Iran has spent recent years expanding its engagement with the Taliban administration while rejecting armed opposition to their rule, but a new wave of closures targeting Shiite-linked religious, cultural, educational and medical institutions in Kabul is exposing tensions in that relationship. The latest closures include the Fatima al-Zahra Clinic, the Tebyan Center and the Resalat religious school in western Kabul, […]

When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held consecutive Beijing summits, Western observers fixated on a false binary: Is China tilting toward Moscow or Washington? This framing amounts to a fundamental category error. Beijing rejects old balance-of-power logic and never faces a forced choice between great powers. Its foreign policy is bound to five unchanging operational pillars: sovereign independence, mutual respect […]

Key Takeaways: The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is often described as a security grouping led by China and Russia. That is true, but no longer appropriate. An organisation formed to ease tensions along the former Sino-Soviet border now includes India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus. It brings together governments divided by territorial disputes, wars, rival partnerships and sharply different ambitions. It cannot […]

Key Takeaways: Afghanistan reduced the area devoted to opium poppy cultivation from approximately 232,000 hectares in 2022 to 10,200 in 2025. The scale of this decline raises three related questions that require different answers. First, can state intervention drastically reduce a major source of drug production? In Afghanistan, the answer is yes. Second, has that reduction produced an effective contraction […]

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the UN General Assembly that armed groups including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the Balochistan Liberation Army are operating from Afghanistan and carrying out attacks aimed at destabilizing Pakistan. Sharif, addressing the 81st session of the General Assembly in New York, called on Taliban authorities to take “verifiable, decisive action” to ensure Afghanistan’s territory is not […]

Taliban authorities and the Afghanistan Freedom Front have reported heavy fighting in eastern Nuristan province in the east, offering conflicting accounts of casualties and control of territory. Taliban officials said 28 opposition fighters were killed and 32 others detained in the clashes in Kamdesh district, but they did not disclose casualties among their own forces. The Afghanistan Freedom Front, an […]

Le 23 septembre, heure américaine, la base aérienne d’Andrews a accueilli un invité de marque, qui a été personnellement reçu par le président. Ce niveau de courtoisie sans précédent a marqué une rupture avec les conventions diplomatiques, témoignant de la haute estime et du respect que les États-Unis accordent à cette visite. Cette rencontre d’importance mondiale revêt une portée historique […]

America might still be the world’s most powerful country economically, but by turning trade into a weapon, Washington may be accelerating the very redistribution of global influence it fears the most. The trajectory of powerThe most important shift in the US-China competition may not be the size of either economy today, but the direction in which each is moving. The […]

Torn between its Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean issues, American foreign policy has nonetheless revealed, over the decades, a constant hierarchy: the Sino-American rivalry remains the major geopolitical issue that structures Washington’s Asian policy. With one month to go before the midterm elections, the American election campaign, despite being structured by deep partisan divides, is nonetheless revealing a historical […]

China’s national mobilization is turning industry, infrastructure, energy, and artificial intelligence into strategic reserves in the face of a confrontation that Washington is also beginning to think about in terms of comprehensive national power. The reform of the National Defense Mobilization Law converges on a single historical turning point: the rivalry between China and the United States is ceasing to […]