The region’s leaderships are making a set of strategic choices as consequential as the ones their predecessors made earlier, and it has an opportunity to make much better strategic choices than it made in the past, and there are signs it is beginning to do so—but not in every case. Read More Here
Washington still has good cards to play in terms of Iran’s destabilizing activities, the U.S. security umbrella over Gulf energy supplies, and Arab public opinion toward China and America. Read More Here
With six Arab states having established relations with Israel, a new Middle East is taking shape. But the diplomatic progress, facilitated by the Donald Trump administration’s compensation to those states, has its limits. Read Here | Council On Foreign Relations
“There were probably Arabs before there was Arabia,” writes Tim Mackintosh-Smith in his extraordinary new survey of these peoples. After all, what does the word “Arab” even mean? For Arabs themselves the term remains elusive: the Egyptian writer and public intellectual Taha Hussein argued that the people to whom the label applied were “in utter […]
Arab regimes spend millions of dollars on think tanks, academic institutions, and lobbying firms in part to shape the thinking in Western capitals about domestic political activists opposed to their rule, many of whom happen to be religious. The field of counter-extremism has been the ideal front for the regional governments’ preferred narrative: They elicit […]
Seven years since the heady days of early 2011, when massive, electrifying protests brought down the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the political atmosphere in Egypt has turned somber. In 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who had narrowly won Egypt’s first free presidential election the prior year. Since seizing power, […]
The most immediate example is the series of efforts by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to isolate, embargo, and boycott Qatar. Some 100 days have passed since they issued some 13 broad, categorical, and poorly defined demands that Qatar change its behaviour. These demands may or may not have been reduced to six […]
It has been more than six years since the start of the Arab Spring, and life for most Arabs is worse than it was in 2011. Unemployment is rife in the Middle East and North Africa, where two thirds of the population is between the ages of 15 and 29. And throughout the region, regimes […]
It may be difficult for the Arabs of today to seriously reflect on the meaning of the defeat they suffered 50 years ago, given their current calamitous predicament. A half-century ago in the free sanctuary of Beirut, Arabs engaged in introspection and self-criticism, seeking to answer the central questions of their political life: What went […]
Israel and India probably do not have what amounts to a strategic alliance, but the two nations have many converging concerns and interests, since both are living in a dangerous environment. The economic relationship between the two countries is impressive when seen in isolation but disappointing by international comparison. Bilateral trade increased from virtually zero […]
looking beyond borders 