Opinion

Who has won?

Published

09.05.2025 13:30

A while ago, when Syria still had a state, I had the opportunity to correspond with a Kurdish nationalist on a social network. I was arguing (and I still hold this view today) that independence under the US umbrella actually meant nothing more than a neocolonial dependency relationship. He, however, had taken the traditional rhetoric of Kurdish nationalism (“it’s a tactic”) up a notch and believed (and probably still does) that the US possessed unique and invincible power, not just in a specific historical period, but throughout history—or at least throughout the history of imperialism. I’m adding the phrase “history of imperialism”; there was no place for imperialism in his words. So, the issue was no longer a matter of “tactics” at a certain stage (and in those circles, that word has always meant a lack of strategy), but had directly become a matter of siding with a superhero in the world order—that is, being on the side of the one who always wins and always will win.

Thus, our correspondence extended to other historical periods before that day, and eventually, we arrived at World War II. And then, an assertion I encountered for the first time genuinely stunned me: he acknowledged that the Soviet peoples had suffered great losses, but this, he claimed, did not mean at all that the Soviet Union had won the war. On the contrary; the US had won the war through its alliance politics, military tactics, and economic superiority, and moreover, had achieved this without suffering great losses, which pointed to an immense political talent, thereby reinforcing the power of the victory.

This is, in the most fundamental sense of the concept, a purely ideological stance, because historical truth has been completely turned on its head.

No one, neither during Soviet history nor today, presents the number of casualties as the measure of victory. That would be an idiotic assertion anyway, because throughout history, there are many victories where the victorious side suffered far greater losses than the defeated armies. That doesn’t mean the defeated actually won. Victory in a war is achieved when one of two conditions—which are actually two different expressions of the same thing—is met:

Enemy armies are physically destroyed;
The enemy’s will to fight is broken.

The number of casualties gives an idea about the intensity, brutality, savagery, and lawlessness of the war; it indicates its nature. But casualty rates are completely irrelevant to the outcome of the war.

1) Physical annihilation of the enemy

On June 22, 1941, the balance of forces on the western border of the Soviet Union was roughly as follows (I am quoting this based on relatively recent research; older sources show the fascist alliance as overwhelmingly superior in the balance of forces):

	Fascist Alliance	Red Army	Modern Weapons	Ratio	Ratio in Modern Weapons
Soldiers	4,369,500	3,262,851		1:1.3
Artillery and mortars	42,601	59,787		1:1.3
Tanks and SPGs	4,364	15,687	~2,500	3.6:1	1:2.1
Combat aircraft	4,795	10,743	1,540	2.2:1	1:3.1

Ostensibly, the Red Army was far superior to the enemy in terms of tanks and combat aircraft; in reality, the situation was different. Within the entire tank inventory, the legendary T-34s were still very few (at most 1,200), as were the SU series self-propelled gun systems (at most 300), and moreover, not all of them were at the front line. In contrast, in the fascist alliance, if one doesn’t count the almost dysfunctional Panzer Is and the Czech-made Pz series, which the Germans did not much trust, the number of all tanks and Stug III type self-propelled gun systems was over 2,500. Of the total combat aircraft, only 1,540 were new planes capable of dealing with the enemy, and most of these were destroyed in the first week due to the rapid advance of enemy forces.

In short, the fascist German forces and their allies were far superior in terms of troop numbers, technology, equipment, and materiel.

Another aspect of the balance of forces is this: 3.3 million of the Wehrmacht’s total 4.12 million combat personnel (including the SS) were deployed to the Eastern Front. This constitutes 80 percent of the combat troops. Similarly, 84 percent of tanks and self-propelled artillery systems, 67 percent of artillery and mortars, and 80 percent of combat aircraft were on the Eastern Front.

Try to picture this: This war machine had occupied all of Europe; countries not occupied were fascist collaborators. British forces and their allies had been ignominiously chased out of Dunkirk. In Europe, there were only local resistance movements, mostly organized by communists. And the German army, with almost 80 percent of its entire strength, had attacked the Soviet Union.

In Germany alone, a total of nearly 18 million people were mobilized and fought in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Approximately 5.5 million of them died on the battlefields and in prisoner-of-war camps. Nearly 80 percent of military deaths occurred on the Eastern Front.

