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The entire Gulf region, and especially Saudi Arabia, is currently experiencing major social and economic transformations. These countries, whose economy once relied solely on oil production, are rapidly opening up to new technologies, AI, global sporting events, and most importantly, art and culture. From Jax, the cultural district of Riyadh, to the AlUla Oasis, Saudi Arabia—the largest country in the Middle East—is investing huge sums to promote art and culture. For the Saudi government, in a society undergoing profound changes, art helps preserve the country’s cultural heritage, transmit traditions and ancestral know-how, while opening the door to cutting-edge artistic projects. Among these ambitious projects, Riyadh Art holds a special place. Launched in 2019 by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, it is part of Vision 2030, the grand development plan of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The project aims to beautify Riyadh, enrich its cultural landscape, and make artworks accessible to all, by turning the city into an open-air art gallery. Since its launch, Riyadh Art has showcased more than 500 artworks created by more than 500 local and international artists. It organized as well more than 6,000 events, and engaged more than 6 million visitors. Ultimately, the project seeks to install over 1,000 iconic works by world-renowned artists throughout the city’s public spaces: residential neighborhoods, parks, bus and metro stations, intersections, bridges, city entrances, touristic sites...etc. To achieve this goal, Riyadh Art encompasses a multitude of projects that deserve attention. Just to cite a few, for example Urban Art Lab installs art galleries in public squares to exhibit works by well-known artists and foster dialogue between artists and residents. Jewels of Riyadh, Art on the Move, and Art in Transit advocate installing award-winning artworks near tourist attractions, major intersections, and bus and metro stops. Among well-known artists artworks already installed in the city, “Janey Waney” by American Alexander Calder, “Love” by artist Robert Indiana, and “When the Moon Is Full” by Saudi artist Zaman Jassim. On the other hand, Riyadh Icon encourages artists to create an emblematic monument of Riyadh, akin to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Statue of Liberty in New York, or Christ the Redeemer in Rio De Janeiro. The Joyous Gardens commissions famous artists to create playgrounds in neighborhood squares, while Welcoming Gateways installs impressive gates at the city’s entrances. Garden City places artworks in a central city garden, while Urban Flow and Hidden River projects promote artistic lighting on viaducts and bridges. The Saudi government also plans annual cultural events such as the Noor Festival , an interactive light art festival, and the Tuwaiq Sculpture symposium , which invites artists from around the world to create large-scale sculptures in an open-air workshop. Art Week Riyadh , supported by the Saudi Visual Arts Commission, brings together over 50 local and international galleries, cultural institutions, artists, and art lovers worldwide. This flourishing of artistic projects helps the Saudi state embellish the city, diversify the economy, attract new investments, and gradually transform Riyadh into a premier destination for art enthusiasts worldwide.

Iran's strategy is not solely maritime. It has been built, with almost Roman patience, around a land arc : Tehran – Baghdad – Damascus – Beirut. For twenty years, Tehran patiently constructed a “Shiite crescent” connecting Iran to the Mediterranean, under the control of the vilayet e-faqih , the Iranian spiritual guide. Thus, it has sanctified Shiite militias and taken control of border areas in Iraq; it gained decision-making ascendancy from 2012 in its partnership with the Assad regime, with the intervention of the Pasdaran and Hezbollah to protect the Assad regime (later shared with Moscow during the Russian intervention from September 2015; and, above all, with the peak, from 2008, of Hezbollah in Lebanon as an expeditionary force and strategic projection tool). This axis had a dual function. Firstly, to create strategic depth against Israel. Hezbollah, with tens of thousands of rockets, made southern Lebanon an advanced deterrence platform. Syria, meanwhile, served as a logistical matrix: depots, bases, arms corridors, border crossings allowing the transfer of missiles and technologies. Secondly, to project an Iranian presence as far as the Mediterranean, this old dream of the Persian and Ottoman empires: to have maritime outlets, control routes to Europe, and integrate Syrian ports (Tartus, Latakia) into a geopolitics of infrastructure.  Iran was not seeking to become a Mediterranean naval power in the classic sense, but to deny the Mediterranean to its adversaries, in this case Israel and the United States, through a system of proxies. Europe understood this too late. Beirut was already drained, and the Syrian revolutionaries of 2011, abandoned to their fate, were literally pulverized by Assad, in the total indifference of the Western world. Obama merely hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Levant in 2015.  