The USA-Israel war against Iran has never been confined to the skies alone; it has spread to the waters and straits, eventually blockading the key lifelines of the global economy. While there are no signs of truce on the horizon, the war seems on the verge of escalation, and the intertwining of more factions and partners appears inevitable. The recent Saudi-Houthi escalation is spiralling as another arm of the wider regional conflict, and another 12% of global trade, along wi

WAS THE CEASEFIRE DESIGNED TO STOP THE WAR? The framing that the US and Iran are “still fighting” despite the Islamabad MOU contains an assumption that contains more than meets the eye. The assumption that the ceasefire was designed to stop the war is largely contradictory; it was designed to manage the war’s tempo while each side pursued objectives that were, to begin with, reconcilable at the negotiating table. Eleven days after Trump and Pezeshkian signed remotely from Ve

Taiwan's coast guard reported on 6 June that a Chinese coast guard vessel and an oceanographic survey ship operated in unison around the Pratas Islands, the first documented case of paired civilian-coded assets at this remote atoll. The conventional read frames this as another grey-zone irritation, one of more than thirty annual incursions since February 2024, to be absorbed and ignored. Illustration by Geopolitics Next That reading misses the structural shift. Pratas sits as