In the intricate web of global geopolitics, terms like 'Global South' and 'Middle East' have played significant roles in shaping perceptions and narratives for decades. However, when we explore these labels from the vantage point of Nepal and wider Asia, it becomes increasingly evident that these terms, crafted in the corridors of Western power politics, need a serious reevaluation and redefinition.

KATHMANDU, May 13: A Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) aircraft will be flying home a total of 600 oxygen cylinders from Muscat, Oman coming Saturday.

TEL AVIV – US President Joe Biden has announced that he will withdraw American troops from Afghanistan by September 11, finally ending his country’s longest war ever. The move was indicative of a broader shift by the United States away from the Middle East – one that has been a long time coming. Will anyone take its place in the region?

TOKYO, Feb 15: Oil prices rose to their highest in more than a year on Monday, after a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said it intercepted an explosive-laden drone fired by the Iran-aligned Houthi group, raising fears of fresh Middle East tensions.

KATHMANDU, Jan 6: Nepal on Wednesday welcomed the decision of the governments of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Qatar to reopen the land, air and sea borders between the two countries.

WASHINGTON/RIYADH, Jan 5: A breakthrough has been reached in Qatar’s three-year-old dispute with Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries and an agreement aimed at ending their rift is to be signed in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, a senior Trump administration official said.

Beirut must be saved

September 14, 2020 15:30 pm

BEIRUT – For millennia, Lebanon has been a meeting point for different cultures and peoples, and also a victim of regional power struggles that have stood in the way of lasting peace. Yet even through the country’s long civil war (1975-90), Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, managed to preserve its open culture. As a bastion of free media, creative literary forums, and renowned academic institutions, it is the pearl of the Middle East.

JERUSALEM, Aug 14: A deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates intended to fully normalise relations follows a history of peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians and their Arab allies that have failed to overcome decades of distrust and violence.

KATHMANDU, May 7: The Non-Resident Nepalis Association (NRNA) Middle-east Committee has suggested to the government to bring home the Nepali citizens stranded in foreign lands on a priority basis.

Napoleon’s Middle East Legacy

March 17, 2020 09:09 am

MANCHESTER – “In the beginning was Napoleon.” So commences the late Thomas Nipperdey’s acclaimed history of nineteenth-century Germany, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck. But although Nipperdey was referring to Napoleon Bonaparte’s central role in creating modern Europe, in many respects his statement also applies to today’s Middle East.

DUBAI, UAE, March 5: Iran will set up checkpoints to limit travel between major cities and urged citizens on Thursday to reduce their use of paper money to fight a spreading outbreak of the new coronavirus, which has killed at least 107 people across the Islamic Republic.

TEHRAN, IRAN, March 4: Friday prayers in Iran have been canceled across all provincial capitals amid the country’s growing coronavirus outbreak, state television said.

WASHINGTON, Mar 1: Leaders in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas rolled out bans on big gatherings and stricter travel restrictions as cases of the new coronavirus spread around the world.

Paradigm Shift on Palestine

February 20, 2020 09:32 am

TEL AVIV – Nobody should be surprised that US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace proposal is heavily tilted toward the Israelis. What is surprising is that, rather than rejecting Trump’s proposal, the world has left the Palestinians largely on their own.

DUBAI, Feb 16: Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement accused the Saudi-led coalition of carrying out retaliatory air strikes on Saturday that killed at least 30 people including civilians, in the latest flare-up of a five-year war.

America’s Middle-East Obsession

January 28, 2020 09:30 am

NEW DELHI – “Great nations do not fight endless wars,” US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative decline of American power and facilitated China’s muscular rise. And yet, less than a year after that speech, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s most powerful military commander, General Qassem Suleimani, bringing the United States to the precipice of yet another war. Such is the power of America’s addiction to interfering in the chronically volatile Middle East.

Costs of conflict

January 23, 2020 08:19 am

The United States told the United Nations that the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani was in self-defence and vowed to take additional action “as necessary” in the Middle East to protect US personnel and interests. On other side, Iran retaliated by firing 20 ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq where United States troops were stationed. It is believed that driving out the presence of United States from the region was the major objective of Iran and Soleimani’s personal mission. So the bigger picture is Iran lost its best military strategist and the assassination ensured the elimination of a man who America saw as potential challenger of its primacy in region.

KATHMANDU, Jan 18: Three of the six people killed in a deadly road accident in Abu Dhabi on Thursday were Nepali nationals, the Nepali embassy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) said.

