Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

The Strait of Hormuz is, in the modern imagination, an energy chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global petroleum and a comparable share of liquefied natural gas transit. Yet this narrow waterway carries a far older and more contested significance, one bearing directly on questions of identity, sovereignty, and historical legitimacy in the Arabian Gulf.1 This study addresses three questions and resolves each on the basis of the documentary and archaeological record.   First, it traces the origin of the name “Hormuz”, surveying the principal etymological theories, subjecting each to critical scrutiny, and arriving at a reasoned synthesis. Second, it reconstructs the history of the Arab population on both shores of the Strait, marshalling demographic and documentary evidence to show that the enduring human substrate of the region was Arab throughout recorded history, while Persian authority was characteristically a governing superstructure rather than a settled population. Third, it situates the Battle of Chains and the defeat of the Sasanian commander Hormuz in its correct chronological place within that continuum and corrects the popular but mistaken belief that the Strait was named after him.   The central finding is that the Strait of Hormuz, far from being a frontier dividing an Arab world from a Persian one, functioned for five millennia as a connective maritime highway whose permanent population was overwhelmingly Arab in character, even during the long intervals in which a Persian imperial umbrella claimed nominal sovereignty over its northern littoral.

For decades, the systems that governments, banks, universities, and public institutions built to verify who someone is rested on a single foundational assumption that personal information, documents, and physical characteristics were difficult to convincingly fake. A Social Security number combined with a date of birth and a driver's license was, for most practical purposes, enough to establish identity.   That assumption has now been broken. The US recorded its highest number of data breaches in 2025 since tracking began, identity theft reports to the Federal Trade Commission rose nearly 20% year over year, and global fraud losses now exceed $534 billion annually. Generative AI, the same technology powering productivity tools and creative applications across the economy, has become a force multiplier for those seeking to deceive digital systems at scale. The speed, sophistication, and accessibility of these tools mean that the problem is no longer confined to the margins of financial crime. It has moved to the centre of a broader question about whether the digital infrastructure modern states depend on to function is as reliable as they have assumed.

Mounting doubts regarding U.S. strategic success in the 2026 Iran war have made Washington eager to project strength by reasserting pressure in other contested regions, including the Caribbean. Cuba is re-emerging as a focal point of great power competition involving the United States, China, and Russia. Most prominently, the country stands out to the U.S. President Donald Trump administration as a “failing state.” The administration believes such a state requires intervention.   The growing U.S. presence in the Western Hemisphere and its drive to expand its influence over the region align with the long-standing tradition of U.S. regional dominance rooted in the Monroe Doctrine. Despite outward claims of victory, do the underlying doubts surrounding U.S. strategic success in the 2026 Iran war increase the likelihood of direct military intervention in Cuba, or do they instead reinforce a model of coercive pressure?

War is often fought on numerous battlefronts with state of warfare constantly evolving. In the case of the US-Israel-Iran War, drone and economic warfare are primarily tools of battle between the warring sides with the possibility extension to the seas following President Donald Trump’s proclamation of a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Although the primary theater of war in this conflict has been the skies with an impending theater about to open in the seas of the Gulf, there is another more unconventional theater that has been operating since the beginning of the war, the theater of social media. Since the beginning of the war both the US and Iran have used memes and social media platforms such as X and Instagram as propaganda tools to attack each other’s credibility and shift the war narrative in their favor by engaging wider audiences.   The purpose of this analysis is to explore the idea behind how social media and memes opened a new theater of war between the US and Iran since the start of hostilities in February 2026 and its consequences. This exploration is based on the idea the use of social media and memes transforms the individual from a spectator to active participant in the conflict, while also normalizing violence through humor. Moreover, by transforming social media into a theater of war, the belligerents transform the concept of war into an aesthetic, especially through the US military and White House’s use of social media and memes.    

