War and the Pitfalls of Truce
Charles Chartouni 30/09 09:08 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
Lebanon is in a state of war, and this reality should be acknowledged if we are to cope with its manifold consequences. The first question to be raised is with whom, because it’s the starting point before engaging the issues that attach to it: the war is between the State of Israel and Hezbollah and not between Israel and Lebanon. The ...
Ambivalence and the Impending Wars
Charles Chartouni 23/09 09:00 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
Gaza Hamas Hassan Nasrallah US Wars
The United States mediation seems ineffective, and the war is bogging down. Radicalization is continuing on both sides, and the chances of working arrangements are receding by the day. Hamas is not interested in the projected trade-off, and the Israelis, despite their fractured political landscape, are unwilling to consider any political and ...
Iranian Equivocations and the New Cold War
Charles Chartouni 16/09 08:30 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The politics of intentional prevarication are part of the repertoire of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The simulation, the doublespeak, and the outright dissembling are essential keys to understanding the subtexts of its political strategizing. Observers have difficulty pinpointing the true motivations and sifting through the multilayered ...
The Stalemate
Charles Chartouni 09/09 09:30 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The truce negotiations have proven their limitations more and more and have yielded no tangible results. The Iranians are still blocking the venues of communication throughout the Middle East. The Arab countries are still hobbled and unable to move on any issues compromising the future of regional peace. The Israelis are prisoners to their ...
Squaring the Circle
Charles Chartouni 02/09 09:00 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Political analysts are quite puzzled when they observe that negotiations in the Middle East are taking place between the US and the Iranian regime, which claims exclusive representation over the whole region. Twenty-two Arab states have no say over conflicts putting at stake their security, regional peace and international incidences. What is ...
A Decaying Near-East and the Purview of Negotiations
Charles Chartouni 26/08 11:21 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
The striking fact about the ongoing truce negotiations is the nature of their stakes, their partners and their projected outcomes. After 10 months of open-ended wars on three battlefronts, we are left with one successful truce, the comeback of an unhindered course of violence, the looming hazards of a total war destroying whatever is left ...
Is There a Chance for Peace?
Charles Chartouni 19/08 10:32 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
The latest developments in the Near East are of bad omen and the chances of stabilization are improbable in spite of the active diplomatic mediations. As long as the Iranian regime is in control of the political landscape, the chances of serious political evolutions are of a limited scope, let alone uncertain. The uncanny neutralization of the ...
Cutting the Gordian Knots
Charles Chartouni 12/08 10:53 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The ongoing wars in Gaza, South Lebanon and South-West Syria are quite perplexing since we have a hard time imagining their outcomes. What makes these concatenated cycles of violence intractable and open to various entanglements and invariable destructiveness? Aside from the centennial legacy bequeathed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ...
Shifting Paradigms
Charles Chartouni 05/08 09:03 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
Hezbollah Ismail Haniyeh Israel Paradigms
The concomitant assassination of Ismail Haniyeh and Fouad Shukr is a major turning point in the surrogate war which opposes Iran and Israel. This came at the heels of a deadly attack on Israeli territory, whereby the children of Majdel Shams, a Druze town in the Golan Heights were deliberately targeted by Hezbollah. The sudden attack pinpointed ...
Divided We Stand
Charles Chartouni 29/07 10:00 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
Benjamin Netanyahu France United States
If I had to choose a motto to depict, by and large, the international scenery, I would opt for the above-mentioned aphorism. The chaotic landscapes burgeoning, throughout the various geopolitical spectrums, is a quite appropriate representation when it comes to describing the dynamics of implosion on the crossroads between domestic and ...
Elections, the New Cold War and the Simmering International Crises
Charles Chartouni 22/07 10:04 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
European elections, followed by domestic elections in France, the jump-starting of the United States presidential campaigns, the electoral parodies in Venezuela and Iran, and the unhindered war courses in Ukraine, Gaza, South Lebanon, South-West Syria and Sudan are interfacing and reconfiguring the international political scene around tangled ...
Political Variations
Charles Chartouni 15/07 09:00 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
France Macron National Rally New Popular Front
The latest elections in France unveiled the evolving political chasms, the growing political and constitutional discrepancies and the systemic exclusions aimed at hobbling the National Rally (NR), and perpetuating the stigmas and the ostracism against this political formation. Ten million political voters are discounted from the French political ...
Transitions
Charles Chartouni 08/07 09:00 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
The mere observation of the international scene conveys a perplexing picture regarding both international political stability and domestic political evolutions. The parliamentary elections in France, the late European elections, and the incoming presidential elections in the US are challenging on multiple accounts: the sociology of the political ...
Resisting Fascism
Charles Chartouni 01/07 09:00 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Fascism Hezbollah Iran lebanon
The ostentatious takeover of the government of Lebanon by fascist Shiite militancy is no more a secret; it is an established fact. The whole constitutional process is fraudulent and systematically rigged to serve and cover the politics of subversion conducted by Hezbollah and its acolytes. It’s worth mentioning that this policy, far from being a ...
The World Stage and Its Circumlocutions
Charles Chartouni 24/06 08:52 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The G7 summit is a manifest success. The Western powers and their circumstantial partners have demonstrated their ability to engage crucial strategic and security issues, outmaneuver the emerging monolithic blocs, and confront the rising totalitarianism and its incipient power architecture. The invitation of Pope Francis, as a religious leader, a ...