KATHMANDU, Jan 9: Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) on Thursday decided to draw the attention of the government to make necessary arrangements to ensure the safety of the Nepalis in the restive Middle East amid escalating tensions between United States and Iran following the killing of top Iranian general by the US military last week.

KATHMANDU, Jan 9: Nearly two million Nepalis working in the Middle East are alarmed by the prospect of war between the United States and Iran. People are huddling in tea shops and chautaris across the country to discuss the possibility of World War III and families of our migrant workers are rightly worried by the news coming out from the Middle East. Sadly, our government has done very little to assure the public of the measures it will take to provide the necessary support to Nepalis in the region in the unlikely event of an all-out war. We have yet to see a statement or public remarks from the government to assure the worried Nepalis, both at home and abroad.

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON, Jan 8: Iran said it launched a missile attack on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the early hours of Wednesday in retaliation for the U.S. drone strike on an Iranian commander whose killing has raised fears of a wider war in the Middle East.

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON, Jan 6: Iraq’s parliament called on Sunday for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave as a backlash grows against the U.S. killing of a top Iranian general, and President Donald Trump doubled down on threats to target Iranian cultural sites if Tehran retaliates.

WASHINGTON, Jan 6: President Donald Trump insisted Sunday that Iranian cultural sites were fair game for the U.S. military, dismissing concerns within his own administration that doing so could constitute a war crime under international law. He also warned Iraq that he would levy punishing sanctions if it expelled American troops in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad that killed a top Iranian official.

WASHINGTON, Jan 2: The United States is immediately deploying about 750 soldiers to the Middle East in response to the violent protests at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Tuesday.

Post-American Middle East

January 2, 2020 08:44 am

NEW YORK – It was August 5, 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded and conquered all of Kuwait, and US President George H.W. Bush could not have been clearer as he spoke from the South Lawn at the White House: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” Over the next six months, Bush proved to be a man of his word, as the United States sent a half-million soldiers to the Middle East and led an international coalition that liberated Kuwait.

ANKARA, Dec 22: At least 25,000 civilians have fled Syria’s northwestern region of Idlib and headed toward Turkey over the past two days, Turkish state media said on Sunday, as Syrian and Russian forces intensified their bombardment of the region.

JERUSALEM, Dec 9: Israel’s two biggest parties agreed on Monday on a March 2 election date, barring a last-minute power-sharing deal, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting for political survival under criminal indictment.

The last days of Netanyahu?

September 25, 2019 00:51 am

TEL AVIV – At long last, Israel has taken a step back from the religious nationalist abyss into which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had been leading it. In the September 17 parliamentary election, the country’s second in five months, the “natural coalition” of Netanyahu’s Likud party, Orthodox groups, and proto-fascist factions failed to reach the 61-seat threshold that would have enabled him to form another government.

JERUSALEM, June 23: Talk of Middle East peace is in the air again, as politicians are set to gather in Bahrain to launch the latest in a long line of initiatives to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

KATHMANDU, June 3: As tensions between the US and Iran further complicate the already difficult relations among Gulf nations, with Saudi Arabia and its allies enforcing an embargo on Qatar, there are concerns that this could leave adverse impacts on countries like Nepal as well.

Structure of diplomatic revolution

April 21, 2019 01:05 am

NEW YORK – It has been nearly 60 years since the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s thesis was simple but heretical: Breakthroughs in science occur not through the gradual accumulation of small changes to existing thinking, but rather from the sudden emergence of radical ideas that cause existing models to be replaced with something fundamentally different.

SINGAPORE, Feb 22: Oil prices fell on Friday after the United States reported its crude output hit a record 12 million barrels per day (bpd), undermining efforts by Middle East-dominated producer club OPEC to withhold supply and tighten global markets.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino appears hugely hopeful that he has stumbled upon the long-lost secret to filling one of the world’s greatest voids: peace in the Middle East.

KARACHI, Sept 21: Speaking about the Saudi-Yemen dispute, Prime Minister Imran Khan has told Saudi media that all conflicts could be resolved through dialogue.

YEMEN, Sept 4: Yemenis file into a makeshift cinema for the first time since fighting broke out in their city of Aden more than three years ago - and watch some of their own story reflected back at them on the projector screen.

LONDON, Aug 22: Iran said on Tuesday it would boost its military might and also showcased a new fighter jet amid increased tensions with the United States and with regional rivals over conflicts in the Middle East.