The US needs to start using its leverage to change Saudi behavior
We’re fast approaching the two year anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and the Trump administration has done nothing to hold Saudi Arabia accountable.
We’re fast approaching the two year anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and the Trump administration has done nothing to hold Saudi Arabia accountable.
“The U.S. is stuck in a broken, angry, and dysfunctional Middle East. It can’t transform the region — see Iraq and Afghanistan — and it can’t extricate itself from it.”
Subject to Donald Trump’s disinterest and erratic impulses, and confronted by ambitious adversaries, the United States is treading water in the Middle East.
Now that Turkey has joined the fight, is Russia looking to settle for a stalemate?
If Israeli governments come to believe there is no price whatever to be paid by them for denying Palestinian statehood, they will never allow Palestinian statehood nor end their occupation.
Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and their allies have handed Iran grounds to argue that it needs to enrich uranium to higher levels than are allowed under the JCPOA.
The U.S. should fully withdraw its forces from Syria and use its remaining leverage to facilitate diplomacy between Syria’s neighbors that are heavily enmeshed in the civil war.
Amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, hopes that the dangers of this disease could bring the six GCC members together have proven to be misplaced.
The COVID pandemic has highlighted the social, economic, and sectarian divisions in Bahrain, which the ruling family has failed to address, and oftentimes has exacerbated, in recent years.
The conventional arms trade is indeed a destabilizing factor in the Middle East, but a multilateral approach that does more than pressure one regional actor would be needed to address that problem effectively.
A close look at the strategic landscape suggests that lifting or extending the arms embargo will have a limited security impact.
The argument advanced by Pompeo, Grenell, AJC and others that banning Hezbollah is not an obstacle to engaging with the Lebanese government is disingenuous at best.
Ankara fears the risks of a geopolitical situation emerging in the Middle East and North Africa whereby the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — along with the Syrian government, Libya’s eastern administration, Greece, and Cyprus — form an anti-Turkish front.
Iranian defense doctrine is not based on technology but rather manpower. And even if Iran procured hundreds of new tanks and dozens of advanced aircraft, it would still not be able to compete with the United States.
The US needs to state its objectives clearly so that we’re not bogged down in counterterrorism operations indefinitely.
It would be senseless for the U.S. to try to stop the petroleum transfer. It would be condemned by nearly every other country in the world as an abuse of U.S. power, with both Iran and Venezuela benefitting from political sympathy.
Back in 1977, the Likud Party’s platform called for “only Israeli sovereignty” over the land between Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.
If states see the present low prices as an opportunity for reform toward more realistic economies and more limited political ambitions, the Middle East could vastly benefit in the long run.
While the Trump administration touts its maximum pressure campaign as a route to peace in the Middle East, Iran’s increased hostilities prove it wrong.
Opinion data show that citizens in the region are highly attuned and averse to unsupervised state spending, particularly on foreign policy and investments that are not perceived to be of direct public benefit.
Without more international funding, the impact of the locusts across the Horn of Africa, Middle East, and South Asia — on top of the COVID-19 pandemic — is going to be catastrophic.