In contrast, nearly 35 million people were mobilized in the Red Army throughout the war. Of these, 8.7 million died or went missing. More than 3 million of these were deaths in concentration camps.

Therefore:

While Germany’s civilian losses constituted about 25 percent of its total losses (7.4-8.5 million), the Soviet Union’s civilian losses constituted 60 percent of its total losses. In contrast, about 30 percent of the German army’s total combatants throughout the war were killed in clashes with the Red Army. About 15 percent of the Red Army’s total combatants throughout the war were killed in clashes with fascist armies.

In other words, the Red Army ended the war in a “positive” manner (in Clausewitz’s terms) by destroying 30 percent of the enemy.

2) Breaking the enemy’s will

Starting immediately after the Stalingrad debacle, from the spring of 1943 onwards, a series of secret peace talks were held in Switzerland between fascist German officials and Westerners, primarily Americans. I will not delve into conspiracy theories; presumably, at this stage, no faction in the US, even if inclined, could risk a separate peace. However, for fascist Germany, attempts to narrow the enemy front due to defeats on the Eastern Front were becoming increasingly necessary.

Even after Normandy in June 1944, the center of fascist resistance was the Eastern Front. This is evident from the numbers. Already at the Tehran Conference (November 28 – December 1, 1943), the Soviet Union’s insistence on its allies opening a second front in Europe had weakened because the self-confidence to destroy the enemy single-handedly, albeit at a heavier cost, had been reinforced by the victories gained.

Therefore, the common refrain in Western secondary school textbooks does not reflect reality: (At the Tehran Conference) “The Soviet Union agreed to launch a major offensive against Germany from the east.” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub., Module 11, World War II.) Yet, by this time, the victory at Kursk had been won, Kyiv had been liberated; there was only one month left to break the Leningrad blockade, and only three months left to cross the USSR borders at every point on the Ukrainian front. In other words, the Red Army was already on the offensive in all directions. Moreover, according to much research, the Normandy landings had not paralyzed the fascist armies, nor did the Red Army’s advance gain extra momentum because of the Normandy landings.

Not even the suicide of their “beloved Führer” on April 30th, nor even the morning of May 8th, had completely broken fascist Germany’s will to resist. Perhaps the most concrete indicator of this is the story of Göring’s surrender to the Americans. It is generally assumed that Göring was immediately arrested; this is not true: he was arrested only the next day, with the definitive fall of Berlin, because the will of the fascist beast was completely broken only at that moment.

3) “History falsifiers”

While working on this article, I had the opportunity to look at 10th and 11th-grade history textbooks in the US and Britain, as well as another high school supplementary textbook in Britain (“Russia and its Rulers”). (This last one is surprisingly objective compared to the others.) There is no information in these about the countries’ losses in the war. The answers to the questions of who destroyed the enemy, who broke its will, and who paid the price for it are somewhat vague, and inevitably, within that vagueness, it is glaringly obvious that the US and Britain are cast in the role of saviors.

Still, when their history books are placed side-by-side with ours [Turkish textbooks], one must admit that their formulations are much more skillful. The creators of the US and British curricula, at least until now, have tried not to appear as captive to anticommunist hysteria as ours, whose every sentence, starting from these lines, is almost entirely wrong: “The USSR was no different from Germany in terms of human rights violations.” (From the 12th-grade “Contemporary Turkish and World History” textbook by the Ministry of National Education [MEB]).

But why this falsification of history?

A few days ago, I came across an interview with Daniel Simić, president of the Republika Srpska journalists’ association. Simić rightly lamented the erasure of history: “Americans are already like that; but for the average Western European reader too, D-Day is the sole and most important event of World War II. The heroism and sacrifices of the Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union are disregarded… The battles of Stalingrad and Kursk are generally described in the West as ‘events on the Eastern Front’; but every bomb dropped by the Allies on Germany is presented as a heroic act leading to victory against Hitler.”

This is a pustule of mass ignorance. There is such a difference between writing history and making it. Then those lies create narcissistic buffoons, each more ignorant than the last, and one of them comes out and says something like: “We will never forget that Russia helped us win World War II by losing almost 60 million people.” (Trump wrote this on his blog on January 22nd.)

4) Qualitative leap

But there is a difference between the past and today.

