The human cost of the illegal war and of Iran’s illegal civilian attacks are severe. Almost 2,000 civilians have died in Iran, more than 4,000 in Lebanon, and around 30 in the Arab Gulf and 30 in Israel. Iran’s Hormuz Strait closure has hit especially the world’s poorest countries, for instance Sudan and Somalia, very hard. Iran’s society is in a catastrophic state. The economic model of Gulf states like the Emirates, which requires stability, is in question. And hence, all around, even in Israel, migration is up.

This war was decided by two individuals, Trump and Netanyahu, against the advice of many of their senior officials. At the same time, it has deep structural roots. It is a link in a spiral of mutual insecurity between Iran, and the United States and Israel. It started in 1980, when Arab Gulf states, frightened by the Iranian Revolution asked a rather willing Washington for protection. The US military entered the Gulf, first indirectly and from 1987 directly. This move, and especially the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001/3 and US threats of regime change also in Iran, scared Tehran. It saw its reactions—more regional proxies; greater nuclear capacities—as defensive. But the United States and now also Israel saw them as offensive, and reacted. Since, the spiral has sped up, and is fanned also by deep cultural antagonisms.

While in 1980, President Carter was partly pulled into the Gulf as much as he pushed, in 2026 regional allies had no say in Trump’s decision to go to war. Worse: globally, this war is the illustration that the United States is turning from a security patron a driver of insecurity, and from a (more or less) predictable actor into an agent of chaos. The effects strategically link the regions central to the US global posture—Europe, East Asia and, since 1980, the Gulf—and both strengthen and greatly worry China.

Iran, like Ukraine, have advanced the drone military revolution to face down large enemies. Drones and missiles allowed Iran to use the war to activate a new leverage: the Hormuz Strait. In the Gulf, the US-Iranian balance of power became more equal. Tehran refuses to return to the status quo ante—which Washington refuses to accept.

This tension is central. It explains every US-Iranian twist—talks, attacks, economic measures, etc.—since the “ceasefire” in April. Moreover, in Tehran, the refusal to go back to the status quo ante, and in Washington the refusal to really accept this, unites officials who otherwise differ a good bit. Caught in the middle are the Arab Gulf states. Their reaction is another central trait of the last six months: they hedge massively and begin to complement, and replace parts, of their old security architecture by building new structures such as the Mecca Agreement.

This situation is unlikely to get resolved soon, although Tehran holds better cards and has more patience. The result? In the region, human suffering and economic degradation continues. And around the world, the badly managed relative decline of US power speeds up. The Iran War and its results is the example and a catalyer of the world’s messy transition from a US-centric unipolar to a multipolar system led by two rivals, China and the United States.

[French version, published in La Tribune de Genève on 2 September 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/iran-la-guerre-de-trump-et-netanyahou-accelere-le-chaos-mondial-597685214669]

Wealthy Europe, which was central in creating the worst challenge that nature has posed to civilization and that is harming the world’s poor most, is also the continent heating up fastest. Here, excess deaths topped 30,000 this summer. With disasters like raging wildfires and thirsting rivers already lowering the EU’s GDP by 1%, the EU urges €70 billion a year in adaptation now to save higher costs later. And it is expanding nature-related cooperation—an endeavour that can build on a rich history.

Take the Rhine. Two hundred years ago, after the devastating Napoleonic Wars, Europeans saw that river as an opportunity, and cooperated to pursue their ends. In 1815, diplomats at the Congress of Vienna created the Rhine Commission, encouraging free riverine trade from Switzerland northwards—a goal completed in the 1868 Mannheim Act, when the Dutch fully joined. The Rhine became the world’s second-greatest trade artery: the “Euro-Rhine,” to quote the work The Rhine by historian Mark Cioc (10). Surviving nationalist claims, it inspired transnational histories like A. Demangeon and L. Febvre’s Le Rhin (1935). Facilitating breakneck economic and industrial development from Basel via the Ruhr area to Rotterdam, it was beloved by national capitalists, too. And institution building, free trade, and industrialization aside, its hydropower drove cross-border electricity projects—first in a Swiss-German project at Laufenburg, now a European electricity network center.

The Rhine could become a “multipurpose waterway” only because it was from 1817 brutally turned into a canal-like human “techno-river,” Cioc tell us (23, 14). Key were engineers like the pioneer Johann Tulla, a German from Baden trained in Paris: often cooperating Europeans with a shared technocratic worldview. Their efforts and pollution by factories, cities, and agriculture increasingly affected the Rhine’s biodiversity. From around 1900, scientists like Robert Lauterborn, a German, began recording environmental problems.

After World War II, the Rhine not only helped build a shared Western Europe but also was helped by that process: the European Coal and Steel Community and the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine against Pollution were both founded in 1950. Sure, the latter body was toothless: as postwar economic recovery took precedence, the Rhine became “a toxic soup of chemicals and raw sewage … by the 1970s” Cioc writes (176). But by that decade cooperative action did start, with the 1976 Bonn Conventions, speeding up after the 1986 Swiss Sandoz Disaster with the 1987 Rhine Action Plan for Ecological Rehabilitation.

Make no mistake. The issue of Europe’s Rhine is categorically different from the global climate crisis. Our challenges are incomparably larger than yesterday’s. But international cooperation like that surrounding the Rhine helped not only create our climate crisis, but also tackle resulting disasters. In this sense, the modern Rhine offers us a timely lesson.

[This is a slightly expanded version of my weekly column, in French, published in La Tribune de Genève on 26 August 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/la-crise-climatique-pourrait-elle-rapprocher-les-europeens-784342926617]

This pursuit is grounded in the banal but consequential matter of Trump’s “unstructured and improvisational” governing style, which is designed to gives him maximum flexibility (171). Like a black hole, he stretches time and space—he does not stick to his agenda, and gives out his phone number as freely as he allows people to flow through the Oval Office—while being an irresistible center of gravity. “If you were not by Trump’s side every day, you might as well not have existed” (173). He makes decisions not through a structured policy making process but on the spot. And his personal gut and interests is policy. He nurtures “constant instability” and “thinks nothing of reversing himself” (41, xxvii).

Put differently: he is thoroughly non-ideological, “confound[ing] those who wanted to put him in ideological boxes or fit his actions into a coherent worldview” (197). As he told NBC in January 2026, “MAGA is me; MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.” Not even tariffs—presumably his/MAGA’s key to rebuilding the United States—are an exception. Lacking a stable objective and “written from the heart,” to quote Trump (123), they are a pressure tool, pure and simple.

To Trump, then, power is not a means, but its own end. It’s telling that in an interview with the book’s authors, he enthusiastically quoted an acolyte’s letter to him that calls him “the most powerful man the world has ever known”—more powerful than rulers such as Alexander the Great, William The Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (411).

As to Trump, power is not a means but its own end, “his” power is not stable and constructive, but fickle and destructive. (Hannah Arendt, the political thinker known inter alia for her book On Violence, would have had a field day with Trump—and would not have called Trump’s power power at all, in fact.) At home, this sort of “power” showed in Elon Musk’s devastating but short DOGE rampage; in Trump’s obsessive but unsystematic pursuit of revenge; in his on-and-off attempts to suspend habeas corpus and invoke the Insurrection Act; and, symbolically, in UFC Freedom 250: Trump celebrating the United States’ 250^th anniversary with a blood sports event on the White House lawn.

One may ask how Trump, by profession a constructor, is a destructor as president. The answer is that his buildings are domineering giants. One may also ask why a non-ideological president has attracted ideological die-hards like Stephen Miller. (Answer: his desire is an erasure, that of non-white America.) And one needs to recognize that at home, there are constraints that can pause or redirect Trump’s moves, be it grassroots opposition, the markets, occasionally the courts, and somewhat more cautious officials such as Rubio and Vance or Chief of Staff Dan Caine and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Abroad, however, there are fewer constraints. Yes, a few rather absolute rulers whom Trump respects, such as Saudi Arabia’s MBS, and the one he fears, Xi Jinping, influence him. And yes, when one unites, he beats a tactical retreat; think of Europeans’ response to his Greenland desires. But the slogan “Make America Great Again” implies and entails making non-Americans smaller: putting pressure on them. Although that pressure and coercion is unsystematic—targets change and tactics vary—its cumulative effect is systemically destructive. And as the United States is a global power, this poses one of the most serious current international challenges, whose consequences will influence how even a Democratic US President could govern after Trump.

[Shorter French version, published in La Tribune de Genève on 19 August 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/trump-un-pouvoir-capricieux-et-destructeur-selon-deux-journalistes-476047327017]

The Mecca Agreement is a balance act also normatively—it invokes international law and Islamic solidarity alike—and strategically. Yes, its most evident if implicit addressee is Iran, for the 40-Day War has increased Iran’s power, allowing it to refuse to return to the status quo ante in the Gulf. But it is also a reaction to Trump’s chaotic unreliability and to Tel Aviv’s regional maximum-force strategy. The three signatories and Cairo—the R[egional]4—realized already in 2025 that “security in their neighbourhood can no longer be left at the mercy of rivalry between the U.S. and Israel … and Iran,” Yasmine Farouk from the International Crisis Group recently wrote. Sure, the Mecca Agreement does not replace Washington’s might. Nobody can, not even China, which anyway is not interested; and Riad will want to balance a deal with a resurgent Iran with a continued US military presence. However, the R4 will try to influence US policy more strongly—which in turn, Israeli analyst Zvi Bar’el has noted, may lessen Israel’s influence and worry Gulf states that, like the UAE, distrust the Saudis.

This brings me to a last point. The Mecca Agreement parallels shifts in the other two world regions that since the 1940s were key to Washington’s global power but whose security is being remodeled. A “European” NATO “3.0” is messily arising, and East Asian states like Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines are tightening ties. The Middle East has its particularities, like every region. But it definitely forms part of a broader pattern, too.

[French version, published in La Tribune de Genève on 12 August 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/laccord-de-la-mecque-599466897776]

In the 1990s, the Russo-Chinese balance of power became more equal. Politically, the USSR’s troubles in the later 1980s and its collapse in 1991 served China a lasting lesson: Gorbachov’s political opening (glasnost) was suicidal—the communist party firmly believed it needs to maintain control of its society to survive and for its country to develop. Economically, Chinese global exports were surging while Russia’s society and economy was cratering. And crucially, both states saw the post-Cold War unipolar world order and its US pivot as a problem. The result was a serious rapprochement. As a student of mine, Alejandro Meneses-Fish, put it, “by the end of the 1990s, a new and growing Sino-Russian partnership” emerged that “was a product of internal political conclusions rooted in the respective Russian and Chinese experiences of the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, creating a common framework for a converging external worldview of multipolarity and skepticism of American hegemony.” This convergence and the now, in the 1990s, more equal relationship produced the 2001 treaty.

This treaty was momentous. It resolved border disputes. It affirmed Russian support for a “One China” policy and China’s backing of Russia in Chechnya. While not a mutual defense pact, it deepened military ties, and both signatories agreed not to participate in alliances directed against the other. And it expanded trade, technology sharing, and energy cooperation, later leading to major deals such as oil and gas pipelines.

In 2021 and again 2026, Moscow and Beijing renewed the treaty, describing it as the durable legal foundation for their partnership. (In 2022, they also issued a more rhetoric “no limits” partnership declaration). At the same time, the clearly US-centric unipolar international order to which this treaty reacted is gone. And more important yet, the PRC is now clearly a stronger and more influential world power than Russia. What these two changes may mean long-term for the Russo-Chinese relations is a fascinating question to which we will keep returning here and there in this column.

