Stephen Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, might be a fresh face for followers of world affairs. But for students of New York real estate, he’s an old familiar presence. The 67-year-old has been buying, leasing, selling, and modifying buildings …
How MBS won the peace talks
The picture says it all: Marco Rubio and Sergey Lavrov, America and Russia, sat about a hardwood table beneath the dripping chandeliers of Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Palace, ready to remake Eurasia for the rest of the century. Between them sits …
Trump’s Riviera would tear the Middle East apart
Only Donald Trump can unselfconsciously talk about one of the world’s most obstinate political and humanitarian crises in terms of its real estate opportunities. Only Trump can be taken seriously while doing so. And so here we are.
“We’re going …
Syria has spooked MBS
The flight of Bashar al-Assad and his family to Russia, where they have been granted asylum, indicates that however ruthless his style of governing by murder, torture and repression, he is not an ideologist. Instead of remaining defiantly in Syria …
Biden must unleash Israel
Having been attacked by almost 200 ballistic missiles — launched by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and each the size of a tanker truck — Israel must now decide how to respond. Whatever happens, one thing is obvious: the Jewish State’s reaction …
Saudi Arabia is stealing snooker’s soul
By now, snooker should have died out. The game seems squarely at odds with a modern world ruled by speed — where facts are onscreen at our fingertips, and the patience required for slow-moving stories is increasingly on the wane. …
Why MBS wants peace with Israel
The 1945 meeting between American President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz, which laid the foundation for their nations’ enduring relationship, is often portrayed as an exchange of oil for security cooperation. But in reality, oil was hardly discussed. …
Israel’s war is about to escalate
As I look out over Lebanon from high up on Israel’s northern border, I see undulating hills dappled with hedgerows and green brush that glows golden in the winter sun. But this is far from an idyll. Lebanese Hezbollah have …
Saudi Arabia’s empire of sand
There’s a slight hush and then a ripple across the room as he enters. “That’s MBS,” a delegate mutters in French, tugging at his neighbour to stand as Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, strides into the …
What will Israel’s invasion of Gaza achieve?
The last major news item about Gaza before the first news of Hamas’s surprise attack was the September 22 announcement that 17,000 Gazans would immediately receive permits to work in Israel, with that number set to rise to 20,000. All …
Is Israel prepared for war?
The images beggared belief. Palestinian gunmen driving through an Israeli city, firing at passers-by from the bed of a pickup truck. The body of a dead Israeli soldier, his green uniform stained red, being dragged from a car inside Gaza …
Joe Biden’s billion-dollar oil mistake
One of the many ironies of the Just Stop Oil movement is that, for the past year, their protests have been positively correlated with the price of oil. If you were tempted to indulge in a little schadenfreude, you might …
The dawn of the Brics World Order
Last week’s Brics summit was supposed to herald the dawn of a new world order. It would announce the end of the American era and the rise of another, this time belonging to developing nations. It would even, according to …
How MBS wins friends and influences people
Prior to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, nobody cared much for Saudi Arabia: a largely nomadic, pre-industrial desert nation with a population smaller than London. But in the last 50 years, it has become a friend worth cultivating. So much …
How the Saudi Empire bought football
I was five years old, desperately precocious when it came to football, and furious that my mam hadn’t let us watch England against Czechoslovakia in the 1982 World Cup. We were on holiday, and that meant that we had to …
