Five Ledger pieces. Two Analysis pieces. One Dossier. Here is what I was thinking when I wrote each one.

The Playbook. Again

Raul Castro indicted. The USS Nimitz positioned off Cuba. I have seen this before. So have you. Washington has been running the same Cuba playbook since 1959 — destabilise, isolate, apply pressure and call it democracy promotion. The indictment was not designed to produce a trial. It was designed to produce a justification. Read it here

He Signed the Treaties. Then He Bombed Kyiv.

Putin spent three days in Beijing calling his partnership with Xi a stabilising force, signing twenty agreements and quoting Chinese proverbs. Then he flew home and launched the largest bombardment of Kyiv in four years. Six hundred drones. Ninety missiles. A nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile over a city of 200,000 people. Xi told Trump that Putin may regret the invasion. Putin answered from the air. The stabilising force stabilised nothing. Read it here

They Were at the Table. Washington Struck Anyway.

Iran’s Foreign Minister and Parliament Speaker landed in Doha for the most substantive peace talks since the ceasefire. Hours later CENTCOM announced strikes on southern Iran and called it self-defence. Trump posted that negotiations were proceeding nicely. There is a word for a negotiation in which one party bombs the other mid-session. It is not diplomacy. Read it here

200 Dead. No Names. No Evidence. No Trial.

Jhonny Sebastian Palacios is a fisherman from Manta, Ecuador. He does not go to sea anymore. Since September 2025, US forces have killed nearly 200 people in more than 50 strikes across the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean. Not one victim publicly named. Not one piece of evidence presented in court. Ecuador’s president was asked about his own citizens being killed. He questioned their motivations. He is a close Trump ally. Read it here

Blow Them Up

Oman brokered the JCPOA back channel. Oman facilitated the 2023 hostage exchange. Oman hosted the last diplomatic contact between Washington and Tehran before the bombs fell on February 28. Trump’s reward was eleven words at a cabinet meeting — Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up. The mediator has been threatened. The strait remains closed. The war goes on. Read it here

Two Analysis Pieces This Week

The Vishwaguru the World Never Knew

From India Examined — India spent twelve years performing its arrival as Vishwaguru — Sanskrit for teacher of the world. Operation Sindoor revealed the gap. The Melody moment confirmed it. Retail investors bought the wrong Parle. The ceasefire was announced in Washington. Pakistan’s army chief sat in the Oval Office. At home the performance played to a full house. Abroad the admirers, it turned out, had not been watching. Not for the past twelve years. Not once. Read it here

Refugees the West Made

The displacement crisis Western governments call a refugee problem did not begin in Baghdad in 2003, or Kabul in 2001, or Tripoli in 2011. It began in Berlin in 1884, when fourteen European powers divided a continent without consulting a single African. It ran through the Nakba, the Cold War proxy wars, the War on Terror and the climate crisis the West created. The bill has been presented many times by the people paying it. The West has never paid. Read it here

From The Dossier This Week

12 Best Scholarships for International Relations Students — A Global Guide 2027

Every scholarship guide gives you the same five names in the same order. Chevening. Fulbright. Rhodes. Gates Cambridge. Commonwealth. This guide covers those five and seven more that should appear on every list but do not — including the Chinese Government Scholarship and the MEXT, two of the most generous awards available to Global South students that most guides ignore entirely. For each one it tells you what the scholarship is actually choosing for, not just what it funds. The best scholarship is not the most famous one. It is the one whose selection criteria most precisely match who you are. Read it here

Seven days. Eight pieces. The world did not disappoint — unfortunately.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

Five Ledger pieces. Two Analysis pieces. One thread connecting all of it: the week the powerful settled their accounts and sent the invoice to everyone else.

For the past five days I wrote knowing the argument was the same argument. Here is what I was thinking.