In recent years, European perceptions of Israel have undergone a noticeable shift, driven primarily by the war on Gaza following the events of 7 October 2023. What began as growing unease has gradually translated into a marked decline in public favourability across Europe, with many viewing Israel’s military response as disproportionately severe. This transformation in public sentiment, however, has not been immediately mirrored at the political level. European leaders have largely maintained a cautious and diplomatic posture, continuing to balance expressions of concern with longstanding commitments to “Israel’s right to self-defence”. That stance has begun to erode more recently. The regional escalation involving Iran has introduced direct economic and strategic pressures on Europe, prompting a more assertive, albeit still measured, response from policymakers. At the same time, political changes within Europe, including the emergence of leaders less firmly aligned with Israel, such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Péter Magyar, signal a gradual recalibration rather than a sudden rupture in policy.   This evolving landscape became particularly visible in late April 2026, when discussions emerged within the European Union around suspending the EU–Israel Association Agreement. Although the proposal did not advance, with key member states such as Germany and Italy blocking consensus, it nonetheless highlighted the extent to which previously unthinkable measures are now part of the policy debate. While the suspension of the agreement would carry significant economic consequences for Israel, its implementation remains constrained by the European Union’s (EU) internal political dynamics. Yet the inability to pursue this option does not imply a lack of leverage. The European Union retains a range of alternative instruments that can be deployed to exert pressure on Israel.

When governments shut down the internet, the standard justification is security, and the standard assumption is that the measure is temporary. Iran has tested both of those assumptions to their breaking point. Its nationwide internet blackout is now the longest ever imposed on an entire population, and Iranian authorities have simultaneously passed legislation making possession of a satellite internet terminal a criminal offence punishable by execution. These two facts are not separate policies responding to separate pressures. They are expressions of a single, long-prepared doctrine of information sovereignty, one in which connectivity is not a public utility to be temporarily suspended but a political instrument to be permanently controlled.   What Iran has built, and what it is now operating at scale for the first time, raises a question that extends well beyond its borders: when a state decides that controlling information is worth more than the economic cost of losing it, and the international system has no answer, what happens next?

Hungary has a strong and well-developed agricultural sector. Arable land and permanent crops account for 4.3 million hectares, of which approximately 130,000 hectares are irrigated. The main crops include wheat (0.9 million hectares), corn (0.8 million hectares), and sunflowers (0.7 million hectares). While pastures cover 0.8 million hectares and forests cover 2 million hectares, livestock production includes 2.8 million pigs and 33.8 million poultry.   The country’s economy is export-dependent, so many technological advancements and the easing of financial restrictions, such as VAT, were integrated across various sectors, helping improve products and increase profits. The agricultural sectors benefited greatly from such policies, where crops and livestock exports have increased throughout the years. Agricultural exports constituted 9.1% of Hungary's total exports in 2024, including commodities like grains and grain products (13%), animal feed (12%), meat and meat products (9%), dairy products (5%), and fruits and vegetables (5%). Hungary's pioneering role in the agricultural sector increases its prospects for adopting measures to address food insecurity while increasing the benefits for any country that cooperates with it.  

For more than five decades, the petrodollar system has served as one of the central structural pillars of American financial supremacy. Since its establishment in the 1970s, the system has anchored the United States’ monetary power by ensuring that Gulf oil exports remain overwhelmingly denominated in United States dollars. Under this arrangement, Gulf producing nations receive American security guarantees in exchange for recycling their oil revenues into US Treasury securities and dollar-denominated financial markets—a self-reinforcing cycle that has entrenched the dollar’s status as the world’s foremost reserve currency and systematically reduced American sovereign borrowing costs for decades.   The United Arab Emirates has, historically, been among the most faithful participants in this arrangement. Its national currency, the dirham, remains pegged to the USD, and its extensive sovereign wealth funds are invested predominantly in dollar-denominated assets. Nevertheless, a convergence of recent developments—an armed conflict in Iran, severe disruptions to Gulf oil exports, and an acute domestic dollar liquidity constraint—has placed the UAE at an unprecedented geopolitical and financial crossroads.

