India, May 18 -- A brazen drone strike near the UAE's Barakah nuclear power plant, covert Iranian air operations from Pakistani soil, secretive Israel-Gulf diplomacy, and an underwhelming Trump-Xi summit in Beijing: taken together, these strands sketch a Middle East in flux, where every player is scrambling to secure its own interests amid a wider global churn.

In their conversation on Hindustan Times' Point Blank, Executive Editor Shishir Gupta and Senior Anchor Aayesha Varma begin with the most alarming development: three drones fired at the United Arab Emirates, with one striking inside the inner perimeter of the Barakah nuclear power plant complex in Abu Dhabi. The drone hit an electrical generator site, forcing emergency generators ...