The G2 Settlement — What Washington Called a War, Beijing Called a Bargain

Trump flew home from Beijing weighing whether to lift sanctions on Chinese companies buying Iranian oil. The country being bombed will fund the relationship being repaired. Washington launched a war in the name of regional security and left Beijing prepared to waive the sanctions it imposed three months ago in the name of bilateral stability. The principle was never the principle. The principle was the calculation. The Global South was not collateral damage in this war. It was the currency. Read it here

Ceasefire That Keeps Killing

Israel killed Hamas’s last senior military commander in a residential building in Gaza under an active ceasefire. 850 Palestinians dead since October. Strikes up 35 per cent since the Iran war paused. The word ceasefire has been doing a great deal of work in Gaza — covering a reality that would look considerably worse if described accurately. Read it here

Occupation Has a Peace Plan

Trump’s Board of Peace called Hamas the obstacle to peace while Israel controlled 60 per cent of Gaza and killed daily. A framework requiring one side to disarm while the other expands is not a peace process. It is a surrender document dressed in diplomatic language. The occupation has a peace plan. The occupied are being asked to fund it. Read it here

Putin Won the War. Xi Won Putin.

Putin went to war for Russian sovereignty. He flew to Beijing this week hoping Xi will finalise a gas pipeline that replaces the European market Russia destroyed by invading Ukraine. The man who launched a war to free Russia from Western dependency is now negotiating from the weakest possible position with the one power that can bail him out. The act of independence produced the most comprehensive dependency in Russian history. Read it here

Bombed. Now Billing.

The United States went to war to break Iran. Three months later Iran is charging $2 million per ship through the Strait of Hormuz, in Chinese yuan, and J.P. Morgan calculates it could earn $90 billion a year from the toll. The bombing did not break Iran’s leverage over the strait. It formalised it. Gave it a price. And put it in a currency Washington cannot sanction. Read it here

From the Nuremberg Files — Two Analysis Pieces This Week

This week DiploPolis published the first two pieces in the Nuremberg Files — an ongoing investigation into the promise of universal accountability made after the Holocaust and the distance between that promise and the world we actually live in.

The Nuremberg Paradox

The Nuremberg Paradox examines why the court built to end impunity cannot collect the warrant it issued for Netanyahu — and why that is not a failure of the system but the system working exactly as the powerful designed it. Read it here

The Master Is Here. He Must Be Punished.

The Master Is Here. He Must Be Punished. documents Ben-Gvir’s prison system — starvation, sexual violence, dogs, deaths in custody, 350 children detained — and places it alongside two Nuremberg convictions. Streicher was hanged for the propaganda. Pohl was hanged for the administration. Ben-Gvir is both. Washington funds his government. The master is in his cabinet. The court is in The Hague. Read it here

The Nuremberg Files will continue. The investigation is open. The evidence is documented. The verdict on the verdict is still being written.

From The Dossier This Week — The 20 Best Masters Programmes in International Relations

This week DiploPolis also published the most comprehensive guide to IR Masters programmes available from a Global South perspective. Twenty programmes. Three major polls aggregated. Every tuition figure verified from primary sources. Every assessment argued rather than merely listed.

The uncomfortable question that opens the piece: these frameworks were built by whom, for whom, and to explain whose world? A student from the Global South can spend $120,000 acquiring expertise in frameworks designed to explain a world in which their country was the object of great power competition, not an actor in it. That is not an argument against these institutions. Some of them are genuinely excellent. It is an argument for knowing what you are choosing and why.

Three facts most guides miss entirely. Princeton fully funds every admitted student — no separate application, no loan, full tuition plus a living stipend for every person they admit. Sciences Po charges one third of what Georgetown costs and one in three of its students pays zero fees. The Geneva Graduate Institute places you walking distance from the UN, the WTO and the WHO at a fraction of American tuition — the best career-to-cost ratio on the list.

If you know a student considering an IR Masters — anywhere in the world — send them this piece. Read it here.

Eight pieces. One week. The world did not disappoint — unfortunately.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

For the past five days I wrote every morning knowing something bigger was coming. Here is what I was thinking.