[For the French version, published in La Tribune de Genève (6 August 2026): https://www.tdg.ch/il-y-a-vingt-cinq-ans-a-moscou-421251870105]

Today, too, developments in the Gulf accelerate a shift in the global power of the United States. There are differences, sure. In 1980 and 1990, the trigger of the crisis was regional, Iran’s revolution and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, while today it’s Washington’s own war on Iran. Moreover, Tehran’s ability to close the Hormuz Strait gives it a global lever vis-à-vis Washington that was absent in 1980 and 1990. But despite these differences, developments in the Gulf were and again are accelerating an already existing major shift in Washington’s global power: in a bipolar world (1980); in emerging unipolarity (1990); and, today, in an emerging multipolar world complete with a new superpower rival, China.

Such shifts are difficult to navigate for a superpower—doubly when, like today, its president cannot think strategically, powerful regional actors pull it into different directions, its parties disagree about foreign policy, and a loss of global power is a real possibility. As a result, the Trump administration is today repeating steps it performed in the 40-Day War, including initiating and then stopping a military escalation. In other words: Trump is flailing. The worst victim is the Iranian population, which is suffering horribly, also because Tehran is unwilling to give up its new-found lever, the Hormuz Strait, vis-à-vis Washington.

It is unclear how Washington (and Tehran) will proceed, i.e. through how many more cycles of escalation and de-escalation they will go. What is sure already now is that the Iran War can either drag Washington further down—or free Washington globally if Washington at long last cuts its losses and agrees to an agreement that will lessen its half-century long over-investment in the Gulf.

(The French version of this text was published on 29 July 2026 in Lat Tribune de Genève: https://www.tdg.ch/trump-la-guerre-en-iran-accelere-le-declin-americain-390685931255)

EU President von der Leyen has found a new excuse to delay discussing imports from Israeli settlements: it might strengthen the extreme right in Israel’s upcoming election. The reaction of my native country of Switzerland to the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s presence in the West Bank illegal is equally prevaricating. Having family and an abiding stake in both Europe and Israel, I believe that if Europe, Israel’s leading trade partner, exacts a price for the Occupation, it will in the long run help change Israeli politics. Left-wing and even some centrist Israelis secretly hope for respective measures. Israel’s zero-price Occupation helps the right-wing.

Israel has an interest in ending the Occupation because it created fascist and genocidal ideologies and practices that are destroying Israeli society and politics. Thus, the first settler director of Israel’s Internal Security Services, David Zini, is pushing to allow previously outlawed ultra-extreme “Kahanist” parties to run in coming elections. But the Zionist dream of normalizing Jewish life is impossible when one occupies another people. Courageous Israelis like those working with Palestinians in A Land for All recognize this.

Europe, too, has an interest in encouraging Israel to end Occupation: the resulting fascist ideologies and practices hurt Europe. First, the EU and Switzerland’s double-standard vis-à-vis Israel create a legitimacy problem at home and abroad. Second, the Gaza catastrophe may still end up causing an uncontrolled refugee crisis. While an aging Europe needs young migrants, an uncontrolled crisis will strengthen the extreme right. And third, the Occupation is the root cause for Israel’s maximum-military pressure approach to the Middle East since 2023. This led to Netanyahu’s and Trump’s illegal 40-Day War against Iran, without which Iran would not have illegally closed the Hormuz Strait: a move that hurts Europe economically and, likely, politically, because it will strengthen parties like Germany’s AFD.

Recently, a new centrist party, Yashar!, has overtaken the Likud in the polls. This is good news given the state of Israeli politics. While its leader, Gadi Eisenkot, presently avoids the Palestine Question, he is at least not excluding a coalition with Israel’s Arab parties, something that even centrists refuse, and has a bit more of a moral compass than Netanyahu & Co. Now, Europe needs to act. It needs to create conditions that will help push politicians like Eisenkot to become their best possible selves and begin to think beyond the status quo.

[For the French text, my weekly column in La Tribune de Genève, see https://www.tdg.ch/israel-leurope-doit-faire-payer-le-prix-de-loccupation-664529733669]

Khamenei’s funeral has been a calculated move by the regime to project strength, unity, and order following the 40-Day War. In Iran, Khamenei’s title for the funeral is Agha-ye Shahid-e Iran, The Sir who became Iran’s Martyr—a choice with a general nationalist appeal rather than a religious one—and in Lebanon, Hizbollah calls him al-Qa’id al-umami, the International Leader, asserting worldwide power. Khamenei’s funeral, for which the authorities expect 20 million mourners, is lasting not one day but seven, and does not occur in one place but in five places in two countries: Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, and Mashahd. This week, mourners in Tehran openly demonstrated their pain but the procession was ordered, as behooves a state that is now almost half a century old. By contrast, in 1989, barely a decade after the revolution, authorities lost control as mourners rushed Ayatollah Khomeini’s coffin when it arrived in the cemetary. Moreover, the fact that Khamenei’s body will be flown to Iraq and that Iranian President Masud Pezeshkian will help welcome it there illustrates Iran’s power in a state that was until recently, the early 2000s, a mortal enemy. And Najaf and Karbala were probably chosen not only because of their religious importance—they are home to the shrines of the first and third Shii Imams, Ali and Hussein—but also as a symbolic move vis-à-vis leading cleric Ali Sistani. Despite his grave medical state, Sistani, who is 95 years old, retains 20 million followers across the Shii World. And he is a so-called quietist who opposes clerics’ involvement in government, and never openly embraced Khamenei who lacked the highest religious credentials when becoming Iran’s Leader in 1989.

At the same time, Khamenei’s funeral evinces insecurities. It was delayed by months for fear of an Israeli-US attack. Perhaps for the same reason, in Tehran the procession’s route was suddenly changed. And presumably for the same reason, Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who was wounded and has not yet been seen, is not attending the funeral of his father or wife, who was killed alongside Ali Khamenei and three more family members. Moreover, the inclusion of Iraq can also be read as a defensive move: to assert the power not just of Ali but also of Mojtaba Khamenei, who has even less religious credentials than his father did in 1989. And perhaps most importantly, Tehran may hope that a massive funeral that creates new images, stories, impressions and experiences will push the memory of January’s mass demonstrations and massacres further into the background—and hence help secure the regime.

[This is the English version of a column published 8 July 2026 in La Tribune de Genève: https://www.tdg.ch/khamenei-les-funerailles-geantes-masquent-les-failles-du-regime-722992346017 .]

Since the 40-Day War, Tehran has concluded that credible deterrence is the precondition for successful negotiations with the United states. The underlying basis of this so-called diplomasi-ye mobarezeh or diplomasi-ye eqtedar, combat or power diplomacy, is Tehran’s mistrust of Washington. And its most powerful instrument is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz: what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called Iran’s nuclear weapon. Tehran negotiates and attacks whenever it believes the Americans have broken the Memorandum of Understanding. Thus, last week it launched drone attacks in order to underscore its role in the choice of shipping routes. The US is complicit—it has its own reading of the memo—yet complains. “If they have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone,” Vance said last week.

Shoot & talk may seem confusing—what does Tehran really want?, some may ask—but it is common in history. A famous case is US President Richard Nixon’s “Christmas bombing” of Vietnam in 1972. Moreover, a number of modern political-strategic thinkers, such as the Frenchman Lucien Poirier or the Americans Thomas Schelling and, later, Alexander George, who coined the term coercive diplomacy, have analyzed how diplomacy and military power can interplay. Besides, in a sense, combat diplomacy is the inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is merely a continuation of politics by other means.”

Iran’s combat diplomacy has a domestic political function, too. In practical terms, it constitutes a fundamental compromise between what some in the West call “pragmatists” and “hardliners” in Tehran, which for the time being holds despite tensions. And ideologically, it protects both groups against ultra-hardliners who reject negotiations. The reason is that combat diplomacy can also be framed as “diplomacy as an (unbroken revolutionary) struggle” against the United States; that is, it provides legitimacy. Here, too, North Vietnam provides a telling historical parallel talk. In 1972, Vietnamese Workers’ Party General Secretary Le Duan invoked the “diplomatic weapon [against] the enemy” to frame talks with Washington, as Pierre Asselin noted in A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (p. 67).

What, then, is the fundamental problem with combat diplomacy? Like all forms of deterrence and coercive diplomacy, it arises in principle from the rawest form of power, that is, from violence. On its own, however, this form of power lacks legitimacy, and is therefore unstable. Genuine, stable power takes the interests of others into account at least minimally. Will Tehran be able to credibly maintain its deterrence while successfully negotiating with the US over Tehran’s core objective: an economic normalization that Iranians need with the utmost urgency and that likely would help stabilize the regime. Or will this balancing act break and the negotiations hence fail, at least in the short term? This question will hold the world’s attention in the coming weeks and months.

The negotiations’ structural context is very different from 2025 and early 2026, when Trump blew up talks. First, it is dawning on Israelis that Netanyahu’s declared post-October 7 strategy of changing the Middle East through maximum military pressure has failed and wounded their society. Netanyahu & Co. will likely be voted out in fall. Second, for Washington, Iran turned itself from a regional challenge into a US and global nightmare. The resulting US-Iranian memorandum is a surrender document. While Tehran did not get every single last thing it wanted, Trump made revolutionary sacrifices to secure his only remaining goal: to reopen the Hormuz Strait. The memo links nuclear and sanctions-relief negotiations and recognizes dilution as a “minimum [nuclear] methodology.” It does not mention proxies and missiles. It covers Israel’s action in Lebanon. It lifts all sanctions on Iranian petro-sales for now. And it foresees a reconstruction fund and a new administration for Hormuz. Moreover, critically, last Sunday, words became action. A one-day (!) talk created two deconfliction cells and technical negotiation teams.

Third, regional states like Qatar and Pakistan but also Saudi-Arabia (though not the UAE) that, while still needing the US, trust it much less after the disastrous 40-Day War, are much more deeply involved in the US-Iranian negotiations than before, and ready to integrate Iran more into a more regionalized Gulf security architecture. Last, in Iran, despite real tensions between so-called hardliners like Zolghadr and Vahidi and pragmatists like Ghalibaf, Araghchi, and Pezeshkian, these have come to share the same strategy. The former accept talks; the latter recognize their precondition is credible deterrence. Hence, the strike-for-strike strategy vis-à-vis the US military in the Gulf in April and May, or the 7 June attack on Israel in retaliation for an Israeli attack on Beirut. Ghalibaf has called this diplomasi-ye mobarezeh: armed/power diplomacy.

What may end negotiations for good? No scenario is likely, but some are less unlikely than others. Very unlikely is a massive development that seriously strengthens Washington: a successful revolt in Iran or the explosion of non-Gulf oil, gas, and phosphate exports, say. Less unlikely is Israel lastingly sabotaging talks or Iranian over-confidence: Tehran may not give Trump the bare nuclear minimum, i.e. a tad more than Obama’s JCPOA.

Sure, both sides will talk tough, and the talks will hit snags and may take time (though especially the US is in a hurry for economic and political reasons and Iran, which used to stall when weak, now may be happy to go fast, also because it needs economic relief.) And sure, nobody knows the future. But the talk’s context differs radically from 2025 and early 2026. And hence, they are bound to succeed.