In summary, entirely sanctified, the Tehran–Baghdad–Damascus–Beirut route thus allowed Iran, for two decades, to ensure the transfer of weapons and technologies to Hezbollah; to project Iranian power to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean; to bypass the American system; and to constitute a permanent threat to Israel from the north. All this collapsed like a house of cards between late 2024 and mid-2025. Hamas dragged Hezbollah into a suicidal spiral, and, as a consequence of the considerable weakening of the Shiite militia, which had become the Praetorian Guard of the Assad regime, Damascus fell into the hands of Ahmad el-Chareh, from the ex-HTS. Tehran faded, replaced by a new power anchored to Ankara and Riyadh, eager to legitimize itself internationally, obsessed with the complete liquidation of Iranian influence in Syria and pragmatic enough to normalize relations with Israel.  Assad, as a minority, could not grant legitimacy to a formal agreement with Tel Aviv. An old ancestral arrangement cynically made the regime a kind of Hagana for the Hebrew State – invasion of Lebanon, control over power in Beirut, bringing the Palestinians into line, containment of Hezbollah in South Lebanon under its tutelage, and, above all, the closure of the Syrian Golan front since 1973…  The advent of Chareh in Damascus had another disastrous consequence for Tehran: Iranian depots were seized, border crossings locked, militia networks cut off from their logistics. Then, in June 2025, Iranian military infrastructures were struck deep by Israeli aviation. The strategic apparatus was shaken. Patiently woven, thread by thread, like a gigantic spiderweb or a Persian carpet, the Iranian Empire shattered.  Hezbollah, whose military leaders were decimated daily by Israeli aviation, survived, but isolated, deprived of its Syrian backbone. And its bravado was mainly directed – chase nature away, it comes back at a gallop – against the Lebanese state and its will to regain the monopoly of legitimate violence and to avoid, by negotiating with Israel, even more strategic internal suicide, with its share of destruction and innocent victims. Practical result: the Iranian dream of territorial continuum towards the Mediterranean, this Persian Levant of Darius III fantasized by Khamenei – it's over.  Next article: Iraq, backbone and open wound Read on the same topic “The Iranian Empire”: anatomy of a fall (1/5)  “The Iranian Empire”: In Yemen, the Houthi gamble (2/5)

The vocation of the Church, of every Church and of all Churches, is charted by Christ. This vocation is both to be universal and inclusive with the aim of banishing all discrimination. It is to be the leaven in the dough and/or the salt without which all food loses its flavor and becomes inedible. In other words, as salt is made for food, we are not made for ourselves, we are 'beings for others.' This vocation is also to proclaim, through our words and our actions, the 'good news' of Christ. 'The foundational base of a minimal national history' and the beginning of the crystallization of a national identity, observed by historian Candice Raymond, is what we have most precious to offer our compatriots – and we must speak of it indistinctly as Maronites and as Lebanese. This foundation is our pride: it is the beginning of a stable and defined identity that we must protect from anything that could disfigure it. This is particularly what we can offer most precious to a community alienated from this Lebanon by a 'millenarian' political-religious utopia, in the sense that it must be fulfilled within History, and in this specific case, conclude History. The Church has been through this. It condemned Christian 'millenarianism,' and we know all too well, and from experience, how much any utopia engenders terror. But it is better, instead of this demonstration which could be prolonged, to speak of what the Maronites of Lebanon can offer most worthy to their compatriots: altruism. Here's how: No apologetic text says it better than the Letter to Diognetus, a manuscript from apostolic times discovered in Constantinople around 1436, in a fish shop where it served as wrapping paper: 'For Christians are not distinguished from other men by country, nor by language, nor by clothing. They do not inhabit cities of their own, they do not use any extraordinary dialect, their way of life has nothing singular. (...) They reside each in their own homeland, but as resident aliens. They fulfill all their duties as citizens, and bear all burdens as strangers. (...) They marry like everyone else, they have children, but they do not abandon their newborns. (...) They are in the flesh, but do not live according to the flesh. They pass their lives on earth, but are citizens of heaven. They obey the established laws and their manner of life surpasses the laws in perfection. (...) In a word, what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world. The soul is spread throughout all the members of the body as Christians are in the cities of the world.' The Letter to Diognetus is an excellent illustration of what citizenship should be; most of its criteria can be adopted by any man, any woman. The same applies to many other doctrinal texts that the Church makes available to us, including the Social Doctrine of the Church. For this doctrine, the notions of the dignity of the human person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity in decision-making, and solidarity are essential articulations of social relations, the place par