Ask China

Bessent called China a funder of terrorism for buying Iranian oil. Then asked China to use those ties to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In the same interview. I wrote this piece on Monday because the contradiction was so complete it needed to be named before it disappeared into the diplomatic noise. Washington built this crisis on the premise that China’s relationship with Iran was the problem. It is now flying to Beijing to ask China to use that relationship to solve the crisis. The sanctions and the summit are the same sentence. Read it here

Xi Only Has to Not Lose

Before Trump landed in Beijing I wanted to establish the terms of the visit as clearly as possible. Trump arrived carrying a war he cannot finish, a strait he cannot reopen and a request that requires the cooperation of the country he spent four years trying to weaken. Xi arrived on home soil, confident and unhurried. A supplicant and a sovereign walked into the same room. The power dynamic was visible before a single word was exchanged. Read it here

Pick a Side

Mike Huckabee walked into a conference in Tel Aviv and announced, publicly, that Israel had deployed Iron Dome batteries and military personnel to the UAE. He was not on the programme to make that announcement. He made it anyway — as a recruitment pitch. The Abraham Accords were sold as a peace deal. What Huckabee confirmed on Tuesday is that they were always a security architecture. The UAE signed to secure its future. It now has Israeli soldiers on its soil and Iranian missiles in its skies. Nobody asked Abu Dhabi whether this was the deal they thought they were making. Read it here

Country Builder Comes to Beijing

As Trump’s plane touched down in Beijing, Chinese social media was trending with his nickname: Chuan Jianguo — the Country Builder. The implication is sardonic and precise. His tariffs drove China toward self-sufficiency. His isolationism pushed China’s partners toward Beijing. His war closed the strait and forced every government in the world to recalibrate its relationship with Washington. He did not build America stronger. He built China more resilient. Then he flew to Beijing to ask for a favour from the country his policies had strengthened. The nickname arrived before he did. Read it here

The Thucydides Question

Xi asked Trump whether two great powers could rewrite the rules of history and avoid the Thucydides Trap — the structural tendency toward conflict between a rising and an established power. It was not really a question. A rising power that invokes Thucydides is not asking whether conflict can be avoided. It is telling the other side that the transition is already underway and asking whether it has noticed. Trump said China was beautiful. One of those answers will define the century. Read it here

From The Dossier —

Eleven Books That Explain the World
Watching the Iran War

This week I also published DiploPolis’s first Dossier reading list. The Iran war did not arrive without a library. Hedley Bull explained why ceasefires collapse. Mark Mazower explained why the Security Council was never designed to deliver justice. Frantz Fanon explained why the Global South distrusts Western power not from misunderstanding but from memory. Eleven books that make the current crisis legible — each one connected directly to what DiploPolis has been arguing since February 28. If you want to go deeper than the daily verdict, this is where to start. Read it here

Five pieces and a reading list. The Beijing summit dominated the week but the Iran war continued underneath it — the strait still largely closed, the ceasefire still disputed, the Global South still absorbing costs it did not vote for. More than enough for the world to remind us why this publication exists.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

For the past five days, I wrote every morning not knowing what the evening would bring. Here is what I was thinking.

Terminated: The War That Ended Without Ending

Trump invoked the War Powers Act to declare the Iran conflict terminated. I wrote this piece on Sunday because I needed to sit with what that actually means — using the legal mechanism designed to end wars as a tool to sustain one. The war is over on paper. The naval blockade continues. The nuclear question is unresolved. The War Powers Resolution was passed in 1973 to prevent presidents from conducting indefinite military operations without congressional authorisation. Trump has turned it into a filing. Read it here

European Waters, Israeli Rules

An Israeli naval vessel intercepted a European-flagged aid ship in international waters. No legal basis. Conducted anyway. I wrote this piece because the cost of this kind of violation has become entirely predictable — a diplomatic protest, a statement of concern, nothing more. The piece is short because the argument is simple: when the price of breaking the law is a letter of complaint, the law has already broken. Read it here

God Does Not Listen

Pope Leo called for peace on Tuesday. Trump announced a deal. Strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure continued through the night. I have been thinking about moral vocabulary — about what it means when prayers and bombs arrive at the same moment and neither interrupts the other. There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from watching the powerful perform seriousness rather than embody it. This piece came from that exhaustion. Read it here

Operation Sindoor: Fifty-Nine Lawmakers. Zero Answers.