(This is the English version of my column today in La Tribune de Genève: https://www.tdg.ch/iran-pourquoi-les-negociations-avec-trump-vont-reussir-156297941744)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds two fundamental beliefs about the US-led West. On the one hand, the West was from the 19^th century colonialist—China suffered a “century of humiliation” that only the CCP was able to end, in 1949—and today’s international order remains biased against China. On the other hand, today, the US-led West is economically and/or politically if not civilizationally in decline. (Some political and intellectual leaders in other major Eurasian powers like Russia and Iran hold comparable views.) Meanwhile, the CCP is leading China back to its rightful historic place at the center of the world. As Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheun put it in The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (p.168), “[T]o Xi, making the world order a Sino-centric one is the best to transform it into one that is good for humankind as a whole. In Xi Thought, ‘the common destiny for humankind’ is essentially a contemporary rendering of the old tianxia (literally ‘all-under-heaven’) paradigm [that] represents the idealized Sino-centric view of inter-state relations of the premodern era. … China would benevolently engage with the rest of the world, spreading civilization, knowledge and material benefits”—unlike Washington, in Beijing’s eyes.

The US-Chinese relationship is, in Beijing and Washington, an all-consuming question, and one to which we will keep circling back, for its interplay with our multipolar world is the international question of our days.

Today’s column, however, is not about that relationship. Rather, it concerns the fact that the CCP’s view of China in the world resembles the postwar United States in important ways.

Think of the sentence “benevolently engages with the rest of the world, spreading civilization, knowledge and material benefits:” many Americans would recognize it, even today, and it has a tianxia-like mythologized framework. Yes, Manifest Destiny was coined to frame modern continental settler expansion, rather than, like tianxia, a premodern tributary regional state system. But like tianxia under Xi, it involved a universal claim that was eventually, from the 1940s, operationalized. And like tianxia, its confidence is tempered by insecurity: will others recognize our claim?

Moreover, like Beijing today, so postwar Washington did not see itself openly as an empire. Europeans had empires; America, the first decolonized state, was politically speaking Asians and even Africans’ cousins, a view held most closely and openly by the Kennedy Administration. (Never mind Washington cooperated with late European empires, problems like the 1956 Suez Canal crisis notwithstanding.) Not dissimilarly, today, the CCP’s global claim has a moral dimension with deep Maoist roots: it keeps framing itself as the leader of the developing world. The point here is not the fact that this claim is, in the Global South, more credible than the postwar-US claim was; but, rather, that both China and the USA themselves frame themselves in not dissimilar ways.

On a related note, although Western Europe and East Asia (and from 1980 explicitly the Gulf) were the two central-most regions for the postwar United States’ global posture, various and shifting parts of the so-called Third World were a critical arena for the US-Soviet Cold War, too. Today, despite the Trump Administration’s demonstrative disinterest especially in Africa, Washington is trying hard to limit if not roll back China’s economic relations in Latin America. More importantly, for China the Global South is key economically and hence politically, as China’s internal security outreach program shows, and strategically. This shows in specific instances—think of Beijing’s tough reaction to Panama’s US-initiated plan to remove Chinese companies from the Panama Canal Zone—and in long-term developments. Thus, “Beijing has … achieved substantial progress in building dual-use space infrastructure throughout the Global South, especially at geographic points that would enable the PLA to communicate with its satellite architecture in real-time during a conflict.”

Finally, again like the postwar United States, the CCP sees not only its political system but also China’s economic power and cutting-edge technology as a proof of its superiority and as the means to assert itself globally. Today, EVs and IA stand out; back then, it was technologies like nuclear power and airplanes. And like today so then, free trade is key to self-assertion. As Jeffrey Engel relates in Cold War at 30,000 Feet (p. 41), in 1944 US Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle stated “American interests [would be] short-sighted as not to see that the doctrine of free air is their plainest road to superiority.” And Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce President Eugene Wilson even stated that “an American postwar ‘empire of the air’ would create a ‘Pax Aeronautica’ comparable with the ‘Pax Britannica’ fostered by English Sea Power.” (James Gormly, “The Counter Iron Curtain,” 249.)

Many factors explain these US-Chinese similarities – factors too complex for this brief column, and to be broached at a future point in time. What remains to be said today is this: yes, China and the United States differ profoundly on many points. But they also share more imperial traits than either Beijing or Washington would care to admit.

[This is an extended version of a weekly historical-geopolitical column published in French on Wed 17 June 2026 in La Tribune de Genève: https://www.tdg.ch/chine-pekin-et-washington-deux-empires-qui-signorent-999837363820]

- Who “won”, as it were?

Historically, this is a minor earthquake in US-Iranian rels. Trump cut his losses. Iran got much more than the USA.

In one sentence, the US basically got a return to the pre-war reality (status quo ante) in Hormuz for 60 days.

By contrast, Iran got the USA to drop key demands made in negotiations and it was able to geographically expand its writ.

Specifics: direct negotiation nexus between nuclear-matter & sanctions-relief (paras 7&8); no new promises re nuclear matters but, rather, dilution explicitly mentioned as “minimum methodology.” Also: Lebanon (Hizbollah) covered; Hormuz Strait, while reopened now, will long-term not go back to status quo ante; immediate start of Iranian oil sales; no mention of proxies and missiles.

But: (1) to state the obvious, this is a legally non-binding MoU, nothing more. (2) Although statements said to be made by M. Khamenei asserted the Strait should be kept close to keep pressuring the USA, this will now happen (hence, opposition of ultra-hardliners like Jalili in Iran, even if M. Khamenei’s statements were ambiguous enough to allow for some agreement). (3) While the pressure on Iran’s economy is massive and helped bring Iran to sign, no upfront lump-sum payment by the USA. (But by others?)

- Why did Iran score a relative win?

Short answer: during the war it created a lever, the Hormuz Strait, which it used to the hilt.

Long answer: Iran had 3 levers and 1 pressure point while the US had 1 lever and 3 pressure points.

Iran’s levers: (1) primary (all flows from here, really): military factor: drones & missiles with which to close down Hormuz against which US had no sufficiently credible response; (2) psychological factor: credibility: Iran will not be afraid to use its military hardware; (3) political factor: Arab Gulf states that are afraid of Iran, which had attacked them in the 40-Day War, put persistent pressure on Trump.

Iran’s pressure point: economic pressure: result of war compounded by US blockade.

US lever: the just-mentioned military blockade.

US pressure points: (1) the afore-noted political pressure by Arab states; (2) global economic strains; (3) domestic political and economic strains. (History will tell which point carried what relative weight.)

- Who’s involved in the negotiations to follow; why; & what does this mean?

Who: Not only US and Iran but also PAK and Qatar.

Why: Because Arab Gulf states have significantly reduced trust in Trump.

Meaning: another step towards an increased regionalization of the Gulf’s security architecture, which was in evidence already during the negotiations. Involves prominently also Oman; KSA through PAK. By contrast, the UAE remains very suspicious.

- Why may negotiations succeed

• The US has been humbled and will be more realistic

• In principle, both parties have a huge interest in a success

• Both parties can seriously hurt each other

• Regional third parties (esp PAK & Qatar; also Oman) remain involved, and much more so than ever before

• It’s not impossible that direct US-Navy-IRGC mil-mil communication in the Straits may percolate up the chain of command and help stabilize negotiations

- What may derail negotiations

• Trump’s behavior and fear of signing an agreement that is not better than Obama’s JCPOA

• US domestic opposition

• Iranian ultra-hardliners like Jalili may try to create pressures

• Israel will try to sabotage an agreement, not the least through Lebanon

• The nuclear file: will the 2 sides’ minimal requirements meet?

What does this MoU mean for Iranian politics?

The MoU signals the success, right now and for now, of a combined diplo-military posture against the USA that has the backing of, and for now brings closer, top officials whom the West used to see as pretty different from each other (from the more moderate Pezeshkian and Araqchi via Ghalibaf to hardliners like Vahidi and Zolghadr). Ghalibaf calls this diplomasi-ye eqtedar, “power diplomacy,” and said: “I am in favor of a diplomacy that is in and by itself a type of struggle (mobarezeh)”: https://www.iranintl.com/fa/liveblog/iran-conflict-june17.

I was wrong. Tehran and Washington are scheduled to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on 19 June, in Switzerland.

I was wrong for one reason, and one reason only—but a critical one. US President Donald J. Trump was even more desperate than I thought to put the war “in the rearview mirror,” as he stated on 16 June. He clearly felt he had no more alternative than to cut his losses.

Of the many signs that Trump has cut his losses and that Iran for now is clearly the winner, three stand out. First, the US Government has not released the MoU text. While Vice President J.D. Vance said said text would be published before the signing ceremony, Trump said it would be released “pretty soon” thereafter. Moreover, Washington refused to share the MoU confidentially with Tel Aviv. And last, Tehran has, through state media, released what it claims is the 14-points bulk of the MoU. Sure, we can’t just trust Tehran (or Washington, or any other government involved in this war, for that matter). But in this instance, the very fact that Tehran has spoken while Washington has not, indicates who won and who lost—doubly as Washington’s reaction has been fuzzy. “Mr Vance cast doubt on the leaked proposal, saying he was ‘seeing a lot of fake information about a potential deal’ on the weekend (i.e. on 14 June(, but since the agreement was announced on Sunday, local time, the vice president has not pushed back on so.”

How are we to interpret this situation?

1: The first point is the most basic and self-evident one. Having strategically won the 40-Day War, Tehran proceeded to win a post-war game of chicken with Washington even more conclusively.

2. Iran won because it had more levers than the United States and because there was less pressure on it than on the United States.

3. The USA had only one, military lever. It blockaded Iran’s Gulf ports to worsen the country’s already massive economic pain. While ordering pinpointed strikes here and there, Trump ultimately shied away from a massive military gamble. He did not for instance attempt to occupy Kharg Island or extract buried nuclear material. Tehran took a risk—a US operation may have happened—but Tehran likely thought Trump’s threats were a bluff.

At the same time, three factors weighed heavy on the US Administration. The possibly most important one—time will tell, and journalists and scholars will eventually find out—was domestic politics. The war became increasingly unpopular among the Republican base and even among some Trump voters, perhaps mainly for financial reasons. Moreover, dissent began to emerge among Republicans in Congress; this may have been Trump’s breaking and turning point. Another factor, though probably not the central-most one, was the strain the war put on the global economy. And a third factor was pressure by a powerful set of US allies: Arab Gulf states.

4. In Iran, by contrast, the only serious pressure was economic. The blockade worsened the economic catastrophe that the war has been for the country. But that economic pain did not translate (yet) into open political pressure at home. And abroad, allies such as China and Russia did not pressure Iran to blink first.

Meanwhile, Tehran had three levers.

Its ace was and remains the military capability that it proved during the 40-Day War, and without which reality would look quite differently. Also after the war, Tehran was able to keep the Strait of Hormuz quasi-closed because its drones constituted a sufficiently credible threat to shipping that’s unauthorized by it. The US military, while able to blockade Iran’s ports, was unable to convince shipping companies that their ships would be sufficiently protected when passing the Straits without coordinating with Iran. Tehran’s drones, and its missiles, constituted a sufficiently credible threat vis-à-vis its Arab neighbors, too. During the 40-Day War, Tehran proved it is both willing and able to attack those neighbors.

Moreover, Tehran had a psychological lever created by its war-time action: credibility. Everybody believed that if war breaks out again, it indeed would use its military force again to the hilt against its neighbors and the USA and Israel. Similarly, some intra-elite discussions notwithstanding, it seemed ready to endure massive economic pain due to the blockade and, if “necessary,” repress protests. Put differently, having not just survived but strategically won the 40-Day War, Tehran was blatantly more self-confident than Washington. In extremis, this showed in the afore-noted risky and potentially escalatory threat Tehran made on 7 June, which deepened and formalized the linkage between two theaters: Israel-Lebanon and US-Iran-Gulf.

