Artigos

Following the official announcement of a framework agreement between Washington and Tehran on a memorandum of understanding to serve as the basis for talks between the two capitals, the picture looks like this: effusiveness in Tehran, where the document is being hailed as a historic victory; anger in Israel; calculated restraint in the United States; cautious optimism in Lebanon; and relief in Gulf countries and Europe, accompanied by a drop in oil prices. The memorandum of understanding, announced late Sunday night by President Donald Trump, is set to be signed on Friday in Geneva, where Trump arrived Monday to take part in G7 meetings. The document is said to have already been signed electronically.

The world speaks of a Lebanese tragedy brought about by Hezbollah and, behind it, Iran, and of another Palestinian Nakba caused by Hamas. What remains absent from any account of this tragedy and this Nakba are two major events: the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005. Both withdrawals were complete. The first was carried out in execution of UN Security Council Resolution 425, adopted in 1978, and that same Council had from the outset rejected the official Lebanese narrative regarding the Shebaa Farms, a narrative that Hezbollah and its spearhead, the "president of the resistance" Emile Lahoud, had rushed to deploy. That narrative was nothing but a brazen lie, designed to justify the retention of the "resistance" weapons, weapons that were never directed at anything other than the Lebanese interior, and whose sole purpose was to keep southern Lebanon as a mailbox between Israel on one side and the Islamic Republic on the other. All of this unfolded without anyone pausing to ask, even in passing, about the fate of the people of that land, who were, and remain, the greatest absent party in this internal and regional equation. To this day, there is no rational explanation for what has befallen southern Lebanon and its people.

The Middle East is sinking into wars and upheavals that show every sign of worsening, more malevolent than at any previous moment. This alone is reason enough to devise solutions that might allow the world to escape its predicament — through diplomacy, through acting with sound judgment freed from instinctive reflexes, through demonstrating the limits of military power, or through some combination of these factors — including by curbing the defiance of laws and the recklessness that now prevails in the conduct of war, under what might be called the “law of the authority of the killing machine.”

A heavy, anxiety-filled suspense gripped the entire day and evening of this Sunday, June 14, which was supposed to be marked by the virtual, online signing of the framework agreement (or memorandum of understanding) intended to "suspend" hostilities between the United States and Iran for a period of 60 days, with the aim of launching a negotiation process over the dispute — nuclear, ballistic, financial, and geopolitical — with the Islamic Republic. Over the past 48 hours, both President Donald Trump and the Pakistani Prime Minister repeatedly and insistently affirmed that the framework agreement would indeed be signed on Sunday. The signing was expected to take place "virtually," in the presence of U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Qalibaf. Yet well into the late evening (Levant time), the ceremony planned for this purpose had still not taken place. Two factors accounted for the delay: internal Iranian disagreements and a military escalation on the Lebanese front.

After more than twenty years spent at the heart of the great houses of high jewelry and international luxury, from Cartier to Hermès, from De Beers to LVMH, between Paris, London and New York, Marie Berthelon could have continued along a perfectly mapped trajectory at the summit of the system. Instead, she chose to step away from it to revive Rouvenat, a nineteenth-century Maison that had disappeared and that she is now reactivating as a living territory, at the crossroads of heritage and the avant-garde. At the head of a small, deeply committed structure, she defends a singular vision of high jewelry: a luxury of circularity and memory, where recycled gold, antique stones rediscovered in forgotten safes, and raw or polished materials do not seek perfection, but light. A jewelry that does not add itself to the world, but awakens it, transforming what already existed into a contemporary presence.

The abandonment of the Future Combat Air System — known by its French acronym SCAF — announced this week by France and Germany after years of tensions, represents far more than the failure of an industrial program. It exposes the deep contradictions now shaping the construction of an autonomous European defense capability, at the very moment when the continent is seeking to free itself from its strategic dependence on the United States. At the heart of this wreck lies a question that has never found a consensual answer: is Europe capable of producing, through a common effort, the instruments of its military sovereignty, or does it remain a juxtaposition of competing national interests?