One year ago, India launched Operation Sindoor. I spent three days trying to write this piece correctly — getting the argument right, not just the facts. The anger I felt was simple: India sent 59 parliamentarians to 32 countries, mounted the most ambitious diplomatic outreach in a generation, and came home with nothing. Trump claimed credit for the ceasefire 80 times. Modi never contradicted him once. Pakistan’s army chief became the Gulf’s most indispensable diplomat. The military operation changed India’s doctrine. The year that followed did not. Read it here

Spy Who Came In From the Cold — and Ran for Parliament

Jonathan Pollard kissed the tarmac in Tel Aviv in 2020. Netanyahu was waiting. This week he announced he is running for the Knesset. He served 30 years in American prison for selling the United States’ most classified secrets to Israel. Israel gave him citizenship while he was still in prison, lobbied for his release for three decades and sent the prime minister to the airport when he landed. Nobody in Washington said a word then. Nobody is saying a word now. The Pollard story is the clearest illustration of what the special relationship actually is — and what it permits. Read it here

Five days. Five pieces. One world that keeps doing what it has always done and calling it something else.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

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The Bet That Didn’t Pay Off

The attack on Bamako was the kind of event that gets a paragraph in the international press before the algorithm moves on. I did not want to let it move on. Mali’s junta made a calculation when it expelled the French and invited the Russians: that Wagner would provide security without the political conditions the West attached. What Bamako got instead was a different kind of dependency, and this week it became clear that dependency does not protect you from the thing you were afraid of, it just changes who is watching while it happens. The piece was about the price of that substitution. Read it here

Alliance by Coercion, Racket by Design

I have been thinking about NATO for a while, specifically about the language used to describe what Trump is doing to it, and I kept arriving at the same discomfort: the word ‘alliance’ implies something voluntary. What I was watching did not look voluntary. It looked like a protection arrangement with a variable premium, and this week provided the clearest illustration yet of the difference between the two. The piece was not really about Trump. It was about what an alliance becomes when the dominant power decides coercion is a legitimate tool of coalition management. The honest word for that is not alliance. Read it here

Weapon That Turned Around

Iran used the Strait of Hormuz as leverage in its own defence, and I found myself thinking about how long it took for the obvious to become the policy. Every analyst has known for years that Iran’s most credible deterrent was not its missiles but its geography. The strait is not just a chokepoint, it is a fact. What changed this week was that Tehran stopped treating it as an implicit threat and started using it as an explicit one, and the world discovered that the oil markets had not fully priced in what ‘explicit’ means. I wrote about what happens when a weapon turns around and faces the people who assumed they were safe from it. Read it here

Negotiation and the Threat

The Cuba piece made me angrier than most things I write, which is why I tried to write it calmly. Washington issued demands to Havana under conditions that make the word ‘negotiation’ nearly meaningless, and then described the process as diplomacy. I know what diplomacy looks like. It does not look like this. It looks like two parties who can each walk away. Cuba cannot walk away. That asymmetry is not a negotiating context, it is a coercion context, and I wanted to say so plainly because the press coverage was treating it as the former. Read it here

Annexation That Hides in Plain Sight

This was the hardest piece to write, not because the argument is complicated but because the reality it describes is so normalised that naming it feels almost impolite in certain circles. Israel is annexing the West Bank. Not incrementally, not ambiguously, not in ways that require careful legal interpretation: it is doing it in plain sight, with road signs and administrative transfers and the quiet confidence of a government that has concluded the international community will document the process without interrupting it. I wrote the piece because I think the documentation without interruption is itself a political choice, and I wanted to say so. Read it here

Analysis This Week….

