Articles

As world leaders gather this week in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, they face a central problem: the world has become more interconnected than at any other point in the history of international relations since the fifteenth century. Yet, at the same time, it has become more fragmented and polarized, with power increasingly dispersed. National economies are deeply intertwined, technology connects billions of people across borders, while capital, goods, data and ideas move at speeds unimaginable when the United Nations was founded in 1945. Global trade reached a record $35 trillion last year, while six billion people, nearly three-quarters of humanity, are now connected to the Internet.

On Thursday, Lebanon bluntly asked Iran to stop meddling in its internal affairs through Hezbollah and to keep their bilateral relations on a state-to-state footing. That was the essence of the message Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam conveyed to Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian during their meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, attended by Lebanese and Iranian foreign ministers Joe Raggi and Abbas Araghchi. Against the backdrop of the acute crisis that has persisted for more than six months between Beirut and Tehran, the Lebanese-Iranian meeting in New York would normally be considered highly significant. But divisions within Iran’s leadership—where decision-making power, as is well known, lies not with the president and his foreign minister but with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—and differing Iranian views on how to handle regional issues, diminish the scope of the exchange.

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to the White House for a closely watched summit with both economic and political dimensions, given its potential international repercussions. Several sensitive issues are on the agenda: trade, U.S. tariffs, U.S. access to Chinese rare earths, artificial intelligence, U.S. support for Taiwan, Iran, U.S. sanctions imposed on Tehran, and Chinese support for the Islamic Republic. These are all issues that have left many analysts skeptical about the prospect of major announcements, including those quoted by Reuters. In their view, the Xi-Trump summit should primarily enable the two leaders to “stabilize a relationship under intense strain.”

This third article in the series examines Saudi Arabia’s development, driven by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Vision 2030, of a vast logistics network linking ports, airports, roads, and railways. Initially economic in nature, this infrastructure could facilitate the deployment of Turkish and Pakistani forces under the Mecca Pact. However, the resumption of the war in Yemen highlights the limits of the Riyadh-Ankara-Islamabad trilateral alliance, which faces the risk of escalation with Iran. Saudi economic and military logistics The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), created in 1971 by King Faisal bin Abdulaziz, was transformed in 2015 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to diversify the Saudi economy and reduce its dependence on hydrocarbons.

Much has been written about the new Middle East and the sweeping changes it has undergone over the past three years. Analysts have filled television screens with predictions about where the region is headed and how its future may be shaped by the shifting political and military balance of power. The changes are real, and they deserve a measured reading. Some argue that the regional order established in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of unrivaled U.S. global dominance, has entered a period of decline. They point to Washington’s direct involvement in the region’s wars, including conflicts it has at times helped set in motion. The most obvious examples are the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war against Iran, which continues intermittently and has yet to reach a definitive end.

Lebanon did not miss this week’s major UN General Assembly gathering at United Nations headquarters in New York. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has held a series of meetings on the sidelines of the event over the past two days, beginning with UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday evening. The messages he delivered were of vital importance, both with regard to the renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the state’s monopoly on arms. On the Lebanese political front, the presence of Foreign Minister Joe Raggi alongside Salam did not go unnoticed, at a time when his near exclusion from the diplomatic trips undertaken by the president and the prime minister had raised questions among observers and caused tensions with the party that had backed his candidacy for the post, the Lebanese Forces.