Bashar al-Assad’s reliance on Hezbollah and Iranian Shia militias for all those years of the civil war was a mistake pragmatically and otherwise. Something his father, Hafez al-Assad, would have avoided. He made an even more fatal mistake after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq when he made Syria a corridor for the passage of Sunni Islamists to

The Kremlin was too consumed by the war in Ukraine to risk a confrontation for Assad’s sake. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime had already been overwhelmed by crises and fears, especially following the rapid destruction of the Hezbollah forces and the rumors that the Khamenei regime was next on Israel’s list. Knowing that Trump’s return to the Wh

This involves leveraging the country’s unique strengths, including geography, infrastructure, a complete transportation network, demographic advantages, human capital base, government policies, and investment and business incentives. These factors complement robust economic growth efforts, focusing on high-tech and digital technology sectors, the

If attained, development-driven reforms can give Cambodia a capable state and even a relatively functioning and predictable legal system, both conducive to business competitiveness. But it would not necessarily foster democratic accountability. This configuration of a relatively effective state without accountability characterises some moderately d

a task which would take the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, Frontier, about 10 septillion (1025) years to accomplish. Though this may seem like a major accomplishment, the fact is that this is true for a benchmark computation called Radar Cross Section (RCS) and has virtually no practical utility. What was much more interesting, however,