A Turning Point: The Gulf Reorders Itself, and Pakistan Moves to the Centre
For eighty years, the security of the Middle East ran through Washington. Gulf monarchies bought American arms and hosted American bases, and in return they assumed the guarantee would hold when it counted. Today that assumption is being retired. What is taking its place is a regional order built by the region’s own powers,…
Papering Over the Fissures: The Illusion of Consensus in an Expanded BRICS
The eighteenth BRICS summit closed in New Delhi with a joint declaration in hand, a result that India’s government has presented as a diplomatic triumph. Given that two earlier ministerial meetings this year had failed to produce any agreed text at all, the achievement is not trivial. Yet a closer reading of the New…
Somaliland and the Middle Eastern Divide
The Horn of Africa has rapidly transitioned from a peripheral maritime flank into a primary battleground for Middle Eastern proxy competition. The core of this friction lies in a concerted attempt by specific actors to embed a structural divide within the region by weaponising Somaliland’s separatist ambitions. This strategy of fragmentation threatens to destabilise…