Pause Without Peace: How the US-Iran Ceasefire Was Built to Fail

The analysis piece this week took longer than the Ledger pieces because the argument required more scaffolding. A ceasefire is not peace, and this one was not even a well-constructed ceasefire. I wanted to go beyond the daily dispatches and examine the structural reasons why this particular pause was unlikely to hold: the gap between what Washington agreed to and what Tel Aviv accepted, the unresolved questions about enrichment that both sides deliberately left ambiguous, and the fundamental problem that the parties who most needed to be in the room were represented by governments who could not afford to say publicly what they wanted privately. The ceasefire was a performance of diplomacy, not diplomacy itself. Read it here

Five pieces on five consecutive days, and one long piece that tried to hold all of it together. The week did not resolve anything. It rarely does.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

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Five pieces and my reasoning behind each.

The Blockade Is the War

Iran did the one thing Washington demanded as the price of peace. It opened the Strait of Hormuz. Within 24 hours it closed it again — not because it changed its mind, but because a naval blockade that Washington’s own military described as completely halting Iran’s seaborne trade made compliance meaningless. I kept returning to one question while writing this: what is the word for a peace agreement whose terms cannot be met because one party is simultaneously destroying the other’s capacity to meet them? The word is not diplomacy. The ceasefire did not fail. It was never meant to succeed. Read it here

The Black Sea Just Got Complicated

While Brussels spent the week congratulating itself on the containment of Viktor Orbán, Rumen Radev secured 44.7 per cent of the vote in Bulgaria on a platform of resuming Russian gas flows and opposing arms for Ukraine. TurkStream — now the only pipeline through which Russia directly supplies Europe — enters the EU at the Turkish–Bulgarian border. American bombers rotate just 200 miles from Crimea at Bezmer Air Base. Radev has already described the Ukraine security agreement signed by his predecessor as a risk to national security. Moscow did not lose a veto point inside the European Union. It exchanged one for another. The new one sits on the Black Sea. Brussels has yet to notice. Read it here

Japan Chose Its Lesson

Eighty years ago, Japan was bombed into pacifism. On Tuesday, it voted its way out. The argument here is not complicated. It is simple. Writing it was the harder part. The difficulty is not the argument, but what follows from it. Japan looked at Tehran’s ruins and drew its own conclusions. The conclusions are not wrong. But the country that survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that wrote pacifism into its constitution as an act of civilisational conscience, has decided that the lesson of 1945 was not the horror of war. It was the horror of losing one. That is the lesson the Iran war is teaching every government that can afford to buy it. Japan just decided it would rather sell. Read it here

Until Such Time As

On Tuesday, Trump announced the United States would extend the ceasefire with Iran indefinitely, ‘until such time as’ Tehran submits a unified proposal. No date. No deadline. No condition that can actually be met while the blockade is in place and the strikes continue. I wrote this piece to make that architecture visible. This is not drift. Wars drift when the people fighting them grow tired or run out of money. This war is not drifting. The targets are listed. The industries are mapped. The language of permanent degradation is now official. What is called a ceasefire is a war deciding how long to pause before it resumes. Read it here

The Right Words, the Wrong Room

Pope Leo XIV stood before Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in Malabo and delivered the most honest speech about Africa’s resource curse that anyone gave anywhere this year. Natural resource extraction drives war, violates international law and denies nations the right to determine their own future. He was correct. He was also standing in the room where the model is demonstrated most faithfully — a country with the highest GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa where more than half the population lives in poverty, governed by a man who has been in power for 47 years, whose son was convicted of embezzlement in France and is still vice president. Moral clarity, when it arrives as a guest, becomes testimony rather than indictment. Obiang received it with the composure of a man who has heard worse. He is still there. Read it here

So this week was about a war with no endpoint, a flank that shifted without a shot, a pacifist nation choosing a different lesson, a ceasefire designed not to hold, and the most honest speech of the year delivered in the least honest room. More than enough to remind us why this publication exists.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

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With the Middle East in an uneasy pause, I turned my attention elsewhere this week. To China, which has spent nine years quietly renaming Indian territory as its own and counting on the world being too distracted to notice. To Israel, whose diplomatic cover is not collapsing one nation at a time. And to Ukraine — the war the world seems to have forgotten — which did not lose on the battlefield. It lost it in a bargain Washington made on February 28, at a table Ukraine was never invited to.