A few months ago, they demolished the monument erected in Tallinn in memory of the Red Army and USSR Baltic Fleet soldiers. In the same days, the “reputation” of the Estonian legionnaires in the Waffen-SS 20th Division was being restored. For the aggressive “little instigators” [a Turkish idiom, “küçük enişteler,” referring to minor but troublesome actors, often with a sense of being meddlesome relatives or associates, ed.n.] of the Baltics, this kind of fascist vandalism has now become routine practice.

The Baltics are a miniature Europe.

In many European countries, including Moldova, there are discussions about banning or at least restricting May 9th Victory Day celebrations, associating them with “Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, celebrating May 8th is often proposed; there are also those who want that day to be declared a day of mourning for all “victims” who died between 1939-1945, including the dead of the Wehrmacht and its fascist allies, a “Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation.” Previously, distortions or denials mostly concerned singular events in the war; today, the emphasis is shifting towards completely denying the decisive role of the USSR in the liberation of Europe and the world, and in the defeat of fascist Germany.

This is a qualitative leap in history falsification. The primary reason underlying this was stated by Marshal Zhukov to Marshal Rokossovsky in Berlin in 1945, where the fascist beast was dismembered: “We saved them, and for that, they will never forgive us.” In other words, at least some of them are burning with the desire to take revenge for being saved.

But more important than this is the following: today, it’s as if a new dawn has broken for the flea market [a Turkish idiom, “bit pazarına nur yağıyor,” meaning what was once considered worthless is now being prized, ed.n.], and European leaders are, apparently, studying the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s more closely. Why shouldn’t war be the way out of the crisis? Isn’t suppressing general dissatisfaction through violence and directing aggression towards others a wonderful solution?

But perhaps, we should congratulate them for finally showing sincerity. Declaring Bandera—the leader of a gang of fascist murderers who killed not only Jews, socialists, communists, and Russians, but also citizens of the Polish state, one of the Kyiv regime’s staunchest allies—a hero and howling his slogans in front of his portrait is no small measure of sincerity, indeed.

Who won the war? The Red Army won, the Soviet peoples won, the leadership of the Bolshevik party won, Russian patriots won… But not only them. We won! Because the war against fascism was our war too, the victory was our victory too.

Related Topics:1945 Europe fascist Germany Nazis Red Army Russia Soviet Union USSR World War II

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Opinion

Chaos and reckoning on the streets of France

Published

1 day ago

21/10/2026

Nalan Yazgan

The streets of France have turned into a stage not merely for anger against the government, but for a deep-seated mistrust of the state’s approach to security. The blurring of the line between peaceful demonstrators and looters, lingering questions over police conduct, and the media’s refocusing on the immigration debate are bringing the country to the brink of a political reckoning far deeper than a routine public-order crisis.

In France, a government does not have to wait for an electoral defeat to lose its legitimacy. Sometimes, slogans chanted in a public square, tear gas fired down a boulevard, crowds penned in at the exit of a cordoned-off street, and testimonies of unhindered looting in shops only hundreds of metres away suffice to expose just how fragile the bond of trust between state and society has become.

Events in Paris on Saturday, 17 October point to precisely such a political fracture. Planned demonstrations with the participation of student unions, trade unions, and the Yellow Vests were marked throughout the day by police crackdowns, disputes over march routes, looting in the city centre, and widespread criticism of the government’s perceived inadequacy. The scene that emerged by evening suggested that France was grappling not merely with an issue of public order, but with a burgeoning crisis of confidence regarding the state’s impartiality and political motives.

Whom does the state permit to take to the streets, whom does it obstruct, and which forms of violence does it intervene against, and to what degree? The answer to this question may prove decisive in understanding France’s current political impasse.

The shadow of 17 October 1961

It is impossible to view the date of these demonstrations as a mere coincidence on the calendar. On 17 October 1961, a peaceful demonstration in Paris supporting Algerian independence was brutally crushed by the French police. Scores of people were killed, with some demonstrators drowned after being thrown into the River Seine. The event remains etched in memory as one of the darkest chapters in France’s colonial history and state-sponsored violence.

Sixty-five years later, as police interventions, youth rage, and the state’s stance on the right to protest are debated once again on the streets of Paris on 17 October, the resurgence of this historical memory was inevitable.

