Geopolitics

In the two years since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Russia has restructured its Mediterranean presence. Although Russia’s limited and increasingly conditional access to the Khmeimim and Tartus facilities in Syria has been preserved, its presence in the country has morphed from Assad’s ‘patron-client’ configuration to a more negotiated engagement. Simultaneously, Russia has upgraded its force-projection and logistical infrastructure in eastern Libya, giving it an access path ...

Brazil's election poses a question that extends well beyond Latin America: how much freedom does a country retain to define its international role when external pressure collides with domestic political exhaustion? For the Global South, the answer matters more than any foreign government's preference regarding the next occupant of the presidential palace. Strategic autonomy remains fragile if every change of government puts a country's freedom of action back up for negotiation. ...

The author of this opinion, Marie-Noelle Nwokolo, is a 2024 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.In September 1978, delegations from 138 countries gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, around a powerful idea: developing countries had knowledge, experience and capabilities worth sharing with one another. The Buenos Aires Plan of Action gave institutional form to what we now call South-South Cooperation, part of a wider post-colonial effort by developing ...

The incident involving Flydubai Flight FZ1073 between Dubai and Tel Aviv does not yet support any definitive attribution. It does, however, provide a useful warning sign: as aviation security closes off traditional avenues of intrusion, threats may shift towards alternative pathways by exploiting the people, service providers, and systems that the aviation ecosystem must necessarily trust.  ...

L’incident du vol FZ1073 entre Dubaï et Tel-Aviv ne permet encore aucune attribution définitive. Il constitue en revanche un révélateur utile : à mesure que la sûreté aérienne ferme les voies classiques d’intrusion, la menace cherche à emprunter des voies alternatives en exploitant les personnes, les prestataires et les systèmes auxquels l’écosystème aéronautique doit nécessairement accorder sa confiance. ...

On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Défense Agreement, a collective-defense pact widely compared to NATO’s Article 5. This essay argues that the comparison is misleading. Mecca borrows NATO’s language of solidarity without yet possessing NATO’s institutional machinery, and the Houthi offensive against Saudi Arabia in September 2026 provided an early and revealing test of what the agreement actually means in practice. Neither Pakistan nor Turk ...

You can imagine how often I've been asked to comment on where the Brazilian economy is headed after the election. With polls pointing to a runoff on October 25 and currently showing a statistical tie between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro in vote simulations, I'm naturally asked about their economic programs and about the country's relations with the United States. ...

This paper was initially published in French on the website of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès. There was a historic decline in Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2025. Foreign aid to developing countries from members of the OECD-DAC fell by some 23%, the largest decline on record and the second consecutive annual decline. Aid to Africa fell by more than 25%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) described this decline in ODA to Africa as “a shock like no other.” It differ ...

The author of this opinion, Marianna Albuquerque, is a 2022 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.As world leaders gather in New York for the 81st United Nations General Assembly, climate change returns to the center of multilateral diplomacy under markedly different circumstances. The debate is no longer confined to whether the world must decarbonize, but increasingly centers on how the transition will happen, who will bear its costs, who will capture ...

Depuis 2010, environ, on sait que la Méditerranée orientale est une nouvelle province gazière. Des ressources gazières ont en effet été découvertes au large de quatre pays ou territoires, l’Égypte, Israël, Chypre et Gaza. Deux d’entre eux sont devenus producteurs et exportateurs de gaz naturel, l’Égypte et Israël. Au large de Gaza, le champ gazier de Gaza Marine n’a jamais été développé et il est très peu probable qu’il le soit prochainement en raison des très fortes tensions entre ...

Since around 2010, it has been known that the Eastern Mediterranean is a new gas province. Gas resources have indeed been discovered offshore four countries or territories: Egypt, Israel, Cyprus and Gaza. Two of them have become producers and exporters of natural gas, Egypt and Israel. Off the coast of Gaza, the Gaza Marine gas field has never been developed, and it is highly unlikely to be developed anytime soon given the very high tensions between the State of Israel and Hamas. By ...

Various competing cross-border payment networks have become vehicles for geopolitical competition. As tensions have risen, many countries want to secure access to cross-border payment systems by joining with like-minded countries to form interoperable networks, either via tokenization or Instant Payment Systems (IPSs). Three major projects are under development, serving the strategic interests of the US, China and the Rest of the World—corresponding to the three trading spheres taki ...