Insights & Editorials

In September the Houthis took Mocha and reached Perim, the island in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb. The strait is not closed, but with Hormuz traffic down to a handful of ships a day, the Red Sea was the outlet Saudi Arabia was counting on — and its pipeline to Yanbu has just been hit too. Iran has now tied reopening Hormuz to ending the fighting by all its allies, pulling both straits into a single negotiation.

Some 80,000 people crossed into Ceuta over two days in late July. A Supreme Court ruling that granted no one a right to stay was recast online as a pass to enter; six written warnings from border unions went unanswered; and once the water cleared, Morocco put the sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla back on the table. Not even the death toll is agreed — and the EU's answer to a border arrangement that just failed was to enlarge it.

After a Chinese submarine test-launched a strategic missile into the Pacific, the Forum's foreign ministers could not agree on a statement. A failure to agree on wording repays more study than a strongly worded communiqué: the same consensus rule that let small states constrain nuclear powers in 1985, and blocked Beijing's regional security package in 2022, has now stopped the Forum's own document. The institution has not changed — the structure of interests has.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement treats an armed attack on any one of the three as an attack on all — language that drew immediate comparison to NATO's Article 5. But reading it as another NATO misses the larger shift: regional powers are no longer only choosing among architectures designed elsewhere. Seventy years after the Baghdad Pact traced nearly the same geographic axis, the architects have changed.

Papua New Guinea is advancing military alignment with Australia under the Pukpuk Treaty and granting US defense access, while simultaneously expanding trade ties and praising major investments with Beijing. This 'compartmentalized alignment' strategy seeks multi-market hedging, but as security, energy, and port infrastructure blur, the cost of policy ambiguity is rising rapidly.

Does war rewrite food safety and quarantine rules between hostile nations? While residue limits rarely change overnight, certificate recognition, enterprise approvals, and border clearances dissolve first. As Ukraine and Moldova shift toward the EU, geopolitical conflict steadily erodes regulatory trust.

As the Thailand-China high-speed rail progresses alongside rising investments in AI, EVs, and batteries, Bangkok is accelerating scrutiny over nominee shareholders, low-cost packages, and unlicensed factories. Rather than a policy pivot, this signals Thailand resetting the terms for foreign direct investment.

On maps, the Strait of Hormuz is merely a narrow trace of water; in reality, it is the world's most formidable energy chokepoint. The conflicts of 2026 have redrawn the scale of oil power. This article analyzes how Persian Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE leverage bypass pipelines to forge asymmetrical energy resilience, restructuring geopolitical alliances.