While guns in the Middle East paused this week. Everything else kept moving.

Five pieces. Here is what I was thinking when I wrote each one.

What Tehran Already Knew

The failure of the Islamabad talks has been framed almost universally as Iran’s refusal to accept a reasonable offer. I pushed back on that framing. Washington wanted surrender dressed as negotiation. Tehran wanted recognition dressed as concession. Twenty-one hours in a Serena Hotel ballroom was never going to close that distance. What Islamabad produced was not a deal. It was the highest-level direct contact between Washington and Tehran since 1979 — which is something, though considerably less than what the world needed. The door has not been shut. It has been left open by people who are not entirely sure they want anyone to walk through it. Read it here

God, Israel and the Rest of Us

Pope Leo XIV stood in a cathedral in Cameroon and called out the tyrants spending billions on war. Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Christ and then deleted it. JD Vance, a converted Catholic, told the Pope to stay out of politics. I wrote this piece because something theological has attached itself to this conflict — its participants are beginning to narrate it in eschatological terms, pressing the sacred into the service of the military. That is worth paying attention to. Wars that acquire religious grammar tend to outlast their ceasefires. Read it here

The Slow Siege

For the sixth time since 2017, China published a list of renamed locations in Arunachal Pradesh — a state it does not administer, does not police and does not govern. India called it mischievous. I argued that is precisely the point. Beijing is not making a cartographic argument. It is making a temporal one. Names become records, records become maps, maps become references, references become positions. India is right to reject these names. It is wrong to treat them as meaningless. Meaning is not in the map. It is in the repetition. Read it here

No One Left to Veto

The architecture of diplomatic protection that sustained Israel’s freedom of action for decades is not collapsing. It is being quietly vacated, one nation as time. There is a difference, and the difference matters enormously for what comes after this ceasefire. I wrote this piece because the erosion is not happening through dramatic rupture — no single government has broken with Israel in a defining way. It is happening through accumulated fatigue, quiet abstention and the growing unwillingness of governments to absorb the political cost of defending the indefensible. At some point, the absence of a veto is itself a verdict. Read it here

Lost in the Bargain

Ukraine did not lose this war on the battlefield. It lost it in the bargain Washington made on February 28. The Iran war handed Russia an oil windfall it could not have engineered alone, pulled Patriot systems away from Ukrainian cities at the moment Russia escalated its ballistic missile campaign to its highest intensity in four years, and gave Washington a reason to want Moscow manageable. Nobody voted to abandon Ukraine. Washington simply found something it wanted more. I found this one the hardest to write. There is something particularly dispiriting about watching a country do everything asked of it and still discover that doing everything asked is not the same as being indispensable. Read it here

The guns paused this week. The arguments did not. That is usually how it goes.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

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For the past five days, I wrote every morning not knowing what the evening would bring. Here is what I was thinking.

The Loudest Critic in the Room

Brian McGinnis walked into a Senate Armed Services hearing in full Marine Corps uniform and screamed until Capitol Police broke his arm dragging him out. He is a firefighter from North Carolina. His wife is Palestinian. A GoFundMe for him raised $45,000 in two days. I wrote this piece because it reminded me of something India has forgotten — that the loudest challenge to American foreign policy is American. In India, McGinnis would have been branded anti-national before the press conference ended. In the United States, they call it Tuesday. Read it here

The War Pakistan Made

Khawaja Asif stood in parliament and declared open war against the Taliban. I found myself thinking — did anyone in that room notice the irony? Pakistan built the Taliban. The TTP was born from the same ideological infrastructure. Islamabad cannot bomb its way out of a problem it spent thirty years constructing. What changed is not the enemy. What changed is that the machine finally turned around. Read it here

Not Iran. Netanyahu.

