Something odd happened during Wednesday’s press conference between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu. When asked to address the Palestinian issue, the U.S. president on three occasions said that he would have more to say when he spoke directly to the Israeli people. The apparent takeaway is that for Obama, spending (wasting?) too much time trying […]
Exploratory drilling near the coasts of Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey has unearthed vast reserves of natural gas. Competition over the rights to tap those resources is compounding existing tensions over sovereignty and maritime borders. The eastern Mediterranean is quickly becoming as volatile as its eastern cousin, the South China Sea. Read Here […]
It is still, on occasion, good to be the king. It is not necessarily good to be the king of a Middle Eastern country that is bereft of oil; nor is it necessarily so wonderful to be the king during the turmoil and uncertainty of the Arab Spring. It is certainly not good to be […]
The United States has waged three wars since Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001: against Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. The first two were forced upon the US, but the third was the result of a willful, deliberate decision by former President George W. Bush, taken on ideological grounds and, most […]
“The problem with this administration,” one senior official who works for an Obama cabinet department and is a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the president told me, “is that we don’t do strategy, we do deliverables.” This is a common lament in modern Washington. Trapped within the news cycle like hamsters within a plastic exercise ball, the […]
No serious observer thinks a nuclear Iran is good for world peace, not with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s abhorrent anti- Semitism and threats to obliterate Israel. Yet the single-minded focus on Iran ignores a more immediate and provocative atomic threat: North Korea. It’s an oversight that U.S. President Barack Obama must rectify. Read Here – Bloomberg
Two new books lament the outsized role of the military in Israeli national security decisionmaking, blaming the generals for favoring force over diplomacy. But the military has sometimes been a force for peace and moderation, and in truth the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the result of far more than just Israel’s bureaucratic politics. […]
No one really believed that the latest round of international negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program would produce a breakthrough. So it was no surprise that itdid not, despite the concessions that were made at the meeting in Kazakhstan by the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus Germany). […]
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Egyptians officials and opposition politicians to overcome their differences for the sake of the country’s faltering economy…Kerry, making his first visit to Egypt as secretary of state, urged Egyptians to respect democratic rights, engage with each other and compromise in order to restore the economy. Kerry’s goal is […]
President Obama‘s visit to the Middle East next month is widely billed as an earnest attempt to double down on diplomacy and revive the moribund peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against the president. Doves on both sides quietly cede that it would take a miracle to get the two sides back […]
looking beyond borders 