Middle East

The tumultuous events that have swept through the Middle East during the last year or so were widely referred to in the West as the “Arab Spring”. The media was awash with expectations of a secular democratic upheaval that...

Over a year into the Arab Spring, a curious pattern has come to define the revolutionary wave that has swept the Middle East. It is presidents and colonels, not kings and princes, who have proven most vulnerable to social...

The U.S. government’s new emphasis on the Asia-Pacific represents a bold strategic choice that could animate U.S. national security policy for years to come. Yet the United States must balance its rightful new focus on the Asia-Pacific with the...

On the 19th of February 2012, the New York Times had an interesting article pointing out the logistical and tactical problems the Israeli Air Force would encounter if it were to try to interdict the development of Iran’s nuclear...

In most accounts of political protests, we focus on the immediate interaction between protesters and the policing units that confront them on the street. We stress whether the confrontations escalate into violence, and if one or the other side...

Western policymakers greeted the Arab Spring with a uncertain mixture of idealism and pragmatism. As populist uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt gained strength, U.S. officials abandoned authoritarian leaders and endorsed calls for democratic reform.  When civil disorder in Libya...

Abstract The Arab Spring has fundamentally shifted the strategic balance in the Middle East. As all sides rush to ensure that their interests will be secured, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has emerged as a key battleground between those...

Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has never been free of political intrigue. However, since the disputed June 2009 presidential election, the level of intrigue has increased. And the recent pubic rift between the two...

My topic tonight is how we should teach our children, here in the United States, about the Middle East. I was asked to give this little talk in part because I wrote two pieces for FPRI in the wake...

The year 2011 may well be remembered as a transformative one in the history of modern Arab states, a moment in which societies across the Middle East and North Africa “kicked back,” after decades of unbridled domination by authoritarian...