“Never interrupt your enemy whilst he is making a mistake,” Napoleon said. It is just one of the many historical lessons of warfare that US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have ignored over the past 40 days. The result is that they have lost the war against Iran and failed to achieve any of their objectives.
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney had a proposal at Davos — ‘middle states’ should work together, not taking sides between the US, Russia or China, but defending free trade and international law. This is a nice idea, but the question is whether it is powerful enough to calm the world and restore some order to the chaos.
I read Israeli newspapers every day, and in them I notice that European protests do get coverage and are thus noticed. Nor should one doubt that Israeli embassies relay every protest to the foreign ministry in Jerusalem. And European politicians are not insensitive to these protests either, even if they often seem not to be, writes Koert Debeuf.
Lifting some sanctions here and there every few months is not what Syria needs. It is necessary to lift all economic sanctions and invest massively in the country for strategic reasons — the fall of Assad has been a major blow for the Iranian regime.
I walked the streets of Damascus last week and could read the joy on people’s faces. The many Syrians with whom I sipped tea or shared a meal were in a kind of intoxication, a combination of deep joy, pride and immense relief that Bashar al-Assad’s barbaric regime of terror is over.
Europe’s response since the fall of Assad on 8 December 2024 has been disappointing. In an initial reaction, several European countries announced that the asylum procedure for Syrians would be stopped. At the same time, sanctions against Syria were not suspended and HTS was not removed from the list of terrorist organisations.
Is this now the great liberation from president Bashar al-Assad’s reign of terror? The timing was perfect. The three forces supporting Assad now have other priorities: Russia in Ukraine, Hezbollah weakened from war with Israel, and Iran busy on many fronts.
Although Trump didn’t campaign much on issues of the Middle East, some actions from his earlier term does give us some clues, writes Koert Debeuf.
The West can try to further isolate Iran by imposing even more sanctions, but that will not reduce its revolutionary thought and sympathy for it. The result will only be further isolation of Israel in the region.
Again we heaer cries that Moscow will invade Europe and that Brussels, Paris, Berlin and London are Russian targets. The question is whether fear is a good counsellor — and whether war rhetoric achieves what we want, writes Koert Debeuf.
Could the EU repair its reputation and credibility by taking action on Gaza? EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell, Spain, Belgium and Ireland, have worked hard to repair the damage, but have faced political headwinds due to internal divisions.
As if the military presence of Iran and China in the Red Sea was not enough to be worried, everything seems to indicate that Russia too will soon have a military base there, and in Sudan.
Europe and the US are thus sending the message that human rights and international law apply to some, but not to others. Some countries that flout rights are sanctioned, while others are simply supported.
The fact that three of Iran’s enemies — the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia —would form an alliance will have set off alarm bells in Tehran. For Hamas, too, such an agreement goes against everything it stands for.
Israel, understandably, cries out for revenge. But Hamas is a terrorist organisation that makes no distinction between military and civilian casualties. Can a country that calls itself the only democracy in the region afford not to make that distinction either?
Perhaps even more surprising to the West was the fact that the Iran-Saudi Arabia deal was not brokered by the United States, or the European Union, but by the People’s Republic of China. Since when was China mediating peace agreements?
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, W.B. Yeats wrote. Yet now, a century later in Europe — from Italy, to Hungary, to Belgium and the Netherlands, even in the European Parliament — the centre is shrinking.
Let us be clear, Qatar is not a democracy, it is a conservative Muslim country that does not give foreign workers the rights and protection these workers deserve.
Europe and the US are seen as imposing rules upon the rest but not following these rules themselves. Europe is insisting on democracy, human rights and the rule of law in third countries — but not several EU member states.
This ‘headscarf revolution’ is about women’s rights and human rights in general, plus police brutality. Moreover, it is a leaderless revolution that is not driven by a leader or a group, but erupted spontaneously.