Many analysts fall into a recurring methodological error when assessing the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) position amid regional turbulence. They measure the country’s resilience by its geographical distance from centres of risk, overlooking its exceptional capacity for strategic reinvention in the face of crises. This misreading, in particular, lends early credibility to pessimistic narratives of a “decline of the Gulf”, narratives that quickly unravel under the weight of empirical evidence and the firmness of facts. The UAE has not navigated successive regional crises by relying on geographic insulation or external protection. Rather, it has done so through deeper, more enduring foundations: a demonstrated ability to convert shocks into substantive reform, and to elevate those reforms into sustained competitive advantage.   Accordingly, this analysis does not seek to downplay the scale of the challenges posed by a regional war that is casting a heavy shadow over the security of the Strait of Hormuz, maritime insurance markets, and investment flows. Rather, it offers a structured attempt to address three interrelated core questions: how has the UAE historically navigated major crises; how did it anticipate the current crisis by fortifying its infrastructure and economic systems to sustain resilience; and, finally, how should the present moment be understood, not as signalling the end of a development model, but as marking the transition to a more mature and deeply embedded position within the global economy.

The Israeli political system has undergone profound structural shifts following the launch of Operation Roaring Lion between Israel and Iran in late February 2026. This conflict marks a transition from traditional deterrence policies and proxy warfare to a doctrine of comprehensive confrontation and pre-emptive strikes targeting nuclear and military infrastructure deep inside Iran. These military developments have coincided with the approaching constitutional deadline for the twenty-sixth Knesset elections, due no later than October 2026, amid a politically fragile environment for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his governing coalition. The confrontation has unfolded at a time when the executive leadership is experiencing a decline in political support, shaped by the continuing repercussions of intelligence and security failures linked to the events of 7 October 2023.   These challenges are compounded by declining domestic economic indicators, sharp societal divisions over legislation mandating military conscription for ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the ongoing trajectory of judicial proceedings. In this context, analytical evidence suggests that the executive leadership is seeking to leverage the state of national emergency to consolidate cohesion within its right-wing electoral base and to affirm the centrality of the current leadership in managing security threats within a complex parliamentary system. The intersection of protracted military conflicts with democratic electoral cycles imposes complex structural pressures on voting behaviour and the prospects of incumbent leadership. The demands of national mobilisation increasingly intersect with deeply rooted crises of institutional trust in the public consciousness. This analysis examines electoral calculations before and after the outbreak of the confrontation, reviews historical precedents in which extended wars have shaped successive Israeli governments, and analyses the strategic and personal drivers of decision-making, culminating in an assessment of potential trajectories for the reconfiguration of the electoral landscape ahead of the 2026 vote.

At the outset of 2026, the global natural gas market underwent a profound structural shift that eroded much of the stability built over years of rebalancing in the aftermath of the 2022 European energy crisis. Markets had been advancing towards a phase of relative supply abundance, underpinned by expanding liquefaction capacity in the United States (US) and large-scale Qatari projects. This trajectory was abruptly reversed on Feb. 28, 2026, when Operation Epic Fury triggered the most severe energy shock to confront the international system in decades. The US-Israel-Iran War and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, removed nearly one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas supply from circulation within days.   This paper analyses the structural transformations in the global natural gas market induced by the crisis, tracing supply and demand dynamics before and after the outbreak of the conflict. It further evaluates the implications for key actors within the international energy system, including countries most exposed to global gas market volatility, such as Egypt and Jordan.

On April 7, 2026, the United States (US) and Iran announced a temporary two-week ceasefire, following intensive diplomatic mediation led by Pakistan during a critical window of escalation. The conflict had erupted on Feb. 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched coordinated military strikes targeting Iranian infrastructure. In response, Tehran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz to international commercial shipping, precipitating the most severe energy supply shock in modern market history.   The closure effectively paralysed approximately 20 million barrels per day that would ordinarily transit the Strait of Hormuz in peacetime, accounting for nearly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade. Under the terms of the ceasefire, Iran announced a conditional reopening of the strait, while the parties agreed to commence diplomatic talks in Islamabad on April 10. This analysis examines the full scope of the crisis and evaluates the prevailing oil price scenarios, drawing on lessons from comparable historical shocks to assess the fragility of the current environment and its potential trajectories.