Last but not least, Iran had a political lever: the afore-noted Arab pressure on Washington, which Tehran’s war-time actions created in the first place. Scared that attacks will be renewed if war breaks out again, most of Tehran’s Arab neighbors pressured Washington to one degree or another to not return to full-blown war.

So what? What does all of this mean, looking ahead? I here do not want to comment on the US-Iranian negotiations that are scheduled to start late this week. Rather, I would like to make five very brief notes on what the MoU seems to signify more broadly.

5. Regional players continue to become more central for the Gulf’s security architecture: this text still stands.

6. Iran’s regime did not split, although at certain junctures tensions became public as some individuals were somewhat more hurried to sign, due to economic concerns, while others pushed back. In fact, the MoU is the triumph of a combination: sustained military toughness, yes, but also continued diplomacy. This constitutes a new winning formula that may help keep together ideologically not-quite-identical regime actors like Pezeshkian, Ghalibaf, Araghchi, Vahidi, and Zolghadr.

7. Trump has proven that his readiness to use military violence has its limits. In ultimo: TACO. In fact, Trump, who really does seem to understand only the language of sustained force, now treats Iran with grudging respect. On 16 June, he called its regime “very rational” and denied he had ever called for regime change. Trump’s behavior—and, operationally, the question just which factors were most important, and when, in reigning him in—will be keenly analyzed especially by foreign powers such as China.

8. A propos China: it has emerged strengthened from this crisis without having had to openly intervene. (It was involved behind the scenes, also via its Pakistani ally, and likely helped keeping Iran in the negotiations.) This, too, will be a lesson China will remember.

9. Also vis-à-vis Israel, Iran has emerged strategically the winner. The reason is that the United States is leaning on Tel Aviv to act with somewhat more restraint, also in Lebanon. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for Iran. At any rate, Tehran has—though only because of Trump’s shift away from Tel Aviv—for now better deterrence than ever vis-à-vis Israel, not only regarding open attacks on Iran but even regarding Lebanon. And this, in turn, is becoming a political problem for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as elections loom.

Tehran is confident of having won the 40-Day War and sure Trump will not launch another war, yet concerned recurring pinpointed US strikes in the Gulf and Israel’s war with Hizbollah are weakening its hand. Hence, it on Sunday carried out a threat that it made firmly last week and recurrently since the April US-Iranian ceasefire, which in its eyes includes Lebanon: it retaliated when Israel attacked its proxy Hizbollah in Beirut. Israel retaliated in turn.

As important as Tehran’s deed were its words. It holds Washington responsible for Israel’s actions; threatened further retaliation if attacks on Beirut and in South Lebanon continue; and warned it would strike Arab oil installations if Israel hits Iran’s again (as it did). Determined to maintain freedom of action in Lebanon, Israel rejects what Expediency Council Chairman Sadegh Larijani called a new “strategic doctrine,” and Trump insists the April ceasefire excludes Lebanon. But he also stated he is “calling all the shots” vis-à-vis Netanyahu and quickly stopped Israeli retaliation. Netanyahu looked weak—but disobeying Trump would have been risky. He is in a tough spot as elections loom. And his gap between him and Trump is deepening: for Tehran, a welcome side effect of its attack.

Meanwhile, Tehran’s objective is not only to protect Hizbollah, but also to link the Israeli-Lebanese and US-Iranian Gulf theaters. If Israel strikes in Lebanon—then Tehran may hit US targets in the Gulf. Reflecting Iran’s afore-noted confidence tinged with concern, this power play carries two risks. When a conflict party that is not militarily dominant tries to impose a new if-then rule, a test of wills ensues that is destabilizing, here doubly because there are not one but two theaters and not two but three conflict parties, i.e. Iran, Israel, and the USA. Moreover, Iran is endangering what it may want most and is working towards: trying to become a new status-quo power in the Gulf. (Intra-regional components of Gulf security are indeed growing stronger, though Arab states want to keep a US presence, too.) Iran’s method to maximize its security by protecting its proxy beyond the Gulf may clash with its will to become more accepted as part of the security architecture of the Gulf.

This is likely to entrench a no-deal limbo in the Gulf, doubly because Tehran feels confident and distrusts Washington and because their demands for now are too far apart to be bridged. The Gulf drives and exemplifies the world’s geoeconomic and geopolitical instability and America’s and regional actors’s responsibility for this situation. Meanwhile, however, regional and global states and companies are not standing still, but searching for strategic and economic alternatives to a return to the Open Hormuz status quo ante.

However, China’s growth has not been due only to domestic policies. (Besides, especially early on these were inspired by others’ successes and failures: the East Asian developmental states and the fate of the USSR, respectively.) And as is well known, that growth has not been mainly driven by domestic market demand, even though China’s economic explosion admittedly began from 1978 with agricultural reforms and the extreme consumption demands of a mainly peasant society of which 84% lived in extreme poverty in 1981.

Rather, China’s historically unprecedented growth sprint-marathon, since 1978, owes a good bit to the fact that it happened within a (definitely since 1990) unipolar open-border world that had no equal in history, either. Now, this world is changing—partly in reaction to China’s success as an export juggernaut.

Sure, China has not only benefited from but shaped economic globalization, doubly since it joined the WTO in 2001. But its exploding share of world trade (1978: <1%; 2025: 12-14%) eclipses the past (1700: approximately 5-10%) also because world trade has never in history been easier than since the 1980s and especially since 1990s: which is precisely when China re-emerged. Trade tariffs became super-low. There were no imperial blocs; the Soviet-led one, which anyway was never separate from (US-led) capitalism, began opening up ever more in the 1980s. And new transport technologies such as massive container shipping matured just before China’s rise began in the late 1970s.

By contrast, the world of Gilded-Age America, to take another explosive economy, was dominated by self-protective empires—though US exports especially to “its” hemisphere and to the only free-trade empire, Britain, gave an inkling of how easy foreign market access could supercharge a dynamic domestic economy.

In sum, since the 1990s, China’s explosive growth has been principally export-driven. As is well known, until the 2010s, most exports were basic to mid-range consumer goods. And while foreign companies made huge profits selling advanced goods to China (which made them share know-how: a strategy with a history) especially in the United States, basic manufacturing jobs dried up: the first China Shock.

A driver of political-cultural discontent in the American heartland, this shock helped bring Trump to power in 2016, and in 2025 was a key background factor why Trump began raising tariff walls. China won that trade war, sure, and continues to export much to the world’s single largest consumer market, the United States. But it is also reacting by intensifying exports elsewhere. And as China since the mid-2010s is producing advanced as well as more basic consumer goods—a historic rarity: countries’ production profiles normally shift as they advance, rather than stacking up—the result is a Second China Shock that is pretty global rather than mainly US-centered; its roots have much to do with China’s performance coming out of the COVID pandemic.

So now, many developed economies like the EU are losing advanced manufacturing jobs and at the selfsame time some developing economies, for instance in South East Asia, are seeing losses in basic manufacturing jobs. Sure, in some up-and-coming developed economies such as Brazil, the picture is (still?) different. And sure, in many developing countries, the picture is more complex. They can sell raw materials and some—impressively certain African countries—are building out domestic economies piggybacking on advanced Chinese goods such as EVs.

Even so, China Shock 1.0 is meeting China Shock 2.0—worldwide. More and more countries are contemplating countermeasures. In the EU, to take one example, these are becoming more likely as an earlier critic, Germany, is screaming in economic pain.

How will countermeasures look like? Which countries will coordinate them? How will they interact with the economic and the political relations between the United States and Beijing, the world’s two giants? And how China will react? These questions will be a key story to follow in the months and indeed years to come—and likely affect China and its economy in one way or another.

IS IRAN BECOMING A STATUS-QUO POWER? (L’Iran est-il en train de devenir une puissance du statu quo? (27 mai 2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/iran-une-revolution-silencieuse-dans-lart-de-negocier-884311325643

THE XI-TRUMP SUMMIT (Le sommet Xi-Trump (20 mai 2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/le-sommet-xi-trump-106878475888

A HISTORIC MOMENT IN THE UAE? (Un moment historique aux Émirats? (13 mai 2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/emirats-la-guerre-de-2026-marque-un-tournant-historique-380329431285

ISRAEL: THE PRICE OF “ETERNAL WAR” (Israël : le prix de la “guerre éternelle” (6 mai 2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/israel-le-prix-de-la-guerre-eternelle-902204675731

Le Golfe et l’unilatéralisme de Trump (29 April 2026): https://www.tdg.ch/le-golfe-et-lunilateralisme-de-trump-940871634523

L’albatros géopolitique de Washington (III) (23.4.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/jcpoa-pourquoi-trump-a-quitte-laccord-nucleaire-iranien-835847369716

L’albatros géopolitique de Washington (II) (15.4.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/petrole-pourquoi-le-golfe-reste-au-cur-des-tensions-mondiales-577877542093

L’albatros géopolitique de Washington (I) (8.4.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/trump-pourquoi-les-etats-unis-restent-englues-dans-le-golfe-339006496617

THE GOLF: HISTORICAL CATALYZER OF AMERICA’S GLOBAL STANDING (Le Golfe comme accélérateur du positionnement mondial de l’Amérique (1.4.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/le-golfe-comme-accelerateur-du-positionnement-mondial-de-lamerique-322993679330

Trump vient-il de céder ? (25.3.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/guerre-en-iran-trump-vient-il-de-ceder-695953208311

Trump à la croisée des chemins (18.3.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/iran-la-strategie-descalade-de-teheran-met-trump-sous-pression-755457852760

Le brouillard est en train de se lever (11.3.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/iran-le-regime-survit-et-la-guerre-touche-a-sa-fin-172666834510

Dans le brouillard de la guerre (4.3.2026): https://www.tdg.ch/iran-cinq-cles-pour-comprendre-la-guerre-avec-israel-9571

THE KING OF GAZA (Le roi de Gaza (25.2.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/gaza-comment-le-territoire-est-devenu-un-laboratoire-pour-israel-137965609063

COLD WAR PROTESTS AGAINST THE BOMB (Les protestations contre la Bombe (18.2.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/les-protestations-contre-la-bombe-218862990757

THE NEW NUCLEAR ARMS RACE (La nouvelle course aux armements nucléaires (11.2.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/lhistorien-itinerant-la-nouvelle-course-aux-armements-nucleaires-875811519107

GREENLAND BETWEEN COLD WAR AND DECOLONIZATION (Le Groenland entre guerre froide et décolonisation (4.2.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/groenland-entre-guerre-froide-et-decolonisation-362902229459

GREENLAND BETWEEN DANISH SOVEREIGNTY AND THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE (Le Groenland entre souveraineté danoise et hémisphère occidental (28.1.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/groenland-les-racines-historiques-des-revendications-americaines-764979251621

IRAN’S BALANCE OF FEAR (L’équilibre de peur en Iran (21.1.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/l-equilibre-de-la-peur-en-iran-634913191370

IRAN IN CRISIS (L’Iran en crise (14.1.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/lhistorien-itinerant-liran-en-crise-216102584216

TRUMP’S WAGER (Venezuela) (La pari de Trump (Venezuela) (7.1.2026)): https://www.tdg.ch/chronique-le-pari-de-trump-794749809480

THE RENAISSANCE OF MULTIPOLARITY (La renaissance de la multipolarité (31.12.2025)): https://www.tdg.ch/trump-son-mandat-accelere-la-fin-du-siecle-americain-542111764999

THE CHRISTMAS TREE (Le sapin de Noël (24.12.2025)): https://www.tdg.ch/noel-comment-le-sapin-alsacien-est-devenu-un-symbole-mondial-205538557532

THE NEW US NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY (La nouvelle Stratégie de sécurité nationale (NSS) américaine (17.12.2025)): https://www.tdg.ch/nss-la-strategie-americaine-aboie-mais-doute-face-a-la-chine-763578072387

The Xi-Trump summit

[published in French on 20 Mai 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/le-sommet-xi-trump-106878475888]

Last week, Trump became the first US president in a decade to visit China. While historic, his summit with Xi was not a turning point. Rather, it confirmed the shifting nature of bilateral US-Chinese relations, but left its broader international context unclear.