excellence where piety and fidelity to God are played out. At the limit, these are even non-religious texts, in the sense that there is no need to be Christian to draw from them; it's a buffet open to the whole world. Pope Francis' social encyclical Fratelli Tutti is one of these texts accessible to all, without distinction of religious affiliation. This text is a development of the Abu Dhabi Declaration on Human Fraternity co-signed by Francis and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Ahmad el-Tayyeb (2019). By the Pope's own admission, this declaration was born in its broad outlines around a meal to which he had informally invited the Sunni dignitary, after a working meeting at the Vatican library. Pope Francis highlights the concept of social friendship, which is in fact the necessary complement to the concept of citizenship. These elements of Christian doctrine are underpinned by universal values and principles that transcend cultures and eras. When John Paul II said of Lebanon that it 'is much more than a country: it is a message of freedom and an example of pluralism for the East and the West,' this is what he meant: the values embodied and embraced by Lebanon of which we speak, and inscribed in our Constitution, are valid for all, including the Western world, part of which is on the slippery slope of self-referential, atheistic humanism. John Paul II's words emphasize, once and for all, the particular, profound, irreplaceable mission of the land of the cedar: that of being a model of conviviality between the different religious communities that compose it, particularly between Christianity and Islam. However, as John Paul II also affirms, 'man is not the truth, he is in search of the truth.' This is the unshakable philosophical postulate on which Lebanon rests. It is the very foundation of this pluralism that makes it rich, and which is in fact the vocation of any democratic society. It is also the 'missing link' whose existence would allow the principle of secularism in France, which is so close to us culturally and politically, to avoid intolerance, to remain measured. Not that the Church is not the mystical body of Him who said 'I am the Truth,' as every Catholic believes. But the Church also knows, particularly since Vatican II, that 'the Spirit of truth,' God Himself, also acts 'outside the visible boundaries of the Church,' and that He leads to salvation those who, 'through no fault of their own,' and for various reasons, have not known Christ as Christians know Him.

The jugular vein that once supplied it with weapons and ammunition has been severed. And yet, Hezbollah refuses to abide by the commitments made in its name through Nabih Berri. Because it does not believe it has been defeated—and because the fertile ground of the South, where it took root, has not contradicted that belief. To be perfectly frank, a handful of dissenting and comforting Shiite voices are hardly enough to bring it back to reason. Though the party of the mullahs has taken a beating, it has not abandoned the fight. It has gone underground to preserve the core of its forces. According to certain sources, it has even rebuilt its military capabilities. In other words, it is recovering. At the same time, it has worn down Western diplomacy, which is openly hostile to it. It can therefore savor its victory. Playing the card of “strategic patience,” learned from seasoned masters, it has created such a diplomatic mess that France has once again rushed to Lebanon’s bedside—to untangle the knot. A “second mechanism” to monitor disarmament is currently being devised, said Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister—so as to avoid escalation, he added. Have the gentlemen at the Quai d’Orsay ever wondered how much their Lebanese sympathies cloud their judgment? Strategic Patience and Its Price Caught in a trap, Hezbollah has lost around forty fighters in southern villages since last October. And that is not all. Since the November 2024 ceasefire, the IDF has killed more than four hundred of its supporters. It is a heavy toll, but what do such sacrifices matter to the Resistance? They are merely the minimum price of that same “strategic patience” instilled by its Iranian mentors. In reality, the Party of God has shifted onto the Lebanese state the obligations that weigh upon it—chief among them, disarmament. It stalls. It drags its feet. It splits hairs, drawing a subtle distinction between north and south of the Litani River. And who bears the brunt of constant pressure and American anger, voiced by the likes of Tom Barrack or Tom Harb? I’ll let you guess. An Admission of Powerlessness Hezbollah has jammed the “engine of the state,” and it is the Lebanese army that pays the price and takes the blows. Threats are made to cut off aid and funding; the army commander’s visit to the United States is canceled; harassment comes from all sides. In his bunker, Sheikh Naïm Qassem must be rubbing his hands: not a single dollar for the Lebanese state without prior disarmament. And thus the indispensable—and well-hidden—secretary general has plunged the Lebanese cabinet and its members into embarrassment. After all, as some observers across the Atlantic slyly remark, “these people cannot deliver.” Can anyone truly claim that Hezbollah has lost its “battle for Lebanon”? There will be other battles indeed —but only the final one will seal its demise.

