Washington’s New Middle East Playbook

Iraq, Lebanon, and the Politics of Conditional Sovereignty. By Raghu Kondori in The Times of Israel

A quiet shift is underway in how power is exercised in the Middle East. It is no longer defined primarily by large-scale military intervention or formal regime change, but by a more indirect mechanism: financial leverage, institutional pressure, and conditional access to global systems of legitimacy. The emerging pattern can be described as conditional sovereignty—the idea that a state’s autonomy is increasingly tied to its ability to meet externally defined benchmarks in governance, finance, and security control.

Read the full article on The Times of Israel