Before the 19^th century, summits did not exist. Travel was arduous; diplomats, not leaders, did diplomacy. But as travel became easier and public opinion more important, world leaders began to meet. At first, they did so only to defuse crises; think of Paris 1919 or Munich 1938. Then, from the 1960s, world summits became more frequent. Cold War leaders wished to gauge each other, keep relations stable, and influence public relation. These were the objectives also of last week’s Xi-Trump summit. It was not meant to solve a crisis; and it did not result in policy decisions. Especially US diplomats must have been happy. Diplomats fear summits because when leaders like Trump fly solo, unencumbered by dossiers and professionals, they can take irreversible problematic decisions.

Even so, that summit mattered. It confirmed that China’s relative victory in the 2025 trade war with the United States was not a bug, but a feature. Trump (Trump!) was deferential and unlike Xi called his counterpart a “friend,” delighting Chinese media. And he confirmed what had shown e.g. in the US National Security Strategy and the sale of H200 Nvidia chips to China last December and in Trump’s approach to China in the Iran War: the American rhetoric and many policies are softening towards a powerful China. Tough talk and explicit “de-coupling” are out; business deals are in. Not by chance, Treasury Secretary Bessent was more involved in the summit than Rubio and Hegseth, and Trump was flanked by business leaders like Nvidia’s Huang. And Trump unprecedentedly called an arms sale to a crucial third party, Taiwan, a “negotiation chip” in bilateral US-PRC relations.

But if the summit confirmed and clarified shifts in US-Chinese relations, that bilateral relationship’s global context remained unclear. Iran and the Gulf was barely mentioned to the media. And while Xi impressed on Trump that Taiwan may violently derail US-Chinese relations and while Chinese media touted Trump’s “negotiation chip” comment as a policy change, the reality is unclear. Trump (Trump!) only listened to, but did not comment on, Xi’s Taiwan comments—as a true diplomat would. And there are many US Republicans and Democrats politicians, State department diplomats, Pentagon officers, and economically and militarily important US allies such as Japan and South Korea who will have a weighty word to say on all matters Taiwanese—not the least because Taiwan is not just Taiwan’s, but seen by many in Washington as a key to America’s own strategic interests in what is seen as an American ocean, the Pacific.

All of which poses a fateful question. Do both Americans and Chinese think their bilateral relationship is somewhat clearer (and less confrontational) while the global context and, indeed, arena of that relationship remains fluid if not chaotic? Or do perceptions differ? Does Beijing perhaps really believe Trump is changing his Taiwan policy? Such questions, to do with both sides’ perceptions and misperceptions of what happened and mattered at the summit, will be crucial to follow in the coming weeks and months.

A historic moment in the UAE?

The 2026 War seems to be reinforcing an ever more distinct security posture of the UAE in and beyond the Gulf.

[French: 13 May 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/emirats-la-guerre-de-2026-marque-un-tournant-historique-380329431285]

During Israel and America’s 2026 War on Iran, Iran attacked non-military targets in Arab countries hosting US bases. Turning US-provided security into insecurity, Tehran wanted to pressure those countries to pressure Washington to end the war and, long-term, to loosen their reliance on Washington.

Iran’s main target was the UAE, which it attacked with at least 2256 drones, 537 ballistic missiles, and 26 cruise missiles. The UAE’s carrot to incentivize “good” behavior—allowing Iranian trade via the UAE to soften US sanctions, a policy backed especially by Dubai, the emirate with the oldest and largest Iranian merchant community—did not work. Instead, Tehran punished the UAE for a stick: its relationship with Israel, officialized in 2020. Rooted in the 1990s-2010s, this relationship crystallized from 2015. Both were upset Obama’s nuclear talks with Tehran excluded them, and both argued the resulting JCPOA emboldened Iran regionally. And their power and politics were mutually attractive. If Israel has the region’s premier military, the UAE has the (Arab) Gulf’s largest industrial-military complex and best military, which gained experience from the 1990s by participating in US-led campaigns from Kosovo to ISIL and from the mid-2010s by its own campaigns, e.g. in Yemen. And the UAE’s opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, domestically from the 1980s and regionally from the Arab Spring in 2011, is compatible with Israel. The relationship is so strong that the UAE has forbidden pro-Gaza demonstrations since 2023. Sure, that relationship strengthens the UAE also vis-à-vis its giant Saudi neighbor. But its key reason is to deter Iran, Israel’s regional antagonist and the UAE’s most threatening neighbor-giant already under the shah, who occupied three islands as it became independent after Britain’s withdrawal in 1971.

If the UAE’s carrot did not deter Iran from attacking it, its stick—partly its own might; principally its Israeli relationship—literally backfired in Iran’s barrage. But the UAE did not duck. It doubled down. Now seeing Iran as an existential threat, not unlike Israel, the UAE behaved unlike other Gulf countries. During the war, it massively froze Iranian assets; counterattacked, though not publicly and probably only once; had an Israeli anti-missile team and technology come to its help; and informed its population about the exact number of Iranian attacks, probably to align Emiratis with the state’s view of Iran as a rogue actor. And after the war, it dramatically expanded its non-military power—leaving OPEC allows it to sell as much oil and gas as it wants—and is likely to expand its military capabilities, on its own and with Israel and the United States. It is again doing so partly vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and now also Pakistan, another giant neighbor with its own interests working closely with Riyadh; but more than ever mainly vis-à-vis Iran, also by trying to keep Washington from making what it considers undue concessions.

In sum, the UAE’s experience of the 2026 War as existential likely means it will become a historical turning point, not unlike other moments like the 1991 Gulf War and the 2011 Arab Spring. There may be domestic repercussions. (Back in 1979, another external threat, the Iranian Revolution, turbocharged federal state centralization and strengthened Emirati nationalism.) And there already are clear geostrategic and geoeconomic consequences, in the region and beyond.

Israel: The Price of “Eternal War”

[French 6 May 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/israel-le-prix-de-la-guerre-eternelle-902204675731]

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s single biggest trauma, it has waged what some call milhemet netzah: an “eternal war” that some support and many still accept as their fate. But increasingly, Israelis are realizing what a price this state of being exacts—also from them.

That domestic price needs to be named: not to excuse the war’s catastrophic and, in Gaza, genocidal effects, but because these effects and that price are two sides of one coin. Accepting this truth is the precondition for Israelis to understand that forever wars do not solve problems—which they grasp: in a recent poll, 57% said Israel did not win any war since 2023. In a future column, we will address the effects of Israel’s policy on our continent, Europe. And closer to the Israeli elections, held at the latest this October, we will address socio-political effects, most importantly the question of who serves and who does not. Today, however, we deal with something else: war makes sick.

Israeli mental health experts are describing a “tsunami” of “moral injury” among soldiers: a condition caused by witnessing or participating in acts that violate a person’s deepest moral values, producing guilt, shame, self-alienation, and a collapse of identity and meaning. Thus, a soldier who killed a group of civilians removed every mirror from his apartment because he cannot look at himself, does not leave home, and was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward after speaking to Haaretz, on whose report this text relies. Clinics and private practices are reporting more cases of moral injury than ever before, with the secondary circle—children of reservists disturbed by what their fathers did—also now presenting symptoms. As for the IDF, it uses the term “identity injury,” which is a politically motivated: acknowledging moral injury would undermine its self-image. Most soldiers are silent, fearing they will be branded weak or disloyal—though a committee is now expected to recommend recognition.

More broadly, a large and growing proportion of Israelis is suffering from mental disorders at clinically significant levels. “We are reaching a point where the majority of the population is already on the side of the affected rather than the ‘resilient’,” says psychologist Eyal Kalanthroff from Hebrew University. “The public needs to know what the long-term costs of the war are.” Clinical insomnia have risen from 5% to 28%. PTSD, already at 16% before the war due to the Netanyahu government’s sociopolitical revolution, is now at 20%. In March 2026, 95% of respondents of a clinical study reported at least one trauma-linked psychological symptom, with 21% crossing the clinical threshold — more than double the pre-war rate. About one third of Gaza Envelope residents affected by the Hamas massacre and 7% of other Israelis have clinically significant OCD. And addiction has surged from 10 to 25%, among the highest rates in the world. The economic costs are staggering. The NATAL trauma organization estimated the annual damage to the economy at 27 billion CHF — 40% in direct costs related to lost work capacity and treatment, and 60% in indirect costs from trauma-linked rises in accidents, violence, addiction, and illness. Researchers say even these estimates are conservative, particularly due to the wars with Iran—and assert that the damage will outlast the war.

The Gulf, historical catalyzer of America’s global standing

[French: 1 April 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/le-golfe-comme-accelerateur-du-positionnement-mondial-de-lamerique-322993679330]

The likely acceleration of America’s relative decline as a world power due to the war on Iran confirms the Gulf’s longstanding role as a catalyst of America’s global standing. Today, I discuss two dimensions.

First, Tehran’s use of the Hormuz Strait to turn the war into a world-economic crisis for now keeps strengthening its deterrence vis-à-vis Washington and Tel Aviv, which may in turn lead to a cease-fire that makes America look weak also beyond the region. Sure, military moves feed warnings of an escalation trap, and Trump’s rhetoric and maximalist 15-point plan together with Tehran’s maximalist rhetoric, decades-long preparation for this war, and belief that its strategic success will last, may lead to escalation.

But as possible is a cease-fire. Trump may understand that reopening the Strait militarily would cost blood, time, and money and be suicidal politically and economically. Moreover, he has made a decision that suggests he may accept a cease-fire and try to move on: in charge of possible talks is J.D. Vance. A president-hopeful and the voice against new wars in Trump’s orbit since 2023, he may be quick to cut Washington’s losses.

Such a cease-fire would strengthen Tehran vis-à-vis Washington. This would be historic. Since 1979, Iran has consumed enormous US ideological, military, and economic-political resources, and from the late 1980s to the early 2010, when the world was unipolar, Tehran remained the state challenging Washington, also because Bush Jr. in 2002 cut short a post-9/11 rapprochement. If after a war that both sides see as the climax of that confrontation, a cease-fire strengthens Iran’s deterrence, Washington will look weak globally, even if the world—except Russia—will be relieved. (It will be less relieved if the war has destabilizing effects beyond the Middle East. A world power that fears it is growing weaker, and whose citizens also for this reason voted twice for a bully, will try to compensate weakness by showing strength elsewhere—in Cuba?)

Second, the recent Pakistani-Saudi-Egyptian-Turkish initiative, backed by China and the UN, is the first concrete sign of a coming shift in regional security. Under Trump, America and its Israeli ally turned from a stabilizing force vis-à-vis Iran into a destabilizer. In response, Riad wants additional security arrangements: not with the UAE, a rival still committed to its US and Israeli allies, but with three non-Gulf giants whose relations with each other and Iran have been at least fair.

