Israel’s recognition of Somaliland constitutes a significant step in its engagement with the Horn of Africa and the broader Red Sea security environment. While the move does not immediately alter the regional balance of power, it formalizes ties with a relatively stable political entity in one of the world’s most strategically sensitive maritime corridors.
Iran has entered its fifth day of an effective nationwide internet blackout as anti-government protests, born of deep economic grievances, spread across several cities. While independent verification of casualties and overall scale remains constrained by the telecommunications lockdown, activists and monitoring groups using Starlink and shortwave radio report significant violence and mass arrests.
The contemporary global order is undergoing continuous fragmentation, driven by great-power competition and institutional erosion that are reshaping how power is exercised and contested. The gradual decline of rule-based multilateralism has produced an environment defined less by stability and more by fluidity, uncertainty, and overlapping spheres of influence.
The new United States National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2025 codifies a strategic turn away from the ambition of global guardianship towards a hierarchical ordering of interests, in which allies are explicitly ranked and held to account. Europe and other partners are no longer treated as pillars of a liberal order, but as subordinate actors.
When US helicopters thudded low over Caracas in the early hours of January 3rd and explosions lit up Fuerte Tiuna and La Carlota Air Base, the strategic script felt eerily familiar, especially to anyone who remembers Manuel Noriega being flown out of Panama on January 3rd, 1990.
For two decades, Berlin treated China less as a geopolitical problem than as an economic solution. German carmakers sold more vehicles in China than in Germany. Machinery firms supplied the tools for the world’s most spectacular manufacturing boom. Politicians wrapped this symbiosis in a comforting doctrine: Wandel durch Handel or “change through trade”.
An unanticipated consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been the strengthening of ties between Moscow and New Delhi, particularly in the energy domain. The India–Russia axis has been one of the world’s most enduring great-power partnerships.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has actively reshaped Europe’s deterrence landscape. The political uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s return to the White House has renewed calls for European strategic autonomy and intensified doubts about the long-term reliability of US extended nuclear deterrence in European capitals.
The recent 2025 agreement on the delimitation of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and Lebanon put a definitive end to two decades of ambiguity surrounding the maritime borders of the two states.
The U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) criticizes European policies and institutions, explicitly backs nationalist parties as preferred partners, and argues that the continent’s fragility stems from the erosion of sovereignty, national identity, and political confidence.
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