On the Road to Total War
Charles Chartouni 17/06 08:02 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Conflict scenarios are complex and foreshadow cycles of destructive violence resembling total war. Diplomacy has proven ineffective in containing the recurrent rounds of violence and offering an alternative road map to the dominant ideological and strategic impasses and power politics. The Palestinians are still subjected to the sway of the ...
Equivocations of Truce
Charles Chartouni 10/06 09:01 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
US President Joe Biden’s proposal for a lasting truce should be clarified and subjected to further elaboration and incremental amendments if it were to offer a true alternative to the actual doldrums. The sequenced truce framework falls short of its projected objectives unless it specifies the conditions of a sustainable political plan ...
The Interlocking Impasses and Cascading Tragedies
Charles Chartouni 03/06 09:00 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The tragic events of Rafah are quite illustrative of the interlocking impasses that characterize the ongoing war dynamics and their destructive fallouts. The dramatic turn, far from being incidental, reflects the in-built gridlocks of a conflict dynamic meant to perpetuate, feed on intentional victimization and lead to open-ended warfare. The ...
Iran and the End of a Murderous Dystopia
Charles Chartouni 27/05 08:00 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, seems to be the result of technical failures, according to the questionable forensic investigations. Nonetheless, the technical failures unveil the hidden realities of a decaying dictatorship that has nothing to offer after 45 years of undisputed Islamic totalitarianism, failed governance, ...
The American Peace Proposal and the Intricacies of an Ongoing War
Charles Chartouni 20/05 08:46 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
China Joe Biden Saudi Arabia United States
US President Joe Biden has seized on the ongoing war to offer a peace deal that dovetails with a finalized regional strategic understanding between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The settlement of the current conflict should be part of a new strategic vision that aims at extracting the Middle East from the Iranian stranglehold, ...
'Dead Cat Diplomacy,' Political Cynicism and Nihilistic Warmongering
Charles Chartouni 13/05 09:30 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
Aside from pacifist daydreaming and faked humanitarianism, how evitable are the battles in Rafah and South Lebanon? Is the unilateral pressure on Israel likely to forestall the inevitable confrontation on both sides of the border, while Hamas and Hezbollah are still determined to derail diplomatic mediations and engage in long hauled conflicts ...
The Limits of Negotiations
Charles Chartouni 06/05 09:00 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
The ongoing negotiations shepherded by the US and Saudi Arabia offer a suitable platform to tackle the equivocations of a deliberately mounted conflict and its self defeating premises. This conflict is intractable by definition and was initially conceived to prevent the possibility of diplomatic intermediation. The offer of a 40-day truce ...
The Inevitable Wars and the Future of a Deadlocked Conflict
Charles Chartouni 29/04 11:19 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
One wonders why it was assumed that this war was unlikely to stretch out and why Israel’s reaction to October 7, 2023 was going to be muted or limited. The reason is simple: observers outside Israel have failed to understand the magnitude of this massacre, grasp its nature and come to terms with its manifold consequences on Israel’s national ...
The Islamic Republic of Iran and the End of a Murderous Dystopia
Charles Chartouni 22/04 09:00 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
Iran Iranian regime Israel Middle East
The Iranian tempestuous power projections in the larger Middle East, the militarization of national security, the repeated attempts at creating an international authoritarian counter-order, and the false sense of omnipotence and ubiquitousness are hardly tested with the derailment of the war objectives set after the October 7, 2023 attack in South ...
Dilemmas of Security
Charles Chartouni 15/04 09:00 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
The dynamics of violence that were unleashed after the 7th of October in South Israel have mutated into a major strategic turnaround that questions the extant geopolitics in the Near East. The Hamas murderous undertaking turned out to be a major disaster, which led to the destruction of Gaza and its transformation into a graveyard. What’s ...
Political Vignettes and Ongoing Conflicts
Charles Chartouni 08/04 09:00 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
Sergei Shoïgu, the Russian minister of defense, surmises French responsibility behind Moscow’s terror attack since Ukrainians are masterminded by their European mentors and France has defied the moral and political arrogance of the dictator. Relaying the lies of the Russian autocrat, S. Shoïgu perpetuates the culture of dissembling and ...
Equivocations and the Ongoing Wars
Charles Chartouni 01/04 10:36 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
The Russian and Iranian imperial wars in Ukraine, Georgia and the Larger Middle East, their similes throughout the geopolitical landscapes (Taiwan, Philippines, Eastern Armenia, Syrian-Iraqi interfaces/ China, Russia-Turkey-Azerbaidjan…), and their models of governance are redefining the landmarks of renewed fascism, political violence and ...
The Riddles of an Open-Ended Conflict
Charles Chartouni 25/03 09:00 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
Listen to the article [audio mp3="https://thisisbeirut.com.lb/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-ongoing-developments-of-the-war-in-Gaza-and-their-sequels-are-proliferating-in-every.mp3"][/audio] The ongoing developments of the war in Gaza and their sequels are proliferating in every direction, and there is a need to recapitulate the different ...
Dilemmas of War, Dilemmas of Peace
Charles Chartouni 18/03 09:00 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
The unfolding international political dynamics are intertwined and unlikely to be construed unless they correlate with internal political dynamics and ideological subtexts. This primary observation seems compatible with various political evolutions throughout the large geopolitical spectrum and its variations. While reviewing the conflict-ridden ...
Strategic Dilemmas and Treacherous Terrains
Charles Chartouni 11/03 11:52 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
A simple overview of the regional and international landscapes is enough to gauge the gaping voids and expanding hazards. The complexities of the world order are building up on the intersection between internal conflicts and the emerging fault lines of the new Cold War. Tackling these issues from both analytical and strategic standpoints ...