This initiative would not fully reverse the 1980 Carter Doctrine, in which Washington, scared by the shah’s fall and Moscow’s Afghan invasion, first vowed to intervene also militarily to “protect” its Gulf partners and their oil. But it might decrease America’s relative weight in the Gulf. Sure, this may be fine with Washington. After all, its posture has changed before. In the 1980s, vis-à-vis Iraq and against Iran, it mainly strengthened over-the-horizon bases and partners like Oman and Saudi Arabia. And in the 1970s, after London’s withdrawal, it was content to have Riad and mainly Tehran serve as the Gulf’s policemen. A more direct US presence, while manifest first in 1987/88, geled fully only after the Gulf Wars of 1990/91 and 2003. And just as the war of 1990–91, including Washington’s colossal diplomatic effort to forge a politico-military coalition, catalyzed the unipolar era and was a “test case for a new [fully US-centric] world order” (Lawrence Freedman), this Gulf War, a parody of 1990–91, might now catalyze the relative weakening of America’s standing not just in the region but far beyond.

The King of Gaza

[French: 25 Feb 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/gaza-comment-le-territoire-est-devenu-un-laboratoire-pour-israel-137965609063]

In mid-February, Trump’s Board of Peace met, imagining Gaza as a tabula rasa. This view has a history. Since 1948, Gaza has lacked a clear political-administrative status and, hence, been a governmental laboratory.

1948-49 saw the first war between Israel and regular Arab armies. The area controlled by Jordan became, with Israeli collusion, part of Jordan: the West Bank. By contrast, the Gaza Strip, born because Israel was unable to repel all Egyptian forces, had four futures. The British Empire wanted its Jordanian allies to control it, to protect the Suez Canal. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ultimately rejected an Israeli-Egyptian condominium or Israeli control because he had no use for 80,000 Gazans and 200,000 Nakba refugees. Hence, the strip came under Cairo’s military control, but not part of Egypt. Most Gazans disliked their new rulers, who invested little in them. Simultaneously, Gaza’s massive refugee population made it a center for the newly founded UNRWA.

In the 1967 War, Israel conquered the strip (and the Sinai, Golan, and West Bank). Like the West Bank, the strip was not integrated into Israel, and served the Israeli economy as a source of cheap labor and captive consumer. But more than the West Bank, it suffered from what Sara Roy has called planned “de-development.” And while Jordan maintained a stake in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, nobody cared for Gaza. Not even Israelis did. There were few settlers, and Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin famously dreamed Gaza would just disappear into the sea. Gaza was thus also for Israel the perfect first seat for the Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Vice versa, because Gaza was Palestine’s quintessence, the Palestine of Palestine really, poet Mahmud Darwish has called it “the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us and the one most worthy of love.”

Gaza’s fate did not improve when Hamas took ground control in 2007. Hamas saw it firstly as a laboratory for its own power; and its military leadership developed genocidal fantasies that—fed, but certainly not excused, by Israeli repression—drove October 7, 2023. As for Israel, it withdrew in 2005, but maintained overall control, as the UN has attested. It exchanged the principle of “maximum Arabs in minimum territory” for “maximum control and minimum responsibility” (Darryl Li). Gaza became a laboratory for the IDF and Israeli exports. Here, electronic surveillance was refined, also in buffer (kill) zones along the border, and air control, including by drones, improved. “We are looking at how you control … from the air when it is no longer legitimate … from the ground,” Air Force head Amos Yadlin stated. Air control became ubiquitous; The Drone Eats with Me, écrivain Atef Abu Saif wrote. Last, by 2023, Gaza became an open lab for military AI: programs such as Habsora, Lavender, and Where’s Dady have been key to, and helped drive, Israel’s genocidal war.

It is Gaza’s 80-year-long past as a territory without a clear political-administrative status and, hence, as a convenient lab, which explains why Trump can dream of Gaza as a real-estate riviera and crown himself the President-for-Life of the Board of Peace, aka the King of Gaza.

Cold War protests against the Bomb

[French: 18 February 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/les-protestations-contre-la-bombe-218862990757]

Last Wednesday, this column commented on the nuclear arms race between Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, and compared it to the Cold War. Today, we take a look at Cold War protests.

Although there were protests against the Bomb throughout the Cold War, they were strongest from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s and especially from the early to the mid-1980s. In both phases, some officials in the Eisenhower and Reagan administration asserted a nuclear war may be winnable. (Some Soviets believed in so-called nuclear superiority, too, though to lesser public effect.) Also, in both phases, that rhetoric was driven home by an event: the first H-bomb test in 1954 and the NATO Double-Track Decision, still under Carter, in 1979. Today, that rhetoric is back. Russia has threatened to use tactical nukes in the Ukraine, and in 2024 rendered its nuclear doctrine more aggressive; and Trump administration officials and think tanks are signalling a belief in nuclear superiority. But there has not been a major event yet that may galvanize protests. And while in the Cold War, people around the world attacked nuclear arms for “benefitting” two superpowers, today, multiple governments and, for now, populations believe they may need their own nukes.

While Cold War protests happened around the world, reasons varied. In the Pacific for example, testing was a key issue; in the Global South, superpower arrogance; and in central Europe, fear of nuclear war on one’s land; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s living memory kept affecting the Japanese. Protest intensity varied, too. While some critics were audible in socialist countries, protesters were loudest in democracies; the 1982 Freeze demonstration in New York drew a million people. In North America, Europe, and beyond, cultural genres like pop music amplified nuclear fears especially in the 1980s—and across the world, a range of people protested. In the 1940s, especially in America, scientists were in the lead, including some who had built the bomb, like Robert Oppenheimer. Moral authorities got involved: Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s, for instance, and in the 1980s US Catholic bishops and the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council (IPC). From 1980, 4,000 municipalities, first probably Manchester’s, declared nuclear free zones. Government leftists like some German SPD members in the 1950s and 1980s and Sweden’s Olaf Palme in the 1980s helped movements grow, while non-government leftists like Dorothy Thompson and her historian-husband Edward, co-founders of European Nuclear Disarmament, were key transnational networkers, with the IPC. Most important were regular people, however. Thus, in 1955, “middle-class housewives in Tokyo’s Suganami ward, determined ‘to protect the lives and the happiness of all mankind,’ began a petition campaign against H-bombs,” Lawrence Wittner notes in Confronting the Bomb. The 1958 Swiss Movement Against Atomic Armaments involved regular citizens. And staid middle-class protests from 1972 against a nuclear reactor in Wyhl, Germany, formed a base for future protests against nukes.

Such democratic citizens and the attempts by some to eventually form links also with citizens in non-democratic polities are inspiring—and indeed may eventually affect politicians, as they did in the 1950s and 1980s.

The new nuclear arms race

[French: 11 February 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/lhistorien-itinerant-la-nouvelle-course-aux-armements-nucleaires-875811519107]

A global US-Russian-Chinese nuclear arms race is on. It bears a few similarities with the Cold War, but is more destabilizing, with effects also on regions like Europe and East Asia.

The world is in the middle of a new nuclear arms race. Rooted in the later 2010s, it is being sped up by the recent expiration of the 2011 US-Russian New START treaty. For two reasons, this race it is more unstable and dangerous than the Cold War. Back then, there was one global-nuclear relationship; today we have a nuclear Three-Body-Problem involving Moscow, Washington, and Beijing. And while Moscow and Washington begrudgingly saw each other as peers in a bipolar world, today instability reigns. “Our” race includes an irredentist power, Russia. Worse, it is part and parcel of Beijing and Washington’s messy attempt to manage to its own advantage “their” Thucydides Trap, where a rising power challenges a ruling one.

The Cold War was not rock-stable, however. Sure, theorists from the 1950s posited that nuclear deterrence, i.e. Moscow and Washington’s ability to survive a nuclear attack and retaliate devastatingly, should create permanent military and political stability and end the nuclear race. But this “Nuclear Revolution” (associated with the term MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, coined in 1962) was not quite the “fact” that some scholars such as Robert Jervis thought it was. US and Soviet arsenals kept growing, and by the 1970s-80s could have destroyed the world dozens of times over. Moreover, there is a Cold War precedent to Beijing’s present race to nuclear parity. From 1949, Moscow raced to catch up with America, whose arsenal surged even more steeply than Moscow’s—also to assure NATO allies—before plateauing out in the mid-1960s. Only in 1972 did US-Soviet negotiations first succeed, with the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty and SALT I. And even then, a second race followed, as historians like Brendan Rittenhouse Green have pointed out. The Soviet arsenal grew until 1986, and the 1979 NATO Double-Track Decision deeply shaped European politics in the early 1980s, especially in Germany.

Today, the guardrails provided by those 1970s accords and successors like START I (1991) and New START are sorely missing. Moreover, US, Russian, and Chinese policies are in effect encouraging regional proliferation. Trump, Mr. America-First, is causing East Asian and European allies to ponder homegrown nuclear options. Europeans are scared doubly because of Russia’s thousands of theater nuclear arms—whose use Moscow has threatened in Ukraine—and almost-complete nuclear modernization. And China’s buildup is worrying India and—with North Korea’s arsenal—East Asian democracies. Most worryingly, Moscow, Beijing, and Washington are undermining each other’s retaliatory-strike capacity. Following 9/11, Washington withdrew from ABM. Russian nuclear modernization followed, including hypersonic and submarine arms. Such arms and the Chinese nuclear build-up, including plans for orbital arms, are causing Trump to push for an anti-ballistic Golden Dome, which in turn worry China and Russia.

Why, then, is present-day public protest muted compared to the Cold War? And what may past protests teach us? These questions will occupy us next Wednesday.

Greenland between Cold War and decolonization

[French: 4 February 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/groenland-entre-guerre-froide-et-decolonisation-362902229459]

Last Wednesday (28 January), this column ended with a note on the April 1941 US-Danish Greenland agreement, which affirmed America’s recognition of Danish sovereignty but also called Greenland “a part of the Western hemisphere,” a point Copenhagen recognized by ratifying the agreement in 1945. US bases were built from summer 1941: to defend America against Germany, and to forecast the weather and help supplying Britain. In 1945, Copenhagen rejected a US offer to buy Greenland. Washington did not insist—but kept its bases, using the 1941 agreement’s ambiguity. “The American Continent” was still in “danger,” Washington claimed, and in 1946 called Greenland, Iceland, the Azores, Okinawa, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal “essential” for defending the USA: a space far beyond mainland America. It nota bene exceeds Trump’s defensive space: in 1946 America was an expanding power, while today it is recalibrating. But clearly, Trump’s Greenlandic desire, though idiosyncratic, has deep roots. And his concern about arctic rivals, China and Russia, has a historic parallel.

In 1946, US concerns mounted about the USSR, and vice versa. Washington’s Soviet policy, “containment,” included a “polar strategy” from 1950. Key was Thule (Pituffik), built after a new US-Danish agreement was signed in 1951; NATO membership lessened Copenhagen’s Soviet fears. On the shortest route to the USSR, Thule serviced nuclear bombers and refueling and reconnaissance planes. In 1961, four years after Sputnik, until 1987 Thule became part of an intercontinental missile radar warning system. Today, Pituffik is still defensive; a new radar operates since 2009. In the 1960s, B-52 bombers—some of which were from 1958 always airborne, for fear of a Soviet nuclear strike—assured airborne contact with Thule.

