Maya Haddad covers Middle East politics, conflict and diplomacy, with emphasis on the gap between public rhetoric, legal commitments and actual state behaviour.
The Group of Seven foreign ministers condemned Houthi attacks and called for an end to threats against civilian shipping during meetings around the UN General Assembly.
Paris is working with Washington on a Security Council resolution aimed at restoring commercial movement through the Strait of Hormuz.
Six months of conflict have left Washington confronting pressure across Hormuz, the Red Sea, Gulf alliances and the diplomatic stage at the United Nations.
Tehran says it has information that the United States and allies may be preparing a major attack, while Washington has warned Americans in the region about possible escalation.
Seoul is weighing how far to support navigation security in a waterway central to its energy imports while managing the political risks of military involvement.
Rerouting crude through Oman is easing immediate supply fears, but it also highlights the strategic value of alternative export corridors during regional conflict.
Intelligence and targeting assistance offer a middle path between abandonment and direct strikes, but proxy support can still drag patrons toward escalation.
A movement built partly on contempt for 'forever wars' now owns a widening conflict whose exit conditions remain unclear.
Reopening shipping lanes and degrading Iranian capacity are military objectives. Neither answers the harder question of what political outcome ends the conflict.
Data centres, cloud regions and sovereign compute are giving Gulf governments a new strategic asset, but announced gigawatts are not the same thing as operating capability.
Data centres, chips and power infrastructure are strategic assets. Regional conflict is forcing Gulf states to price physical security into the AI boom.
Israel's prime minister faces pressure from Washington, far-right coalition partners and voters while the basic sequencing of withdrawal and disarmament remains unresolved.
A worsening security environment in the West Bank is colliding with efforts to preserve and expand Israel's Arab relationships, testing how far normalization can be compartmentalized.
EU-Israel political disputes can move quickly. Trade, research and legal frameworks move more slowly, creating a relationship in which pressure and cooperation coexist.
Missiles, drones and maritime disruption create overlapping security interests, but shared exposure to Iran does not erase Gulf states' separate diplomatic strategies or create mutual-defence obligations.
Regional conflict has made public normalization harder, but trade rules, diplomatic channels and existing agreements provide a more revealing measure of durability than summit rhetoric.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE increasingly treat great-power competition as something to arbitrage rather than a binary alliance test.
As governments debate AI safety and competitiveness, the infrastructure, models and expertise remain concentrated in private companies, creating an unusual imbalance between public authority and technical control.
Washington's effort to halt the Iran war created an unusual divergence with Israel, showing that dependence on an ally does not eliminate conflicting war aims.
Ukraine's concerns over fuels refined from Russian crude expose a recurring sanctions problem: changing the legal identity of a product can weaken pressure without changing where the underlying commodity came from.
The restart of Druzhba oil flows helped unlock a €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine, exposing how infrastructure dependence can become institutional bargaining power.