Reading paths
The archive is large. These paths are a way in: each is a question, a handful of columns in order, and a sentence on why each one is worth your time. Dates are shown prominently because the columns were written in their moment, not today.
Understanding Lebanon
Why is governing Lebanon so difficult?
From the 2019 uprising to the fiftieth anniversary of the war, one diagnosis deepens: a system shared out among sects that always needs an outside guardian.
Lebanon at a Crossroads
The uprising, eleven days in, with the numbers: debt, unemployment, poverty, and a country that 'exports its educated children'.
Lebanon: The 'Mission Government' and Overcoming the Impossible Mission
His harshest sentence about his own country: the Lebanese system, 'like a minor child, always needs external guardianship'.
Lebanon: The Triad Required for Rescue
His prescription for rescue in three parts: a president, a government that works as a team, and a reform programme with a timetable.
Lessons of Lebanon's 'Wars'
Fifty years after April 1975: not a war of left against right, but a war of identities and of others.
Sovereignty and neutrality
Can Lebanon escape other countries' conflicts?
From active positive neutrality in 2020 to 'the decision of war and peace' after the 2024 war: the idea that became a doctrine while the war was being fought.
A Policy of Active Positive Neutrality: A Necessity for Lebanon
The founding text: not Swiss legal neutrality, not 'Hanoi', but an active foreign policy that attaches the country to no axis.
Essential Elements of an Effective Foreign Policy for Lebanon
His programme in seven points, from a lecture at Saint Joseph University: geography, a real consensus, the logic of the state, and the firefighter's role.
Lebanon: Reviving the Armistice Agreement Is More Than Necessary
'Reform and arms', and the relation between them; the 1949 Armistice Agreement as the legal frame until there is peace.
Lebanon and the Possible Scenarios
The week after the cabinet's decision on the exclusivity of arms: the essential step from 'de facto authority' to 'the logic of the state', and the scenarios that follow.
Diplomacy in practice
What can negotiation accomplish when interests clash?
His standing model: settlements are built from the top down, they come when the combatants tire, and partial solutions postpone a war rather than end it.
2018: How Will the Middle Eastern Landscape Look?
The first statement of his binary: either a grand bargain among the powers that matter, or fires that move from one arena to the next.
Syria After the Military Strike: What Possibilities?
Syria after the three-power strike: how a settlement is made 'from top to bottom, from the international to the regional to the local'.
Partial Solutions Mean More Wars to Come
The rule in a headline: truces are no substitute for a settlement, and the Security Council should 'impose, yes impose' a comprehensive ceasefire.
The Lebanese-Israeli Negotiations: Where To?
The Lebanese-Israeli negotiations after their seventh round: 'negotiating by fire', 'negotiating for the sake of negotiating', and what Lebanon asks for.
A changing regional order
Who shapes the Middle East, and how has that changed?
The thesis that opened his column in 2016 and governs everything after it: the Arab order dissolved into a Middle Eastern one, and the alternative to chaos is a set of rules written with the neighbours.
What Future for the Arab Order?
The first column: the 'Arab earthquake', the Iraqi barrier that became a bridge, and five challenges for the Arabs.
Are We Witnessing the Birth of a New World Order?
Thirty years after the Berlin Wall: a tripolar order being born, without the ideological fixity of the Cold War.
The Middle East: How to Escape Chaos and War?
His long-standing proposal: a Helsinki-style conference on security and cooperation for the Middle East that includes Iran and Turkey.
The Middle East: Wars, or the Beginning of Solutions?
Summer 2026: the American-Iranian memorandum falters, and the same question returns: wars, or the beginning of solutions?