In 1968, a nuclear B-52 crashed at Thule. Copenhagen insisted on amending the 1951 agreement to explicitly forbid nukes in or above Greenland in peace time. Washington agreed (it anyway had intercontinental missiles) Politics mattered, too. Back in the late 1940s, protests in some decolonizing countries like Egypt to US plans and forces on the USSR’s “perimeter” made the “polar strategy” more attractive: Greenlanders had no foreign policy voice. Although in 1953 Copenhagen told the UN that Greenland was not colonial anymore, integration was not equality. Greenland was Danified. And while US nukes were forbidden in Denmark, Prime Minister Hansen in 1957 demurred when asked whether he’d like to know about US nukes in Greenland. By 1968, however, a rising Greenlandification movement hovered in the background of US-Danish negotiations. By 1979, that movement led to Home Rule, and in 2009 to Self-Government—and one hopes that today, Greenland’s government will be able to defend its interest in possible negotiations concerning its island.

Greenland between Danish sovereignty and the Western hemisphere

[French: 28 January 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/groenland-les-racines-historiques-des-revendications-americaines-764979251621]

While idiosyncratic, President Trump’s Greenlandic desires have deep roots. Since 1920, Washington, while recognizing Danish sovereignty over Greenland, considers that island to be part of the Western hemisphere.

January 2026 was a turning point in US-European relations—and Greenland the reason. Europeans were incensed about US President Trump’s territorial claims and reasons such as “I did not get the Nobel Peace Prize.” The claim that Russia and China are moving in was batted away, too: this may happen in the future only.

Lost in the hubbub was history. Washington’s view of Greenland is complex. In exchange for purchasing the Virgin Islands from Copenhagen in 1917, Washington recognized Danish sovereignty over all of Greenland while, in 1920, insisting that no other state should ever replace Copenhague. The reason: Greenland belongs to the Western hemisphere and hence is covered by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which opposes non-American interventions in the Americas (but does not mention Greenland). Early on toothless, that doctrine became more muscular as America’s economic and political power grew; in 1867 Washington invoked it as it helped republican Mexicans to end the 1862 French occupation of Mexico.

Greenland became an active US concern in 1940. That April, Germany occupied Denmark (but not Greenland). As Britain was already at war, Washington on the 12th called in London’s ambasaddor to bring up “the express application of the Monroe Doctrine regarding Greenland.” He “treated the matter in the friendliest spirit,” a State Department source in the US FRUS collection notes: Britain needed America, and Greenland was not a priority. However, Canada, a British Dominion, feared a German Greenland: the island neighbors Canada, and to produce aluminium, Canada needed cryolite, mined in Ivigtut. Meanwhile, the Danish Ambasaddor Henrik Kauffmann and the Danish authorities in Greenland began lobbying Washington to get involved in Greenland, to keep Berlin and London out. Kauffmann formed a presumably humanitarian Greenland Delegation, and on 19 April even “made some reference to the question of a protectorate over Greenland.” Njet, Secretary of State Adold Berle replied, and also declined Greenlandic authorities’ request for the Navy to protect Ivigtut from a German attack. But Washington dispatched private contractors; internally saw Kauffmann and the Greenlandic authorithies as “the surviving remnant of the Danish government;” and asked the Navy to begin military contingency planning.

Washington’s calcul changed in in February 1941. As Germany intensified its bombardment of British troops in Iceland, Ottawa (and London) insisted Washington agree to a British air base in Greenland. Meeting Canadian diplomats, Berle insisted “any action taken must be taken within the framework of the inter-American continental defense” and proposed to construct, with and for Danish Greenland, air bases that would be “open to ourselves and to the other American nations,” including Canada. The Canadians were “satisfied.” So was Kauffmann, who signed, on 9 April, an agreement of historic importance. The agreement, which incensed German-occupied Copenhagen but was ratified after liberation, did two things. The United States reaffirmed its recognition of exclusive Danish sovereignty. And Denmark recognized Washington’s right to establish military bases to defend the Western hemisphere. In effect, Denmark recognized Washington’s claim that Greenland belongs to the Western hemisphere. This recognition was all the more important because the 1941 agreement formed the basis for postwar US-Danish agreements concerning Greenland: a topic this column will discuss next Wednesday.

Iran’s balance of fear

[French: 21 January 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/l-equilibre-de-la-peur-en-iran-634913191370]

Iran’s state and much of its society are locked into an unsteady balance of fear and delegitimization. To understand it, a comparison with Iran under the shah is instructive.

Iran is locked into an unsteady balance of fear and delegitimization. January was a new peak. As in 2022/23, many shouted “Death to the Dictator” and demanded a revolution; but protests became much more intense. And officials again decried protestors as foreign stooges; but repression was unprecedented. For now, neither side is able to break this balance and overcome the other. To explain why, a comparison with Iran under the last shah is instructive.

What helps today’s state? First, unlike the shah, it built a real socio-ideological class base; for now, some (lower) middle class Iranians, organized in manifold ways, including the Basijs, remain loyal. Second, state violence is more unrestrained. Official sources talk of 5000 deaths in early January versus 2000-3000 in 1978-79. (Violence “helps” only short-term, though.) Third, the systematic imprisonment of critics makes it hard for society to organize and find a leader, like under the shah. The exiled Ayatollah Khomeini was for a long time known only to some, and in 1978-79 it took him time to become an accepted figurehead. Fourth, today guerillas operate “only” in Kurdish and Baluch but not in Persian-speaking areas, as the Mujahedin and Fedayin did from 1965 and 1971, respectively. As for civilian and military government elites, they until the shah’s last days remained rather unified; this is the case today, too.

Foreign relations are a toss-up. Unlike today’s state, the shah from 1953 had a patron, Washington. Until 1977, he overall profited, and on top became increasingly independent, for instance in OPEC in the 1970s. But his deep relationship with Washington boomeranged: when US President Jimmy Carter began to criticize his human rights record in 1977, the shah soon felt and looked weak, creating a political opportunity for critis. Moreover, today two powerful states, the US and Israel, want regime change, and might militarily intervene. This being said, Trump may be good news for Iranian officials and generals who secretly see Venezuela as an acceptable scenario: Trump removes the head of state but leaves the state intact, eschewing democracy while lifting the US economic blockade in opaque ways that profit some state elites and a few Americans.

What helps today’s society? Ideological homogeneity, for one thing. Most Iranians want some form of secular capitalist democracy; under the shah, there also were Islamists and various socialists. Second, today more than in the 1950s-70s, civil society is vibrant, educated, and internationally networked. It also has potential leaders who could, if repression lessens, organize protests and take over the state, perhaps with low- or mid-rank officials, for instance from Iran’s powerful municipalities.

What about structural factors? It seems that today’s triple environmental, economic, and political crisis is deeper than that in the later 1970s. Perhaps worse, today’s state is unwilling and/or unable to address that crisis, whether due to ideological conviction or economic self-interest or foreign relations.

These structural problems seem to be creating a prerevolutionary situation that may in time weaken the state’s class base. Moreover, shifts in other afore-noted variables will likely benefit society and harm the state. This being said, as of today, Iran is not in a revolution, and non-revolutionary futures including state survival are at least as likely.

Iran in crisis

[French: 14 January 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/lhistorien-itinerant-liran-en-crise-216102584216]

Compared to 2022, today’s protests in Iran and their repression are more violent. There also are new features, some of which parallel past events. The regime is in crisis mode.

While today as in 2022, most protesters demand a revolution and the regime calls them foreign terrorists, this time protests are more violent. Protesters have attacked seminaries, torched offices, police stations, and mosques, and killed more than 100 security forces (in all of 2022/23, around 70). The regime uses not just police, militia, and Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) units but also, unusually, a few army units, and is rumored to have asked Iraqi militias for help. It also has already now killed more people than in 2022. The state see the protests as a supreme national security challenge.

This is also for geopolitical reasons. Israel’s attack in 2025 has weakened the regime and sharpened its fear. Moreover, unlike Obama during the 2009 protests and Biden in 2022, today’s US President is intervening, for now “only” with tarrifs—and Tehran worries that Trump’s abduction of Maduro may portend US military action.

Domestically, today’s unrest stems even more clearly than in 2022/23 from economic turmoil and environmental crisis, including electricity shortages and water scarcity, that are caused or worsened by state policies and corruption. In 2022, protests were triggered by cultural repression. Today, it is currency collapse, which led Tehran’s conservative Grand Bazaar merchants to close their shops. Protests quickly spread across Iran and to other groups. Merchants protest were momentous in Iran’s 1905/6 and 1978/79 revolution. But unlike in 1978, oil workers are not striking (yet), protests are not (yet) fully cross-class, and the security forces (still) are united.

Put differently, Iran may be in a pre-revolutionary stage, but not in a revolution. Some but far from all factors that studies of revolution like Theda Skocpol’s 1979 States and Social Revolution see as portending revolution exist. Most importantly, the IRGC, though somewhat factionalized, has much to lose economically and is determined to use violence. Thus, on the one hand, if nothing changes, the regime will survive. And after the death of Khamenei, who is 86, various scenarious are possible that may resemble present-day China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, and/or Turkey, as analyst Karim Sadjadpour explained in an excellent article in 2025 in Foreign Affairs. On the other hand, the protests keep coming at an ever faster and more violent rate, and now involve even conservative groups, and Washington is much more ready than in the past to intervene (and so is Tel Aviv). The regime is not simply facing its greatest challenge in decades. It is continuously on the defensive, and weaker and more fearful than ever.

Trump’s wager

[French: 7 January 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/chronique-le-pari-de-trump-794749809480]

The abduction of Maduro aims to intimidate Latin America and control Venezuelan oil. But complex historical and political obstacles await Trump.

The Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolas Maduro pursues two objectives: instilling respect in Latin American leaders and reasserting US dominance over Venezuelan oil—but not installing democracy. Washington is ignoring María Machado, who by proxy won the 2024 presidential election that Maduro falsified, and communicating with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, an able oil technocrat. She may not be against a deal. After all, Maduro himself offered Trump deals in 2025; and tapping the world’s largest oil reserves is key to resuscitating Venezuela.

Three problems stand in the way. First, Ministers of Interior and Defence Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Vladimir Padrino López and troops loyal to them can spoil a deal and hence need to be cut in—but both are indicted for drug charges in the US. Will they be captured, too? If yes, how will troops react? Second, Venezuelans (will) have a double problem with Washington’s thirst for oil. Their oil industry is so maraud that trickle-down material benefits from its reconstruction may be far off; hence, justified cries about “Yankee colonialism” may turn into anti-Yankee deeds, doubly as Venezuela is “packed from end to end with armed groups,” in analyst Phil Gunson’s words. Could that industry rise quickly enough, then—and will it be profitable enough given that some Venezuelan oil is hard to extract? Third, instability must concern the US oil companies that Trump wants to re-enter Venezuela, led by Chevron, the only one now sur place. Which ones will enter? And how will they react if Trump tries to force them?

Instilling respect in regional leaders will be tricky, too. Sure, small states will become doubly careful in dealing with Trump. And right now, right-wingers like Argentine’s Javier Milei are jubilant and center-leftist critique is measured; Maduro, who helped produce an economic disaster and 8 million refugees, had few allies besides Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and Russia. (China cares little for Venezuela today.) But in the mid-term, all bets are off. For one thing, Trump’s brags about hemispheric dominance is triggering unpleasant memories: 1898-1994, Washington intervened successfully to change regional governments at least 41 times. These sentiments will create political pressure on Latin American governments, which may be effective doubly because US Democrats oppose Trump’s adventure and the US mid-term elections are in less than a year. For another thing, like the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, so its Donroe sequel shows anxiety, not strength. From 1823 into the interwar period, America was not dominant; the British Empire was more influential. This truly changed only from World War II. Today, Washington fears Beijing. And its threats will likely reinforce Latin Americans’ urge to further diversify economic ties. Europe now may get a better Mercosur deal, and lithium and soya exports to China may grow further, for instance.

