 28 February 2026 has outlived its ceasefires. The pattern is now diagrammable:[1] Iran interferes with shipping near the Strait of Hormuz; the United States retaliates; Tehran hits American assets across neighbouring Arab states — including Qatar, even as Doha mediates; mediators urge restraint; talks resume; a temporary understanding is reached; the underlying disputes remain untouched;…

There is a kind of catastrophe worse than being blindsided: the one you were warned about, in plain language, by the people whose job is to know — and chose to discount. The 2026 war against Iran is of this kind. Its defining feature is not an intelligence failure but a failure of reception. The event the intelligence correctly predicted…

The problem with major wars is not simply that they leave questions unanswered, but that they often invite explanations that appear more complete than the evidence allows. The wider the war becomes and the more complex its trajectories grow, the more likely it is that narratives will emerge promising to explain it through a single cause. With repetition, that cause…

The military escalation between Washington and Tehran in June and July 2026 was neither merely a successive exchange of strikes nor simply the abrupt collapse of provisional understandings reached only weeks earlier. Framing the crisis exclusively through the lens of military operations produces an incomplete reading. What is unfolding in the Gulf extends beyond a contest over military targets or…

The Politics and Society Institute has published an analytical paper titled “Perceptions of War: The Symbolic Structure of the Sixth Generation of Warfare.” The paper examines the Iran–Israel–U.S. confrontation and its regional implications through a lens that focuses on the battle of narratives, propaganda, disinformation, and artificial intelligence, rather than on the military trajectory alone. The paper, which emerged from…

In the winter of 1950, Ankara dispatched a force of approximately 5,000 soldiers to the Korean Peninsula-a war that was not its own-for one reason alone: to convince a newly emerging Western alliance that Türkiye deserved membership. The price was steep. Nearly 700 Turkish soldiers lost their lives in exchange for an admission ticket that would not be granted until…

The announcement of the Lebanon–Israel Framework Agreement in June 2026 did not constitute merely another negotiating round in the long-standing conflict between the two countries. Rather, it reflected a significant shift in the strategic approach adopted by both the United States and Israel toward Lebanon. The document was not conceived simply as an instrument to consolidate a ceasefire or establish…

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran was accompanied by political expectations that went far beyond degrading Tehran’s nuclear program or weakening its military capabilities. In Washington and Tel Aviv, many believed the conflict would become a founding moment for a different Iran—either by producing a political order more closely aligned with the West and less committed to its anti-Western ideology, or…