The situation on Lebanon’s southern border already feels like a hot war, with a rapid escalation in two-way missile barrages. These clashes have caused the deaths of dozens of Lebanese civilians and well over 140 Hezbollah personnel. Lebanese Army positions have been repeatedly hit.

We are in completely uncharted territory.

One of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani's key governing pledges was to normalize the situation throughout central Iraq by transferring control from the military to civilian police, and regular military forces have indeed obediently withdrawn in many provinces.

Revolutionary developments are afoot for strategic control of major trans-Middle East transport routes. Kuwait and Iraq are tussling over control of Gulf waterways, amid plans for a route from Faw port through to Turkiye, and progress on an Iraq-Iran rail link.

The world is scrambling to respond to manifestations of increasingly symbiotic Russian-Iranian coordination that flout the full spectrum of international norms and fundamentally undermine global security.

In a country where financial, health and welfare systems have collapsed, half the population are starving, there are four million drug addicts, and 20 percent suffer mental health problems, the Taliban are obsessed with one policy agenda — robbing women of any kind of purposeful existence.

In the context of the Ukraine war, the manner in which the world functions, and rivalries between superpowers, have been profoundly transformed in ways that are scarcely yet understood.