Representatives of Iran and the European Union are scheduled to hold a telephone conversation in the next few days about the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Ali Baqeri, the deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), made the announcement during a speech at the University of Tehran on Monday. “Today, they, the office of […]
Iraq has no national foreign policy. For the past decade, a lack of unity among its ruling elite has failed to allow for a unified approach towards its international relations — one that could have protected the country from becoming a playground for outside powers, with disastrous consequences for its political and security stability. Read […]
Whether or not America‘s politicians can find a way to sidestep the brutal automatic military cuts of sequestration, the era of rising Western spending on weapons and wars is over. That reality increasingly is challenging major arms manufacturers, spurring them to look for new markets, cost cuts and mergers. It is also confronting policymakers with difficult […]
Some months after the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, I sat at lunch with the aging Hosni Mubarak. He was then 76 years old and hard of hearing but soon to “run” for the presidency for a fifth time in 2005. The four times previous, there had been no election at […]
Mitt Romney may have talked about the Middle East yesterday in what was billed (and panned) as a major foreign policy address, but ad spending by both candidates’ camps shows that global affairs are still low on the list of key campaign topics. Fewer than 10% of ads aired in the U.S. presidential race to date have made […]
When Kuwait’s next ruler takes power he will need to reassure competing factions in the Al-Sabah dynasty that he is protecting their interests and maintaining stability, making progress toward democratic reforms unlikely, at least at the beginning. Current ruler Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, 83, has resisted opposition demands for more policy-making authority in an increasingly […]
There is more to be said for President Obama’s Middle East policy than Shadi Hamid allows. While Hamid focuses on the gap between unrealistic expectations and real policy outcomes, the fact remains that in the space of two and a half years, between the president’s Cairo speech and the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in […]
Seventeen months before George W. Bush announced that he was sending five additional brigades to Iraq for the 2007 “surge,” a team of officers and civilian analysts gathered in Baghdad to conduct a classified review of America‘s military strategy in Iraq. In a June 2005 speech at Fort Bragg, President Bush had told the nation that […]
Shortly before the fateful US intervention in Iraq that led to the downfall and the eventual execution of the then Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, Brent Scowcroft, who had been the National Security Advisor to the first President Bush, wrote a perceptive piece of advice that was published in the Wall Street Journal on 15 August 2002. Advising […]
When the Big Picture misses the point. Read Here – Foreignpolicy.com
looking beyond borders 