Middle East

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...

My thinking on Iran is more or less mainstream thinking in Israel, what many Israelis within the defense and foreign policy establishments feel, even if they say it in a more diplomatic way. Today’s Iran is multi-layered. It is...

The alienation between Turkey and the EU has grown on both sides to the point that more and more people in Brussels and Ankara are beginning to realize that not only is Turkey’s EU membership unlikely, but that it...