For a long time, the major powers had hoped that imposing strenuous sanctions on Iran could produce an interlocutor willing to negotiate honestly and to adhere to an exacting arms control agreement. But time may no longer permit the patient exercise of coercive diplomacy. Read Here – New York Times
When the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt, there was fear that draconian social measures would be pursued, thereby killing the country’s important tourism industry. Instead, the party has attempted to portray a moderate face, and more aggressively, tout itself as an administration willing to cut lucrative deals. While the politics of the Brotherhood remain […]
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 […]
Barack Obama had a lot on his hands last week with attacks on U.S. embassies across the Middle East, but in Europe, a big story buried by the drama of firefights in Libya, Cairo riots, and tumult in Tunisia should have him sleeping a bit easier. In fact, he might want to send a thank-you […]
In the complex chessboard where the New Great Game in Eurasia is being played, both Kings are easy to identify: Pipelineistan, and the possible, multiple intersections of a 21st century Silk Road. Few have noticed a crucial meeting that took place during the recent Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran, between senior Foreign Ministry diplomats […]
THE imagery is graphic enough. A mob scales the walls of the American embassy in the Egyptian capital, raises an Islamist banner and burns the Stars and Stripes. A female announcer dons a headscarf on state television for the first time in its 50-year-long history. Bearded police officers demonstrate for an end to the force’s […]
Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks. Time and again in recent years, as the outside world has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of birth in […]
Many Arabs believe that the Arab Spring is a Western, and more specifically an American, plan since the days of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to divide the Middle East into smaller rival nations to breed discord and plunder their wealth. Some subscribe to the theory that recent events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen […]
I have been traveling most of this week, watching events in the Middle East unfold from the American heartland. The reaction among many of the people there was a mix of shock, anxiety, and fear. They also wanted to know why people are storming U.S. diplomatic compounds. Americans are in disbelief that this is happening […]
An eruption of violent unrest across the Middle East is confronting President Barack Obama with the most serious challenge yet to his efforts to keep the Arab Spring from morphing into a new wave of anti-Americanism – and he has few good options to prevent it. Read Here – Reuters
looking beyond borders 