oday’s Russia is a strange paradox. The country and its people are better off than at any time since at least the Bolshevik Revolution. But its great financial wealth coexists with remarkable weakness. True, it still has a large army and a nuclear arsenal capable of ending life on Earth. But by most measures of modern power, Russia is a lightweight. It has almost no influence in the world […]
ALL the pollsters say that the party led by Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s incumbent prime minister, is set to win the most seats in a general election on January 22nd, and that he will probably, after the haggling that usually lasts several weeks, keep his post at the head of a nationalist-religious coalition government. Given Israel’s […]
Saudi Arabia is the world’s last absolute monarchy. Like Louis XIV, King Abdullah has complete authority to do as he likes. But while a revolution in Saudi Arabia is still not likely, the Arab Awakening has made one possible for the first time, and it could come in President Obama’s second term. Read Here – The Daily […]
AS EVERY monarch in the Gulf knows, even geysers of oil cannot keep all your subjects happy all of the time. Still, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia may have been surprised that his recent appointment of 30 women to the kingdom’s 150-person shura council should provoke a public protest. The all-appointed body, a sort of proto-parliament, has […]
Israel’s January 22 elections will produce a new government. The extent to which it will differ from the outgoing government remains to be seen. But efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons might be affected. Could the composition of a new Israeli government indirectly impact the Israeli-U.S. discourse on Iran’s nuclear program? Assuming the […]
America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and […]
Because of its strategic location between the two twentieth-century centers of Arab power, Egypt and Iraq, Syria has been for many decades a bellwether of Arab politics, viewed widely in the region as the heartland of Arab nationalism. The fact that the first major pan-Arab nationalist party, the Baath, was established in Syria and the […]
Any look back at 2012 would necessarily focus on three parts of the world: the eurozone, with its seemingly endless financial uncertainties; the Middle East, with its many upheavals, including, but hardly limited to, the Muslim Brotherhood’s accession to power in Egypt and Syria’s savage civil war, which has already claimed more than 60,000 lives; […]
Believe it or not, Israel, led by the arrogant Israeli leader Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been dealt two American slaps in the face in the last few days, a blow it has never experienced since President Dwight Eisenhower compelled Israel and its two European allies, Britain and France, to withdraw their occupation forces from […]
Dubai‘s new strategy would establish logistics and policy infrastructure for products and services aimed at giving birth to an Islamic economy that operates parallel to the existing robust economy of Dubai. The platform proposed will include Islamic finance instruments, Islamic insurance, Islamic contract arbitration, Islamic food industry and trade standards (Halal food), as well as […]
looking beyond borders 