Tehran's regional policy over the past twenty-five years has obeyed a clear logic: to establish itself on the bottlenecks and corridors of the Middle East, transform straits, land routes, and enclaves into instruments of strategic blackmail, and build a defensive depth around Iran made up of militias and subservient regimes. Within the framework of this policy, Yemen and the Houthis have played a central role. Yemen, fragmented and failed, constituted the ideal terrain for the Islamic Republic of Iran to install this 'western twin'. The Houthi movement, backed by a Zaydi matrix and a malleable anti-imperialist grammar, offered Tehran a proxy capable of: holding the capital Sanaa; controlling a large portion of the Red Sea coast; and threatening Bab el-Mandeb with missiles, drones, and booby-trapped boats. Bab el-Mandeb thus becomes a strategic lever, a variable that Iran can activate according to the pressures it faces: sanctions, Israeli escalation, tensions with Riyadh, confrontation with Washington. Tehran's message is as follows, invariable: if you touch Iran, you will suffer the consequences for your global trade. In this sense, the Houthi attacks of 2023-2024, reactivated in 2025 under the pretext of Gaza, were far from isolated acts: they reflected the Iranian doctrine according to which Bab el-Mandeb is the maritime extension of its deterrence system. The turning point in Tehran's favor was undoubtedly the assassination of Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2017, when the Houthis coldly eliminated the former president who was preparing to reconcile with Riyadh. His death closed the door to a national political solution. It largely benefited the Houthis — and therefore Iran — in the short term, much like the assassinations of Rafic Hariri, the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the disappearance of Yasser Arafat. Saleh's death ruined the possibility of a unified Yemen and trapped Tehran in an alliance with a radical and chaotic — almost caricatural — movement impossible to integrate into a regional compromise. However, the anti-Houthi front fragmented with: the rise of the Southern Transitional Council, supported by Abu Dhabi; the Saudi military withdrawal after its disastrous 2015 offensive and the beginning of a dialogue with Tehran; the collapse of the fiction of a unified state; and increased international pressure on the Houthis, particularly through Israeli and American strikes and international sanctions. No matter... Although shaken, Tehran's proxies are still standing: the north of the country remains under their control, their security apparatus functions, their capacity for disruption remains intact, and rhetorically, they remain a link between Iran and the Red Sea. The internationally recognized government, meanwhile, is reduced to a fiction. The Iran-Saudi agreement of 2023, negotiated under Chinese auspices, ended seven years of rupture. It aimed not so much to reconcile two existentially rival powers, but to freeze a front that neither was able to win. Riyadh wanted to exit the Yemeni quagmire, reduce drone strikes on its infrastructure, and protect Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030. Tehran wanted to gain implicit recognition of its gains in Yemen and Iraq, reduce its isolation, and avoid an American escalation. But the truce has resolved nothing. It frames Houthi nuisance without ending it, limits Iranian ambitions without disarming them, and creates an unstable balance. Above all, it protects Saudi Arabia from Iranian retaliations on its territory in the context of an Israeli-Iranian conflict. Moreover, Riyadh has no interest in reopening a war in Yemen from which it emerged exhausted, and Iran, weakened by Israeli strikes, does not have the means to broaden the conflagration. Yemen thus becomes a controlled, useful but contained, tension zone that both capitals prefer to maintain at low intensity. Next article: The land corridor and the ambition of the Levantine Empire Related article “The Iranian Empire”: anatomy of a fall

The history of Lebanese Shiism is too often told backwards, or worse, flattened by a teleological reading that presents Hezbollah as the natural culmination of a long religious and political continuum. