Recent elections in Hungary mark a significant turning point in the contemporary European political landscape. For more than a decade, Viktor Orbán consolidated a model of governance often classified in International Relations literature as an “illiberal democracy,” characterized by the centralization of power, institutional control, and recurring tensions with the normative values of the European Union (EU)

For decades, globalization was conceived as one of the main drivers of positive transformation in the international system. The prevailing belief among academics and policymakers was that the intensification of flows of goods, services, capital, and people would promote economic growth and greater political stability.

Contemporary geopolitics often seems to orbit around the statements and impulses of figures such as Donald Trump, whose relationship with institutional predictability has always been, at best, fragile. When decisions with global impact are made without coordination, without consultation, or even in contradiction with specialists — such as his former counterterrorism chief — the international system ceases to operate on rules and begins to react to impulses.

The escalation in the Middle East reveals not only a regional conflict, but a structural crisis of the international system, marked by internal fractures in the United States, strategic divergences in Europe, economic contradictions, and the weakening of International Law, demonstrating that power and interests prevail over norms and traditional alliances.

A few years ago, despite the region’s typical geopolitical uncertainties, the Gulf seemed to be merely a narrow passage between two powers, paying the price for alliances forged over decades and discovering that geography, when lent to wars, does not belong solely to its people.

The role of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in the contemporary scenario transcends the domain of the sacred to become one of the most sophisticated pillars of Vladimir Putin’s geopolitics. To understand the depth of this phenomenon, it is necessary to dissect the symbiosis between the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Kremlin, which has transformed faith into a tool of territorial expansion and global cultural influence.

United States and Venezuela: Another Example of a Geopolitical Dispute over Resources, Sovereignty, and International Influence