This memory may hold a distinct meaning, especially for French citizens of North African descent. Yet it would also be a mistake to reduce all the young people taking part in the demonstrations to a single identity, immigrant origin, or political motivation.

To what extent has the French Republic truly reckoned with the legacy of its colonial past and the relationship its security apparatus maintains with diverse segments of society?

Looters on the streets, where are the police?

Individuals dressed in black and associated in the public eye with the Black Bloc broke into shops at various locations, damaged businesses, and engaged in looting.

While peaceful demonstrators marched under a heavy police presence, fierce criticism arose that looting in certain areas had been allowed to unfold unchecked.

It is striking that while 14,000 police officers were deployed across the capital during the Pope’s visit to Paris, only 10,000 officers in total were assigned across the whole of France for the demonstrations of 17 October.

To which areas were police resources allocated? Had intelligence services assessed the risk of looting beforehand? While a robust security presence flanked the routes of peaceful marches, why was the same effectiveness not demonstrated in safeguarding commercial districts?

The deployment of elite units trained to quell urban unrest, such as CRS 8, does not resolve these questions. On the contrary, the failure to contain the incidents despite the presence of specialized units calls the quality of planning and coordination into question.

A political reckoning extending from Marseille to Limoges

The debate in Paris soon reverberated across the country’s other cities. In a televised address, the socialist mayor of Marseille stated that he had requested police reinforcements from the government, yet the units dispatched fell short given the scale and requirements of the city.

The mayor’s most striking allegation was that while looters stormed Marseille City Hall, the Hôtel de Ville, police officers stood roughly 200 metres away and failed to intervene. Stating that he possessed security camera footage, the mayor affirmed that he would await the scrutiny of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry and demand an explanation from the government.

The mayor of Limoges likewise issued what amounted to an ultimatum to the government, demanding the reconstruction of the torched town hall and the full reimbursement of costs. According to the mayor, the government had failed to protect a public building and neglected to provide the police with the necessary resources and backing.

These statements emerging from two distinct cities demonstrate that a new confrontation over security policy has arisen between local authorities and the central government. How security resources are allocated, which risks are prioritized, and whether the warnings of local administrations are heeded must all be brought to light.

The deepening scrutiny over the administration’s stance was compounded by President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to accept the resignation tendered by Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez. The rejection of the resignation raises the question of whether the executive aims to preserve the chain of accountability, or fears that a political reshuffle would only exacerbate the crisis.

In either case, the government faces a crisis of trust.

An eight-minute speech and unanswered demands

Macron’s roughly eight-minute televised address failed to meet expectations regarding the political dimensions of the crisis. The president announced that he would meet with student unions and that the prime minister would engage with political parties, yet he presented neither tangible decisions nor a comprehensive political roadmap.

Education spending, police violence, the Palestinian cause, anti-fascism, and backlash against the Macron administration appear to have ceased being disparate issues in the eyes of the youth.

To be sure, the true strength of a state lies not in silencing its people and streets, but in addressing legitimate demands. It must not be forgotten that institutions unable to adapt and change are destined to break.

Opinion

What is scale in foreign policy? How is success measured in foreign policy?

Published

1 week ago

13/10/2026

Barış Doster

By its very nature, foreign policy feeds into and draws nourishment from numerous, disparate, and varied fields. It is a domain with manifold and diverse inputs. For foreign policy is examined alongside a broad array of subjects, ranging from geography to history, economics to intelligence, and military might to public diplomacy, commonly termed soft power elements.

The capacity of the state, that is, the scale of the state, or in other words the aggregate of its elements of power (namely political, economic, military, and soft power components), is decisive in foreign policy. Geography is decisive in foreign policy. Commercial relations are decisive in foreign policy. Energy dependence on another country or countries, if present, is decisive in foreign policy. Foreign policy cannot be conducted in spite of these four factors.

There is more. A country’s capacity, its scale, does not increase overnight, from one day to the next. It requires planning. It requires national consensus. It requires time. It requires preparation. Nor are these enough. The regional and global environment, the conjuncture, and the international plane must also allow for it. The stance of allies and adversaries is, of course, also important.

For the international environment is, by its nature, complex. It is an environment rife with contradiction, turmoil, conflict, and tension. To draw an analogy, the person in the driver’s seat of foreign policy is not a motorist speeding along the road as they please. There are things they must not forget, rules they must obey, red lights, vehicles speeding up from behind, a truck moving ahead, and a heavy vehicle hurtling toward them from the opposite direction.