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scholarly work on the ulama of Jabal Amel, on the contrary, allows us to reconstruct a very different genealogy—one rooted in doctrinal pluralism, a conscious relationship to the state, and a non-theocratic conception of religious authority. It is precisely this tradition that has been broken. Historically, Ameli Shiism developed within the framework of wilayat al-umma : a community of believers endowed with moral and spiritual autonomy, but not with a project of political domination. The choice of marja‘iyya was free and plural, often oriented toward Najaf, within a deliberately distanced relationship between clerical authority and political power. This tradition acknowledged the diversity of religious authorities, rejected doctrinal centralization, and, above all, did not seek to govern society in the name of the sacred. The rupture came with Khomeini’s invention of wilayat al-faqih : a radically new construction that cannot be reduced to a theological debate, but rather constitutes a major political upheaval. By replacing the plurality of marja‘iyyat with the exclusive authority of a Supreme Guide, by transforming the cleric into a sovereign and religion into a state ideology, revolutionary Iran broke with Najaf and imposed Qom as an imperial center. Shiism thus ceased to be a diverse religious tradition and became an instrument of geopolitical projection. In Lebanon, this graft did not occur on virgin soil. Lebanese Shi’a have always adhered to the project of the state, in line with the Ameli logic of inscription within a given national space. But since independence—and even earlier—they have been socially and economically marginalized, kept on the periphery of development, and subjected to local feudal authorities who spoke in their name without ever emancipating them. This structural marginalization partly explains why, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, a segment of the community turned toward secular parties hostile to the confessional system, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and its syndical and intellectual offshoots. The emergence of Imam Musa al-Sadr marked a decisive rupture. He embodied an uprising against social injustice and marginalization without breaking with the state as the ultimate horizon. His project was profoundly Lebanese—in the broad, non-ideological sense of the term—even as it remained open to regional dynamics. He sought neither to Islamize Lebanon nor to detach it from its pluralism, but to fully integrate Shi’a as citizens in their own right. It is precisely this position—neither submissive nor instrumentalizable—that explains his disappearance, at the moment when another, radically antagonistic project was emerging: that of the alliance of minorities, anchored in regional authoritarian logics. After him, the Amal Movement gradually shifted, under Nabih Berri, into the Alawite sphere through its alignment with the Assad regime. Hezbollah went even further. From the early 1980s onward, it led Lebanese Shi’a in direct opposition to their Ameli heritage, uprooted them from the logic of the state and territory, and inserted them into that of wilayat al-faqih , turning Lebanon into a mere functional space serving an Iranian project. The community was thus satellized rather than represented. Secular, liberal, or simply Lebanese-oriented Shi’a were systematically marginalized: through tailor-made electoral laws, intimidation, forced exile, or assassination—from Mahdi Amel to Lokman Slim. This domination unfolded under Syrian and then Iranian occupations and was accepted, realpolitik obliges, by the international community, which from the 1990s onward had no difficulty accommodating Hezbollah, despite its past, its activities, and its true nature. In the face of this hegemony, the Lebanese-oriented Shi’a project survived only in isolation, carried by a handful of major intellectual and religious figures such as Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, Hani Fahs, and Mohammad Hassan Al-Amin, among others. All defended a clear vision: Lebanon as a definitive homeland, the state as a finality, coexistence as a horizon, and the rejection of any identity fixation based on majority status or privileged community. This school has been marginalized for far too long. It is time to stop trying to appease or save Hezbollah. The challenge is no longer tactical; it is strategic. What is needed is the emergence of a new Shi’a elite—modern, non-traditional, freed from external tutelage, having pledged allegiance to Lebanon, and to Lebanon alone, and having renounced any logic of domination over other communities. But this demand cannot be unilateral. One cannot ask Shi’a to stop behaving as a tribe in search of guarantees and privileges if the other communities do not also put their own house in order. The Shi’a question is not exclusively Shi’a. In Lebanon, the affairs of each community are the affairs of all. There are no exclusive zones and no partial security perimeters. There is only one national security perimeter: Lebanon, within its borders, its project, and its vocation. The solution to the Shi’a question is Lebanese. It lies in transversal parties and movements capable of breaking the communal, sectarian, and tribal framework, without external allegiance. Still, this requires thinking in strategic terms rather than in terms of immediate electoral gains, in a country obsessed with deadlines and power balances, to the detriment of its future.