In the quest for influence in the Middle East, China’s future ambitions are even more important than its past diplomatic dealings. Through its policy of promoting investment in the region, China has built strong ties to both Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors. These ties provide the leverage necessary to broker more peaceful relations […]
Historians will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a combination of curiosity and incredulousness. While some may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal reality. For the Middle East continues to fracture and pose multiple threats to […]
For the past eighteen months as representatives from Iran and the P5+1 have negotiated a potentially historic nuclear agreement, a debate has raged on the contents of the deal. While the document itself is critical, what will be more decisive for the success or failure of the agreement is the set of regional, global, and […]
Saudi Arabia’s aggressive, interventionist foreign policy has so far led it to wage two external wars in addition to an ongoing battle on the domestic front. The government does not appear to be fighting the three campaigns with the same degree of commitment and dedication, but more important, none of its battles is yet to result in victory. Read […]
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are each other’s wild cards. Each is the other’s out-of-region game-changer, a factor that must play into the calculations of all other players in the Middle East and South Asia alike. Think you’ve got the complex equation sorted out of Arabs vs. Persians, Sunnis vs. Shi’a, Ba’athists vs. Islamists? Well, if […]
As India looks east, it is losing influence to its west to China and Pakistan. India’s inability to consolidate space in South Asia should induce greater caution in assessments of its rise as a global power given its inability to establish dominance in its periphery. India has experienced a flurry of setbacks to its west as […]
Saudi nationalism can be defined as the idea of a single identity that acts as the social glue across the divisions within the kingdom. The Saudi historian Abd Allah Al Uthayman said it best: “In the first circle, I am a son of the Arabian peninsula. The regions of the peninsula were united under the […]
U.S. policy debates about the Middle East suffer from the fallacy that there is an American solution to every problem. Washington does not have a silver bullet for the region, but it can preserve its core interests there Read Here – cfr.org
The appointment of a former Director, Intelligence Bureau as envoy for Af-Pak and West Asia indicates that the Modi government is looking at the entire Islamic world to India’s West through an intelligence-security prism and not a diplomatic-cultural construct. Modi’s Pakistan policy is conditioned by a similar mind-set of talking but not negotiating, while building […]
In my view, viewing national and foreign affairs through a communal prism is one of the most pernicious, destructive and self-defeating features of the Indian scene. It would be far more useful to see the proposed visit to the Holy Land as the commencement of Modi’s engagement with the complex politics, economics and culture of West […]
looking beyond borders 