Unless, of course, Washington intervenes in multiple other countries. Then, we really will enter terra incognita.

The renaissance of multipolarity

[French: 3 January 2026: https://www.tdg.ch/trump-son-mandat-accelere-la-fin-du-siecle-americain-542111764999]

2025 was a pivotal year in international affairs. In a way, it was comparable to 1945 and 1991. Sure, unlike those two years, it did not end a hot or cold world war, and did not have clear victors and defeated. But it signalled the final reversal of a trend away from multipolarity that began in 1945. In 1945-91, the world became more bipolar, turning around the USA and the USSR, and after the Soviet demise in 1991, it became more unipolar. But even after 1945, multipolar traits persisted. They included, in the 1970s, China’s and the EEC/EU rise. By the 2010s, multipolar traits became more manifest, and multiple actors—now including Russia and middle powers such as Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia—became more assertive. In 2025, these traits and actors became so influential that we may call it the year when multipolarity was reborn, after a long gestation period. Put differently, 2025 was the year when the “American Century” that American Henry Luce declared in 1945 finally ended. This would have happened anyway. But its timing and speed is the doing of the Trump administration, whose policies—a fatal mixture of insecurity and aggression—are having the opposite effect of Making America Great Again.

Several points stand out about our reborn multipolar world. First, different powers enjoy very different combinations of economic and military might. Second, not the least because the United States is the only proven economic and military power, it for now remains the world’s primus inter pares. Third, for the first time since Imperial Japan, there is a “nonwhite” power, China, and most middle powers are nonwhite, too. Fourth, key features of the post-1945 international system such as the UN and NATO are persisting, though they are changing form. And fifth, for the first time in modern history, one power, the EU, is not a state but a confederation. This poses great challenges (think of the fight over Euroclear’s Russian assets). But the EU is making major policy strides, and Europeans’ supranational-European identity is getting stronger. All these developments, but most directly the fifth one, will also affect us here in Switzerland—and hence will have to be on our minds as we are moving into 2026.

The Christmas Tree

[French : 24 December 2025 : https://www.tdg.ch/noel-comment-le-sapin-alsacien-est-devenu-un-symbole-mondial-205538557532]

Christmas can be a very personal and intimate holiday. To me, it was, is, and always will be a deep-green fir tree alight in candles, the Christmas story recounted by my mother, and Christmas songs sung by my extended family in the small living room of my grandmother in Burgdorf, all crowned by presents and a Bernerplatte. Deep down, I feel this is Christmas, full stop. But evidently, untold people cherish a very different emotional truth. I have a friend who grew up in civil war Lebanon in a Sunni family that adored santa, sang carols, and kept a plastic tree at home. “We understood Christmas as a special celebration, and one that somehow “belonged” to everyone. I never had a sense of it as a ‘Christian’ holiday,” she told me when I asked her about her memories.

In fact, Christmas has been different things to different people for a long time. Even its very form and function has shifted. The Christmas tree is an excellent example. It is first documented in the 15^th century, mainly in Alsace, as a public Paradise Tree recounting the story of Adam and Eve. Soon, status-conscious local guilds sponsored trees and decorated them with edibles like apples and pretzels. By the time the term Christmas tree appears first, in 1611, it had already spread. Rich Protestants in northern Germany had embraced it, moving it into their private homes. Poorer folks followed suit, sometimes hanging small trees from their ceiling for lack of space. By 1800, the tree had become part of an elaborate, intimate ritual of bourgeois domesticity in which the husband-father, wife-mother and children all played a role—a ritual quite similar to that of my childhood. So much for the personal!

Around 1800, too, the tree began moving seriously. German aristocrats brought it to Britain and migrants to the United States. Puritans objected—even to December 25, which the Bible does not mention—but eventually, denominational competition forced them to surrender. The tree spread for political reasons, too. In Germany, nationalists invented a pre-Christian Teutonic past for the tree to help overcome Protestant-Catholic divisions. After losing to Germany in 1871, France stopped dissing the tree as an Alsatian rarity. In America, the tree was hoped to help overcome the civil war’s divisions. And the British monarchy sponsored its use in schools and army camps across the Isles.

Perhaps most momentously, the British Empire helped spread the tree around the world, including to places like Australia whose climate required great adaptations. As momentous were Americans: missionaries, soldiers—kurisumasu was born after America occupied Japan—and companies: in 1931-1964, a Coca-Cola ad helped globalize Santa Claus. Not everybody was happy. In 1951, two cardinals in Dijon burned a Santa Claus effigy as excited children chanted “Death to Santa!” But globalization has continued—and with it, adaptations and status games. In 2010, a tree in a hotel in Abu Dhabi featured jewels worth US$11 million. Sixteenth-century German guilds would have appreciated the idea though perhaps not the execution. Be that as it may, one thing is for sure. Christmas is a most wondrous holiday, intimate and public and timeless and ever-changing all at once.

The new US National Security Strategy

[French: 17.12.2025: https://www.tdg.ch/nss-la-strategie-americaine-aboie-mais-doute-face-a-la-chine-763578072387]

Two weeks ago, the new US National Security Strategy (NSS) hit Europe like a bombshell. In two dismissive pages, it warned migrants will wreck the continent. Even some far-right European lovers of white replacement theory like France’s Le Pen objected. The EU leadership, however, reacted coolly. It is right not to shout. For now, Europe’s security still depends a good bit on America. But it does not have to shout, either. It has some allies. The US Army is pro-NATO, and so are some Republicans in Congress. And while the NSS barks, it does not bite. It does not mention a NATO exit. In fact, its bark covers America’s long-term dependence on Europe. Most vitally, Europe’s US bases facilitate America’s access to Africa and the Middle East, and Europe defends the northeastern Atlantic, America’s moat vis-à-vis Russia. Besides, US-European economic interdependence is here to stay.

Regarding China, the NSS does not bark, but has some bite. This combination is atypical in that since 2010, under Obama, NSSs explicitly named China a concern, though one to be tackled by “engagement,” a policy abandoned for a more muscular approach in 2017 in Trump’s first NSS. The combination is typical in that NSSs have always, and especially since they became regularized and public in 1986, expressed a compromise between heavy weights. Today, the US Treasury is afraid to alienate China. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, outproduced by China in steel, ships, and else, is trying to keep its Asian allies. This is not Cold-War-style “containment,” though: America is militarily too weak, China economically too strong, and the two countries’ economic interdependence too deep.

More broadly, the NSS’s bark covers self-doubt. Just as MAGA thinkers at home explicitly idealize a better (read: whiter) America, e.g. the 1950s, the NSS implicitly acknowledges that America is weaker globally today than three generations ago. And if for many Americans, today’s policies already are a tragedy—think ICE or health care—regarding the world, the NSS is a farce of what US historian Paul Kramer has called America’s post-1945 “international empire.” Then, America accepted nation-states while seeking to work through their elites and middle classes; it took, but also gave. Now, the NSS, while affirming the “primacy of nations,” rejects multilateral rules and institutions that serve weaker states at least somewhat, and embraces a dog-eat-dog world dominated by “great powers,” each with its own geopolitical sphere of influence.

Washington’s sphere is the Americas. But au même temps, it has a world-wide nationalist economic agenda: to force foreign capital through compulsory tariffs and semi-compulsory investments into America to restore America to its industrial glory, circa 1950s. This screams self-doubt. (Why not use US capital?) And the worldwide nature of this economic nationalism and the hemispheric focus of US geopolitics are at odds.

Until recently, Trump and Co. were busy breaking stuff while navigating those odds. As of late, they have begun to pick up the pieces and are trying to glue them, somehow. How this process will unfold: that will be a main story in 2026.

As important as outcomes, however, is a quiet revolution in the negotiation process—quiet because we are deafened by Trump’s bombast. Compared to negotiations not only under Trump, in early 2026 and mid-2025, but also under Biden and Obama, more regional states are involved, and more actively so. The mediator now is Pakistan, the mighty nuclear ally of Saudi Arabia where it maintains troops (and a partner of Beijing, with which it is consulting). Tehran is in continuous contact with large non-Gulf regional states such as Egypt and Turkey. Gulf states accept, also vis-à-vis Trump, Tehran’s refusal to nuclear talk right now and are pressuring him to sign a deal. And most crucially, regional states are becoming stake-holders. Doha may front Tehran, which has zero trust in Washington, unfrozen funds. And Iran has intense contacts about Hormuz openly with Oman, and likely also with the UAE, even if the latter was the single biggest target of Tehran’s attacks and vitriol during the war.

This quiet revolution has two main causes. First, Tehran proved it is willing and able to do serious damage to Arab Gulf states. In response, these are assuaging Iran, though they are also rearming and though they still believe they need Washington’s military presence and, if less so, a medley of other third parties: Europeans; Israel in the Emirati case; and Pakistan, which signed an military agreement with Saudi Arabia already after the Iranian Revolution, in 1982. And second, now not only Iran distrusts Washington but also Arab Gulf states, if much less deeply and for very different reasons. Trump did not consult with them before he launched his devastating war. If the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed felt humiliated in 2013 finding out on CNN that Obama was negotiating with Iran, one wonders how he felt on 28 February 2026.

Seen historically, that quiet revolution may be bringing together, and may begin to address, two longstanding issues. Since Washington became directly involved in Gulf security in 1980, to protect its interests and allies following the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Tehran has insisted that the less Washington is present in the region, the more secure it will be. And since 2013, when Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran excluded not only Israel but also the Arab Gulf states, these have deplored that those talks sideline them and their security concerns.

In sum, any upcoming US-Iranian agreement’s framework will involve regional states. This might mean that an Iran in which hardliners are more dominant than before the war is paradoxically also an Iran that has a greater stake in the (post-deal) status quo. Meanwhile, if the GCC was created in 1981 for fear of revolutionary Iran, any however minimal opening of the Gulf’s security architecture to Iran—surely a scary prospect for Arab Gulf states, but apparently a quasi-certain one—would further dent an already ailing GCC. Arab Gulf states seem to have had little use for it during the war, and they are maneuvering intensely now that negotiations are under way.

Finally, while for Washington the war is a own-goal of historic proportions, China may see a more intraregional security architecture like that now emerging in the Gulf, which it nimbly supports politically, as a blueprint for how to secure economic interests in instable regions at a time when the world’s biggest military power behaves erratically.

(shorter French version: https://www.tdg.ch/iran-une-revolution-silencieuse-dans-lart-de-negocier-884311325643)

from this week, I will post, in this new Substack account, an expanded English version of the French historical-geopolitical column I have been publishing since December 2025 Wednesdays in the Swiss daily La Tribune de Genève.

Who am I?

Born in Switzerland, I studied Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science in Israel, Switzerland, and the USA (PhD, Columbia U., 2004).

In the early 2000s, I studied and worked in Iran. My first two positions were in Lebanon and the USA (Assistant Prof., American U. Beirut, 2005-8; Assistant & Associate Prof., Princeton U., 2008-17).

Since 2017, I am Professor of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

For more details, see: https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/faculty/cyrus-schayegh.

The next post is the expanded English version of the column published today, 27 May 2026:

https://www.tdg.ch/iran-une-revolution-silencieuse-dans-lart-de-negocier-884311325643

I will post the English versions of my earlier columns on this account presently.

I hope some of you will find this column useful.

Sincerely,

Cyrus Schayegh