Middle East

In January 2005, Iraqis proudly displayed ink-stained fingers, confirming their participation in the formation of a national reconciliation government. That mark represented their first opportunity to take part in a democratic election in more than thirty years and seemed...

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has been a top foreign policy priority for U.S. administrations since 1948, is about to be shaken up. On December 19, the so-called tahdiya, or calm, is set to expire. With both sides clamoring to...

Over the past few decades, the processes that launched and strategies that unfolded in the early years of U.S.-Egyptian relations and the peace process have gone through a number of significant changes. In order to appreciate better what has...

In a few months time, the current U.S. administration, following in the footsteps of its predecessors, will hand over the still unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite last-minute efforts by the Bush Administration to engage in shuttle diplomacy and broker a...

The assumption of continuity is liable to blind us to differences between the Cold War and the present era, leading us to underestimate opportunities and exaggerate dangers. During the Cold War, U.S. interests in the Middle East were quite...

Auguste Comte once wrote that ‘‘intellectual confusion is at the bottom of every historical crisis.’’ Insofar as the United States finds itself in a foreign policy crisis, intellectual confusion is indeed the cause, and in this case it is...

The Middle East is by far the most volatile regional problem facing the Bush Administration. Two struggles are underway: one, the war for the Palestinian state, its size and powers, which in turn will greatly affect the security of...

Three weeks of war between Israel and Hezbollah have not yet yielded a decisive result. Yet, it should be clear that this is more than just a nasty border clash. The larger landscape of the Middle East has been...

My book The Much Too Promised Land had a very strange origin in the sense that I really never intended to write it. I “resigned” from the State Department in January 2003. Only two secretaries of state in the...