(Image: UK MOD, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0, via Wikimedia Commons ) AI is everywhere in the current Middle East wars. In the Gaza war, triggered by the monstruous massacre inflicted by the Hamas militia on 7 October 2023, the Israel military is using machine learning in order to produce targets in Gaza ( “Octobre 7: How …
Continue reading “AI at War (3) – Hyperwar in the Middle east”
(Art direction: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli – design with DALL-E 2) Given the speed and political density of the historic sequence opened by the war in Gaza, the second article in this new RTAS series only covers the period from 27 October to 20 November 2023. In the first part of this series, we saw how the …
Continue reading “From the War in Gaza to the Great U.S.-China War (2)?”
Strategic foresight and early warning are grounded in the idea of preventing surprise and more specifically strategic surprise. However, if we move away from the general idea of “strategic surprise” and try to be specific, i.e. if we try to apply the concept to a specific threat or issue we try to anticipate, then the …
Continue reading “Assessing the “Strategic” in Strategic Surprise”
Israel faces an unexpected and immensely dangerous strategic threat: climate change. This threat is shared with the rest of the world: it is the way climate change keeps getting stronger and how its effects are combining with pre-existing systems of vulnerabilities at country and regional level, the Middle East in the case of Israel (Dahr …
Continue reading “Israel and the Coming Long Threat – The Planetary Crisis Rules (4)”
While climate change is hammering the Middle East, and as Syria and Iraq are engulfed in war (Valantin, “Climate nightmare in the Middle East”, The Red Team Analysis Society, September 14, 2015), Egypt and Israel are going through a profound energy revolution. In effect, since 2011, Israel has discovered two giant natural gas off-shore deposits (Valantin, “Israel, Natural Gas and Power in the Middle East”, The Red Team Analysis Society, April 27, 2015) while in August 2015, the oil Italian company ENI has discovered a mammoth off-shore natural deposit in the Egyptian economic exclusive zone (Anthony Dipaola, “ENI discovers massive gas fields in the Mediterranean”, Bloomberg Business, August 30, 2015). In other terms, these two countries are transforming themselves into a new, …
Continue reading “Energy Transmutation in the Middle East: Egypt and Israel”
In April 2014, the Israeli President and historic figure Shimon Peres led a three days state visit in China, in order to bolster the growing relationship between the two countries (Shannon Tiezzi, “As China Turns Toward Middle East, China and Israel Seek Closer Ties“, The Diplomat, April 09, 2014). It is interesting to note that the discussions were mainly focused on agriculture, natural resources, environmental protection, education and healthcare. Since then, other talks have been held about defense cooperation (Mercy A. Kuo and Angelica O. Tang, “The U.S.-China-Israel Defense Dynamic: Strategic Common Ground”, The Diplomat, May 11, 2015). Beijing has even proposed its mediation in the Israel-Palestine conflict (Shannon Tiezzi, “China appoints new special envoy to the Middle east”, The Diplomat, September …
Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime minister is known to joke about the fact that Moses led his people during forty years in the desert to the only place in the Middle East without oil (Marin Katusa, The Colder War, 2014). And, indeed, for the first sixty years of its existence, the lack of energy resources has been a major difficulty for Israel. However, a profound change seems to be underway, since two giant off-shore natural gas deposits have been discovered in the Israeli exclusive economic zone in 2011. The Tamar and the Leviathan fields hold respectively 10 and between 19 and 22 trillion cubic feet of gas of estimated reserves, which could ensure decades of domestic consumption as well as …
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Editorial – A strange bipolar world? – As previously suggested (see the Weekly 142, 143 & 145), the crisis in Ukraine seems to be accelerating some of the profound transformations that are globally at work, as consequences spread to Asia, and as doubts are being cast about the U.S. real commitment to, interest or capabilities in the region. Yet, and interestingly, the rhetoric against Russia from “the West” is strong and quite unanimously spread across (Western) media. As other noteworthy changes happen according to their own specific domestic and regional dynamics, such as the possibility to see Israel forging new ties with Arab states, we may wonder if the return to a Cold War type of discourse is not actually participating in the acceleration of change. In other words, …
Continue reading “The Red Team Analysis Weekly 148 – A strange bipolar world?”
Editorial – Russia, the Arctic and … Syrian uncertainties – If you were looking for a new tense area to monitor, here it is: the Arctic. We had known it was coming for a few years, but now it is definitely on the agenda, besides, mainly, the Middle East, North East Asia and a struggle for …
Editorial – Si vis pacem para bellum (If you want peace prepare for war) and biases – The continuous escalation in East Asia is worrying to say the least. We have increasingly stronger signals pointing towards the possibility of war, including considering Japan’s challenging domestic situation. Windows of opportunities to de-escalate are most likely to open too in …
Continue reading “The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly No128, 28 November 2013”