The real obstacle to the ceasefire was never in Tehran. It was in Jerusalem. While Washington and Tehran were negotiating, Israel launched a hundred strikes on Lebanon in ten minutes on the first day of the ceasefire. I have been saying this for weeks. The question is not whether Trump can reach a deal with Iran. The question is whether he can reach a deal with Netanyahu. So far the answer is no. Read it here

The Ceasefire That Wasn’t

The ceasefire was three days old and both sides were already in breach of each other’s version of it. Iran’s Parliament Speaker alleged three clauses had been violated before a single handshake. Israel said Lebanon was not included. Pakistan said it was. The Hormuz was still largely closed. A ceasefire that is already disputed before the parties meet is not a ceasefire. The fighting had paused. The argument had not. Read it here

A Table in Islamabad

The delegations arrived. The table was set. And nobody agreed what was on it. Iran’s 10-point proposal exists in two versions — one in Farsi, one in English — and they say different things about enrichment. Washington claims almost everything is agreed. Tehran calls Washington’s demands largely unreasonable. Both cannot be describing the same negotiation. They are not. A deal is not impossible. Exhaustion sometimes achieves what reason cannot. But exhaustion without clarity about what each side will accept is not diplomacy. In war, it means more death and destruction. Read it here

Five days. More than enough for the world to remind us why this publication exists.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

Leave a comment

Five pieces this week. Here is what was on my mind when I wrote each one.

The Indispensable Bad Actor

Pakistan seeded the nuclear crisis it is now being asked to resolve. Abdul Qadeer Khan transferred centrifuge designs to Iran in the 1990s. Washington pardoned Pakistan without consequence. Now the same Washington is routing its peace plan through Islamabad. The bad actor designation, it turns out, has an expiry date. It expires the moment you become useful. Read it here

When the Tyrant Has a Point

Kim Jong Un pointed at the ruins of Iran and said — you see why I kept my nuclear weapons. He runs concentration camps. He starves his people. He is also, on this specific point, making the argument that every government watching the Iran war is quietly making. I found this one uncomfortable to write. The uncomfortable ones are usually worth writing. Read it here

Weaponising the Law

Ben-Gvir walked into the Knesset wearing a noose on his lapel. The last person Israel executed by hanging was Adolf Eichmann — a Nazi war criminal. That is the only precedent for the noose in Israeli legal history. The symbolism was not accidental. It was the point. Democracy is not only about elections. It is also how a state values equality before the law. Read it here

Spain Shows Spine

Every European government this week found a reason to manage its discomfort rather than act on its convictions. France criticised and opened its bases. Germany stayed quiet and offered Ramstein. Spain said the same thing it said last month and the month before — we are a sovereign country that does not wish to take part in illegal wars. Consistency, it turns out, is the rarest form of courage in European foreign policy. Read it here

The Price of Impunity

Washington launched this war without consulting a single ally and is now surprised the world will not follow. Israel passed a law the international community called discriminatory and is now surprised the shield is cracking. A superpower without allies is merely an island with a large military budget. That willingness to look away — once gone — does not return on request. Read it here

It was a full week. The world did not disappoint — unfortunately.

Read. Think. React. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument. Until next Saturday.

Sunny Peter
Editor, DiploPolis.com

Leave a comment

Dispatches is the newsletter home of DiploPolis — Diplomacy & Politics. It is where the analysis, commentary, and arguments published on diplopolis.com find their way directly to your inbox.

DiploPolis is not a neutral publication. It has a point of view. Every piece takes a position and defends it. The publication covers international affairs, diplomacy, and global politics with a deep sympathy for countries and people caught between large forces — and a conviction that the rules governing the world mean nothing if they only protect the powerful. The writing is sharp, argued, and grounded in evidence. There is no bothsidesism here. There is no hedging. Just argument.

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