A Nation Must Think Before it Acts
Middle East
A nation must think before it acts.
Middle East
Haram al-Sharif: Israel’s Alignment with the Sunni Arab States in Practice
The Moshe Dayan Center In recent years, it has become part of conventional wisdom in Israel that there are unprecedented opportunities for regional security cooperation between Israel and the conservative Sunni Arab regimes: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the...
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The Iraq Wars: An Enduring Puzzle
Dr. Samuel Helfont, started his lecture by highlighting how odd it is that Iraq has been such a central part of U.S. foreign policy for over 25 years. Iraq on the surface, according to Helfont, is not a particularly...
Read more »Arabs and Africans Still See Hope in President Trump
The Hill Shuttling between my home in North Africa, business partners south of the Sahara, and friends in the United States, I’m struck by the disparity in perception of the American president. In Washington, from both sides of the...
Read more »What Iraq Must do to Prevent Another Generation of Terrorists
The Morning Call Last week’s defeat of ISIS (al-Qaida 2.0) at Mosul, Iraq, and the expectation that the insurgent group will soon lose its “capital” of Raqqa, Syria, has led many to wonder what will follow the fall of ISIS. I was...
Read more »The Only Way Out of the Qatar Crisis
The National Interest Qatar has been known for years as a small peninsula nation that punches far above its weight. Its immense oil wealth and enormous influence, through its English- and Arabic-language Al Jazeera channels, have given it diplomatic...
Read more »Gaza on the Brink
Foreign Affairs An ongoing electricity crisis is placing an inordinate amount of pressure on Gaza. If not addressed, it could end with a political implosion, a full-blown humanitarian disaster, and yet another round of violence between Hamas and Israel. A dangerous combination...
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Weaponizing Sectarianism in Iraq and Syria
Abstract The last six years of insurgency, rebellion, and war have eroded territorial state sovereignty in Iraq and Syria. The scale and savagery of the war have transformed Sunni-Shia sectarianism into a zero-sum politics of survival. In other words,...
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Iran, Russia, and the Taliban: Reassessing the Future of the Afghan State
The first combat zone utilization of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) device by the U.S. forces in Afghanistan (USFOR-A) on 13 April 2017 brought the Islamic State–Khorasan Province (ISKP) to the headlines. ISKP emerged in Afghanistan and...
Read more »The Art of the Hedge: Jordan Between Washington, Riyadh and Doha
Middle East Eye The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has officially taken sides with the Saudi-led coalition seeking to isolate Qatar. Yet whereas the Saudi bloc, to which Jordan belongs, slashed all diplomatic ties due to Qatar’s moderate position on...
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The Six Day and Fifty Years War
The most important lesson of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war is that there is no such thing as a clean war. That war was very short and stunningly decisive militarily; it has been anything but politically. From the Israeli...
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