Success in foreign policy does not arrive simply because a politician we like has become foreign minister. For a foreign minister is only as effective as the power, capacity, and weight of their country. One must accept this plain truth.

Moreover, there are simple, straightforward questions that reveal whether foreign policy, which some find deeply complex and inscrutable, is successful or not.

There are undoubtedly ways to measure the effectiveness, prestige, influence, and success of foreign policy.

For instance, the number of countries that respect a passport, how many countries can be visited visa-free, and how many countries impose visa requirements and grant those visas only with great difficulty are important indicators of a country’s standing.

Let us take ourselves as an example. Which countries require a visa for the Turkish passport? Which ones do not? Is it easy for our citizens to obtain visas for the countries they primarily wish to visit?

Let us give another example from the Turkic world.

On the Cyprus issue, which we regard as a national cause across government and opposition, right and left, Kemalist and Milli Görüş adherents alike, how many countries have we succeeded in having recognize the TRNC? Why do the Turkic states (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) not recognize the TRNC? Far from recognizing the TRNC, how do the Turkic states in Central Asia (Turkistan) explain to Ankara their developing relations with the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus, which Türkiye does not recognize, their appointment of ambassadors, and their recognition of Southern Cyprus as the island’s sole legitimate government?

We must also ask this question, of course: What is the state of Türkiye’s bilateral trade with the Turkic states?

Let us give an example of the relationship between foreign policy and big capital.

In which countries are big capital circles, among the greatest supporters of the ruling bloc, winning major tenders?

In our country, across both ruling and opposition ranks, there is a political party order that supports Türkiye’s EU membership. Yet how much progress has been made on EU membership?

Why is US President Trump not keeping the promises he made to Türkiye at the NATO summit held in Ankara a few months ago?

How many contracts has the new regime in Syria, the al-Sharaa administration, awarded to Turkish companies for the reconstruction of its country?

Has the government in Libya that Türkiye supports paid the money owed to Turkish construction firms, outstanding for years?

How does Qatar, with whom our relations are very good, explain its developing ties, energy agreements, and joint military drills with Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration, disregarding our sensitivities?

Who is the addressee of the harsh statements used in recent weeks by Azerbaijan, which we view as “two states, one nation”? To what extent does Azerbaijan share Türkiye’s policy on Israel? What does Türkiye think about the scale, depth, and intimacy of Azerbaijan-Israel relations?

These questions can certainly be multiplied.

Yet without taking into account the scale of the state and observing the criteria for measuring foreign policy, no sound assessment can be made.

Opinion

The era of corridor alliances in the Middle East

Published

2 weeks ago

07/10/2026

Nalan Yazgan

In the Middle East, war is no longer waged merely to seize territory. The true contest turns on who will control the energy pipelines, trade routes, ports, and railways of tomorrow. Missiles may strike cities today, but the maps of the future are being drawn through transport and energy corridors.

In this context, interpreting Türkiye’s presence in the Mecca Alliance solely as military support for Saudi Arabian security remains incomplete; it fails to explain why two states that viewed each other with mutual suspicion until recently would take steps toward a cooperation close enough to constitute a shared destiny.

Alongside Saudi Arabia’s existential motives, Ankara’s participation in this alliance is anchored in a profound geopolitical foundation: to position itself within, and if possible at the very centre of, the Middle East’s reconfigured energy and transport corridors.

Today, it cannot be said that Riyadh and Ankara see eye to eye on every regional issue. The threat perceptions and priorities of the two countries do not, quite naturally, entirely coincide. On the geopolitical chessboard, partnerships do not always arise from identical agendas. When reasons are sufficiently compelling, particularly existential ones, they can override political differences and enable common ground along the same strategic path.

A new war of corridors unfolds in the Middle East

On one side lies IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), planned to extend from India through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel to Europe. On the other stands the Development Road, which aims to link the Persian Gulf across Iraq to Türkiye, and onward to Europe.

These two undertakings are, of course, far more than mere transport projects. They represent two divergent geopolitical answers to where the future flow of trade and energy between Asia and Europe will traverse; for Türkiye, this issue is of vital importance.

