Order From Ashes

Shownotes

The United States withdrew from Iraq on September 30 at the request of the sovereign Iraqi government. It was the second time that the US has ended a war in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. The pullout — necessary and overdue — won’t bring much relief for Iraq, which is buckling under pressure from America’s latest war, against Iran, and the pressure cooker of militias that operate beyond state c...

Shownotes

A dangerous, and entirely voluntary knowledge gap undermines U.S. policy. The government repeats some mistakes over and over – either oblivious to the results, or hard at work ignoring the damning evidence.

Fiascos like the ongoing American war on Iran build on previous atrocities, including the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Critical research and new knowledge are a necessary first step to end impunity and adop...

Shownotes

Serious research asks open-ended questions, and often produces insight but no clear answers. Every now and then, however, good-faith research hits the jackpot. That’s what happened when Century International fellow Peter Salisbury assembled a team that asked a deceptively simple question: how do Yemen’s Houthi rebels smuggle parts and build drones?

The answer is a blockbuster research project that changes our ...

Shownotes

President Donald Trump launched his full-scale war on Iran in February without an announcement, a clear cause of war, or any declared goals. In similar fashion, the on-and-off hostilities came to some sort of close, for now, with a “memorandum of understanding” announced on June 15. 

Six fellows at Century International join Order from Ashes for a first look at the deal. It’s not a peace treaty or e...

Shownotes

Israel’s wars since October 7 have produced a great deal of death, displacement and destruction, but very little security. Nathan Brown, a political scientist and longtime scholar of hte Middle East, has cut through the confusion of recent history with a penetrating and provocative set of eight theses.

Drawing on Israeli statements and discourse, he outlined in a recent essay the elements of Israel’s new doctr...

Shownotes

The nature of peace talks and conflict resolution has radically changed. Historically, most wars end with political settlements, usually the result of formal negotiations. The prototypical modern peace talks were hosted a major or mid-size power that wasn’t a party to the conflict, negotiated by professional diplomats and technical experts, and implemented with some international oversight by the United Nations or a...

Shownotes

After the assassination of its leader in September 2024, Hezbollah sank to its weakest point since its founding in 1982. Supporters began to doubt Hezbollah’s capabilities, and detractors—inside Lebanon and abroad—planned to dismantle the group. In March of this year, Lebanon’s government outlawed Hezbollah’s powerful militia. Many of Hezbollah’s competitors and critics declared the end...

Shownotes

After five months of negotiations, Iraq’s power brokers have agreed on a completely unknown compromise candidate for the country’s new prime minister. Ali al-Zaidi, a businessman with no experience in politics or public administration, took over leadership of Iraq on May 14 as the country faces multiple emergencies. Iraq can’t sell its oil because of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and is running ou...

Shownotes

The United States has resolved a long debate about its own decline by attacking Iran and failing to achieve any of Washington’s war aims. Winning and losing might not be the most useful paradigm, but for students of global power the war marks a watershed: America can’t simply have its way by force — and pays a price along with the rest of the world for global conflict and economic disruption.

Century Int...

Shownotes

Mohamad Bazzi was born in southern Lebanon in 1975, and spent his first years in the border town of Bint Jbail. In the half century since, his family’s village has been invaded and destroyed multiple times.

Today, Bazzi’s extended family shelters in the far-flung spots where they have sought shelter during the war that began at the end of February, while Bazzi takes stock of what is drearily familiar about the...

Shownotes

The Arab monarchies of the Gulf invested colossal wealth to build modern, diversified economic power. But their growing power depended on safety in the Persian Gulf, which in turn depended on an American military umbrella. Now, Trump’s war on Iran has shown just how flimsy that umbrella really is.

Still, these cash-rich and economically powerful monarchies retain tremendous influence as a cornerstone of the global e...

Shownotes

The forever costs of America’s war on Iran could disfigure economic life for generations to come, around the world and in the United States.

In an earlier era, war spending helped pull the United States out of the Great Depression by pulling unemployed farmers into the cities and retraining them for manufacturing. Even through the Cold War, many Americans viewed war spending as a major driver of high-quality manufac...

Shownotes

American policy has not kept up with the punishing realities unleashed by the war President Donald Trump started with Iran. 

Iran and the United States announced a truce, even as they’re still fighting to control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz – and more tellingly, Israel accelerated its attacks on Lebanon the day after the truce supposedly took effect.

A similar disconnect is at play in the negoti...

Shownotes

Iraq’s government has maintained friendly relations simultaneously with Iran and the United States. The war launched by President Donald J. Trump at the end of February upended that equilibrium. 

Now the United States is directly at war with some Iraqi militias, and the Iraqi state is caught in the middle, too weak to control the militias, too dependent to antagonize either Washington or Tehran. 

Century I...

Shownotes

Is there an off ramp to the war of choice that Israel and the United States initiated at the end of February? The violence has spiraled across the region, directly threatening hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, and straining the entire global economy.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials have publicly floated plans to invade southern Lebanon once more.

On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast we hear from t...

Shownotes

Just a week into America’s war of choice on Iran, the costs already are spiraling out of control. The lives lost and broken are the most important cost. But there’s a colossal price tag for waging war, and America’s opening salvo has a number: $5 billion for the first week and a reported $50 billion that the Trump Administration is planning to seek from Congress.

The American defense budget this year is ...

Shownotes

By the fourth day of its war on choice against Iran, the United States government was offering a shifting and contradictory set of reasons it attacked — to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, or because Iran had missiles that could reach the US, or to preempt Iran from responding to Israel's preemptive attack.

It was clear from the start that the United States had no critical national security interest at stake...

Shownotes

In his historically long State of the Union speech, President Donald J. Trump spent just three minutes talking about Iran, saying he would never let Iran develop a nuclear weapon but preferred diplomacy to war.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, Iran and the United States are negotiating, but are also both preparing for war. On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast, Naysan Rafati grounds the conversation in the realitie...

Shownotes

Almost as soon as the international liberal order came into being after World War II, detractors began announcing its death or irrelevancy. Some disliked its hypocrisy: the United States and its allies preached democracy and human rights for all, but in practice only guaranteed them for some. Others disliked the restraints that the system placed on states that wanted to dominate or invade neighbors.

But while obituaries f...