Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s […]
There is the veneer of authority in a map. A splotch of color bordered by cold, static black lines is the world as it is and as it is for all. Maps, however, are an abstraction of reality. We see the world in a particular way and so we splash this vision onto the page. […]
Three major forces will loom behind the headlines in 2013, driving events in the new year: the crisis of the Western political order, rising sectarian strife in the Middle East, and worries about American withdrawal from the world. The most immediate challenge is the crisis of the Western democratic model, caused by the inability of […]
On Tuesday, a Palestinian medical team cranked open the West Bank grave of former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, took samples of his remains, and handed the evidence over to European experts to determine whether Arafat was poisoned — by Israel, the theory goes — before his death in 2004. “This will bring closure,” Arafat’s widow observed, “We […]
The announcement in the New York Times that Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister and former prime minister, is retiring from politics is a serious blow to anyone who wants to see the Jewish state take a rational and reasonable approach to global security issues. From his time as an officer in Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal special forces […]
The announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in October 2009 that Barack Obama had won the Peace Prize came as a surprise to just about everyone, including the recipient. The president, barely nine months into his new job, knew that the award was an encouragement of his aspirations, not recognition of his accomplishments. He said […]
The diplomatic activities under the current Gaza cease-fire will test whether a quintet of leaders — each with his own domestic critics — can find a peaceful rather than a military solution to solve the Palestinian situation. The cease-fire language was direct but ambiguous: “Israel should stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip by land, sea […]
Over the decades Turkey has dictated its Middle Eastern relations based on opportunities presented by shifts in the regional balance of power. In the early 1990s up until around 2006, Turkey was finely enmeshed in Western sentiments and policies. But beginning in 2006 it recognized a leadership vacuum in the Middle East and began attempting […]
Mediating the Gaza truce was a bravura diplomatic performance by Egypt’s new President Mohamed Mursi, jacking up his personal stature and reassuring an anxious Washington that the architecture of Middle East peace can survive the Arab Spring. For nearly two years, Washington has fretted over what would happen in a major showdown between Israel and the Palestinians […]
This month, a curious thing happened in the annals of diplomacy. A country offered up a peace plan to put an end to a seemingly endless civil war in Syria. This country was not one of the usual foreign policy suspects — it was not the United States, it was not in Europe, and it wasn’t Syria’s […]
looking beyond borders 