Analyses
Cuba’s Twin Embargoes
Donato Di Santo 2 September 2026
For decades, Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were seen as a right-wing phenomenon, with Cuba as the lone exception — a dictatorship born not from a betrayal of democracy, but of revolution. As Washington’s embargo returns to the headlines, this piece asks what that framing has long obscured: that Cuba has never had just one embargo, but two.
  • The Poison in the System Behind Cases Like Jeffrey Epstein
    Jim Sleeper 27 March 2026
    You may think that Americans have heard more than enough by now about how the influence peddler and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein “networked” with accomplices, victims, and their apologists. But all the tawdry cravings for money, sex, power, and, later, conspiratorial dealings by this country’s plutocracy-serving elite have been merely symptoms of a deeper, more dangerous craving that we need to understand. No matter whether we characterize that craving as pathological or as sinful in the nature of our divided human hearts, it has been poisoning the country since long before Epstein and Trump began riding and accelerating it in an ever-widening gyre. I came to it nearly half a century ago, when I got to know a practitioner of sinuous methods and morals that anticipated Epstein’s and Trump’s decades later.
  • War with Pakistan Marks the Taliban’s Weakest Moment Since 2021
    Vittorio Sandalli 27 March 2026
    While international attention is focused on the war with Iran—due to its implications for the global energy market and the threat of a potentially devastating escalation—fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan has resumed with unprecedented intensity in the adjacent region. Such a clash would have been unthinkable when the Taliban returned to power on August 15, 2021, reestablishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, in part thanks to Islamabad’s support.
  • The Discovery of the Public Sphere and the Break with Adorno
    Giancarlo Bosetti 17 March 2026
    Despite the weight and authority of his school of origin—the “critical theory” of Adorno and Horkheimer—the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas established itself from the outset as a distinct and independent theoretical undertaking. The young doctoral student from Düsseldorf, working on his dissertation on the “public sphere,” was carving out his own direction in rethinking the relationship with the Enlightenment legacy, with Kant, Hegel, and Marx. That direction required a break with negative thought and with the radical critique of the Enlightenment—in which the Frankfurt masters saw the paradoxical source of calculative reason, of a distorted instrumentalization of human relations, and of the monstrosities of fascism and communism, of Hitler and Stalin.
  • The Paradox of Trump’s War: Against Iran and Common Sense
    Ramin Jahanbegloo 12 March 2026
    What, then, can humanity do in the face of this lack of common sense on both sides? Perhaps the only way to stop this war and the spread of violence across the Middle East is a shared commitment to peace and to the value of human life, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. We need a minimal morality that could inspire opposition to Iranian tyranny, alongside a strong turn toward common sense—on that recalls the American tradition of civic virtue: the dedication of citizens to the common good and placing public duty above self-interest. Believe it or not, Iranian civil society today is closer to some of the values of the American Revolution than some of those who work in Washington, D.C. and wage wars to expand their capacity to make war. If the 2003 war in Iraq was unjust, the war against Iran is a war against common sense—and against the civic virtues of the Iranian people.
  • A U.S. Attack on Iran Would Redefine Global Shiism
    Pasquale Annicchino 24 February 2026
    The recent large-scale deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Europe has led many analysts to question whether a military intervention in Iran is on the horizon—and what its short- and long-term consequences might be. An action capable of bringing about the collapse of the Islamic Republic would open political and religious scenarios with global ramifications.
  • Shifting the Geopolitical Narrative to World-Minus-One
    Seán Golden 19 February 2026
    While Vladimir Putin’s regime and Donald Trump’s illiberal regression gallop backward toward a nineteenth-century narrative of Great Power empire-building, and the Global South tentatively lays the foundation for a twenty-first-century alternative, Europe seems mired in nostalgia for mid-twentieth-century neoliberal obsolescence. This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos might mark a point of inflection in this process.
  • Immigration: Spain Shows Italy Another Way
    Maurizio Ambrosini 16 February 2026
    The Spanish government has taken an initiative that stands in sharp contrast to the line currently prevailing in Italy and across the European Union, not to mention the United States under Trump’s leadership. While the new European Pact on Migration and Asylum, set to enter into force this June, focuses on restricting the right to asylum and on deporting migrants without residence permits, the Sánchez government is introducing an amnesty expected to apply to some 500,000 people. Spain, moreover, already has 6.6 million legal immigrant residents, compared with Italy’s 5.4 million, within a total population of 48.6 million—around 10 million fewer than Italy’s. If acceptance of immigration were truly governed by quantitative limits (the so-called “tolerance threshold”), Spain should, in theory, have less room for new arrivals and regularizations than Italy and other countries.
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