If a corridor system taking shape to Türkiye’s south, beyond Ankara’s orbit, becomes permanent, Türkiye could forfeit not only an economic opportunity but also a substantial portion of its strategic centrality in the Middle East. It is through this prism that the Mecca Alliance must be evaluated.

Türkiye’s seat at the same table with Saudi Arabia signifies more than military solidarity. Riyadh and Ankara must sit together to avoid exclusion from the region’s emergent security and economic architecture, for the security of a corridor and the corridor itself are no longer separate matters.

The Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandab, and the Suez Canal are links in the very same chain. A security crisis in one directly impacts the others. While the vulnerability of Hormuz makes alternative export routes for Gulf oil indispensable, instability across the Red Sea heightens the strategic cost of Suez.

Saudi Arabia’s alternative pipelines connecting its eastern oil fields to Red Sea terminals are therefore not merely energy infrastructure; they are strategic bypasses mitigating dependence on Hormuz.

For Türkiye, the Development Road fulfills the same function across a broader geography. Stretching from the Persian Gulf through Iraq to Türkiye, and from Türkiye into Europe, this artery possesses the potential to forge a new overland backbone connecting the Gulf to the Mediterranean and Europe. As security concerns in the Red Sea mount and the vulnerability of Suez deepens, the value of this route rises accordingly.

The Hejaz Railway: Revived once again

The return of the Hejaz Railway to the regional agenda signifies far more than mere nostalgia. Once linking Istanbul to Damascus, Amman, and the Hejaz, the railway served as one of the primary transport and logistical arteries of the Ottoman geography.

Reviving the idea of the Hejaz Railway could become the emblem of Türkiye’s drive to reimagine its historical transport connections between the Gulf, the Hejaz, and the Levant through modern rail, energy, and logistics networks.

The objective here is not to restore the past, but to transpose the strategic logic of that historical geographical linkage into the twenty-first century. For this reason, Türkiye’s role in the Mecca Alliance and the resurgence of the Hejaz Railway project must be viewed as components of the same overarching picture.

Corridors do not consist solely of energy pipelines. Railways, ports, highways, electrical interconnectors, logistical hubs, and security architectures are all facets of the same geopolitical grid, and safeguarding these networks requires political alliances.

Herein lies the strategic significance of Saudi Arabia and Türkiye sitting at the same table in Mecca, even at a juncture when their views on Syria diverge.

Ankara and Riyadh do not need to agree on every subject. Yet neither wishes to see the new map of the Middle East drawn to its detriment. Türkiye’s aim is not to build an anti-bloc against any specific country alongside Saudi Arabia; rather, the goal is to avoid exclusion from the future energy and trade systems of the Middle East, while securing a decisive voice in establishing their security architecture.

Hence, for Türkiye, the Mecca Alliance is far more than a simple defence pact. Securing the Development Road, shielding Gulf energy corridors, stabilising the Red Sea, rethinking connections across the Hejaz and the Levant, and bolstering trade corridors reaching Europe all intersect within this single strategic equation.

In this equation, Türkiye’s foremost advantage remains its geography. Ankara sits at the northern terminus of the overland routes linking the Gulf to Europe; within NATO; and at the crossroads connecting the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Will Türkiye become one of the powers shaping the Middle East’s energy and trade architecture over the coming decades, or will it be reduced to a mere transit state traversed by routes designed by others? That question defines the true strategic significance of the Mecca Alliance for Ankara.

In the Middle East of tomorrow, it will be impossible to separate the corridor carrying energy, the security framework protecting that corridor, and the alliance constructing that security framework.

Whoever controls the corridor shapes commerce. Whoever guarantees the routes through which trade flows holds sway over the regional balance of power. This is the true dimension of the contest currently underway in the Middle East.

A succession of distinct and largely mutually exclusive ambitions are competing for dominance in the current climate: India’s linkage to Europe, the Gulf’s new economic horizons, Saudi Arabia’s alternative energy routes, the security crisis in the Red Sea, the strategic weight of Hormuz, and Türkiye’s aspiration to open outward to Europe via the Development Road. Ironically, perhaps, the conflict that will decide which corridor underpins global stability has already begun, and it will likely continue spreading to new fronts. Regrettably, the fires in our region appear poised to intensify long before they abate.