The Venezuelan ruling apparatus is worried about being weakened politically following destructive earthquakes, and rightly so. Latin America offers plenty of examples of authoritarian states collapsing after failing to respond to a natural disaster.
A political battle has broken out in Tripoli over control of the Libyan Intelligence Agency, which has become a fault line that risks escalating in western Libya, with broader repercussions in eastern and western relations at a time when the U.S. is pushing forward with a new unity deal.
Years of planning by the Islamic Republic for a theoretical war with the United States was finally put to the test. Now with the ceasefire, both Iran and the U.S. will look at what went right and what went wrong.
While many hope the U.S. and Iran are now aligned in regards to opening the strait, the reality is both countries have created two different realities that they refuse to compromise.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has long described water as the "strategic commodity" of the Middle East, and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has highlighted how water has emerged as both a powerful potential weapon and also a durable drag on conflict escalation.
