Articles

From New York, Sylviane Zehil As France holds the presidency of the UN Security Council in September, the General Assembly’s “high-level week” is taking place against a backdrop of existential crises and growing questioning of multilateralism. In this context, Paris intends to defend an international system “based on the rule of law rather than the law of the strongest.” Among the sensitive issues on the agenda is Lebanon, with an increasingly pressing question: what should be done about UNIFIL and, above all, how can a “security vacuum” be avoided if its mandate cannot be extended for the long term?

If the Middle East is now the scene of a confrontation between Israeli, Turkish and Iranian projects, the Mecca agreement on joint defense between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan could signal the emergence of something different: not necessarily a fourth hegemonic project, but a new project for regional balance. The significance of the agreement lies in the fact that the three countries bring together remarkably complementary sources of power. Turkey has a powerful military, is a member of NATO, and has a rapidly expanding military and technology industry, as well as advanced capabilities in drones and electronic warfare.

Donald Trump faces a dilemma: responding to the demands of Saudi Arabia, a major Washington ally, while avoiding opening a new front as the war against Iran continues to spread across the region. The U.S. president reportedly backed out at the last minute of launching American strikes against the Houthis, despite renewed urgent requests from Riyadh. According to the New York Times , Donald Trump has repeatedly reconsidered his Yemen strategy in recent days. The NYT says the U.S. administration had prepared an air operation for Sunday. Target lists had been approved and bombs were already loaded onto aircraft when the U.S. president reportedly decided to cancel, or at least postpone, the strikes.

Assala Nasri’s return to Damascus, after an absence of nearly sixteen years, was not simply that of an artist returning to a stage from which she had long been absent. There was something in that image that went beyond music and nostalgia. As though the years separating her last concert in Damascus from her return before a Syrian audience had suddenly been condensed into a single question: who truly remained with Syria, and who was really standing with the power that ruled it? Assala broke with Syria’s official cultural scene when, beginning in 2011, she chose to oppose Bashar al-Assad’s regime and support the protest movement. That choice led to a long rupture with Syria’s official institutions and kept her away from the stages of her own country. When she returned to Damascus after the change of regime, she was therefore not an artist rediscovering her homeland because power had changed. She was an artist who, throughout those years of absence, had continued to insist that her dispute was with the regime, not with Syria.

Following the conclusion of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) mission in Beirut, and as Lebanon prepares to make decisive decisions on the restructuring of the banking sector and the future of deposits, the country now finds itself at a critical turning point. In April 2025, I described the agreement Lebanon was seeking with the IMF as “the world’s most expensive visa.” Today, following the IMF’s latest visit to Beirut, that phrase takes on an even more obvious meaning. The staff-level agreement reached with the IMF in April 2022 involved financing of around $3 billion, subject to the completion of the required prior actions and approval by the Fund’s relevant governing bodies. Above all, the agreement was intended to serve as a certificate of confidence and credibility, enabling Lebanon to subsequently attract much larger amounts of Arab and international financing.

Since the 19th century, maritime strategists—most notably the American Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Briton Julian Corbett—have theorized the concepts of “command of the sea” and “sea power.” These terms are too often treated as synonymous, even though they are quite distinct, addressing different political and military dimensions. Another concept has emerged in recent years: naval power. Unfortunately, some commentators—including prominent ones—conflate naval power with sea power, without understanding the increasingly important distinctions between them as new weapons and new methods of operation come into play, sometimes turning weakness into strength and vice versa. It is these new weapons, together with their associated methods and frameworks of use, that distinguish the terms forming this new terminology: naval or maritime.