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Saudi and Iranian security officials have been holding secret talks since January without any U.S. involvement—a bit of news that has led some to bemoan a decline in American power as President Biden seeks to withdraw from the Middle East. But in fact, this is good news, both for the United States and for the prospects of calm in the region.

The secret talks were first reported last month in the Financial Times. The British news site Amwad.media has since reported that five such meetings have been held, beginning as far back as January, and that some of these sessions have also included officials from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan, on topics ranging from the war in Yemen to security in Syria and Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since 2016. Their leaders and diplomats have practically hissed war threats at one another since before then. In other words, even if the talks don’t produce many tangible results, we are witnessing a monumental political shift.

The Trump administration is quietly fighting a new package of sanctions on Russia, The Daily Beast has learned. A Trump State Department official sent a 22-page letter to a top Senate chairman on Tuesday making a wide-ranging case against a new sanctions bill. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham—usually a staunch ally of the White House—introduced the legislation earlier this year. It’s designed to punish Russian individuals and companies over the Kremlin’s targeting of Ukraine, as well as its 2016 election interference in the U.S., its activities in Syria, and its attacks on dissidents. 

Despite Trump’s strong opposition, the bill passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning. Five senators opposed it, all Republicans: Chairman Jim Risch, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Johnny Isacson, Sen. John Barrasso, and Sen. Ron Johnson. 

Spreading peace and democracy has never been cartographically convincing, even to its promoters. And it could sometimes look downright sinister to those on the wrong side of the map. At the same time, maps are ideally suited to essentialist visions of the world that, accurately or not, divide people into discrete, ready-to-clash units, each with their own color and territory. Perhaps as a result, maps have served nicely as a metaphor for those who assumed conflict was more natural, or more interesting, all along.

After the Cold War ended, maps of peace and harmony proved far less visually engaging than their predecessors and were just as ideologically fraught. Perhaps the best modern-day cartographic depiction of what liberal internationalism’s triumph might look like is Freedom House’s map of freedom in the world, with all the countries gradually ticking green. Like maps of global risk or human development, the Freedom House map offers a ready metric for imagining Western politics and living standards spreading across the globe.

For those who wanted a more militant depiction of liberal internationalist ambition, there was also “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Published by the political scientist Thomas Barnet in 2003, it generated a flurry of media attention before being largely forgotten in the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War. The map envisioned the United States’ 21st-century military strategy as “identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them.” Through interventions like the invasion of Iraq, Washington would expand the “functioning core” of globalization and eliminate the “non-integrating gap,” which was plagued by terrorism, poverty, and repression.

The coronavirus pandemic has opened up similar opportunities for a range of terrorists, insurgents, and criminal organizations. Across the world, they are already seeking to acquire political legitimacy through the provision of public health services, especially in countries and regions where the government has been either unwilling or unable to help.

it is not just terrorist and insurgent groups taking advantage of the crisis to demonstrate an effort toward effective governance. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs have worked assiduously to enforce a curfew in the notoriously ungoverned slums where they operate.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the term “ungoverned spaces” entered the popular lexicon when discussing areas that terrorist groups sought out in which to train, plan, and conduct operations. Areas that few in the West had ever heard about—South America’s Tri-Border Area, the Sahel in North Africa, and Southeast Asian archipelagos—were all tagged with this label. But the term itself is an unfortunate misnomer. No area is truly ungoverned. Rather, nonstate actors and substate groups provide alternative forms of governance to people in these places. And, more often than not, they do so through provision of services that reinforce their social status and lend them a sense of political legitimacy that governments in faraway capital cities lack altogether.

“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition

this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.

that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation