It is true that Saudi Arabia stoked the Sunni-Shia conflict in the region after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but the jurisprudence of the intra-Islam war of the sects was dug up from the Saudi past and its embrace of Wahhabism in the 18th century. If it gives up extremism in 2017, it will […]
Conflicts in the Middle East, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or Yemen, share a common factor: the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. For years, this rivalry has inflamed violence in areas already torn by war and created new battlefields where there had been relative peace before. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may or may not be a true reformer. His record on that score is not unequivocal. But he is determined to halt the expansion of Iranian influence, which now really does manifest itself as the Shiite crescent about which Jordan’s King Abdullah II forewarned over a decade ago. Read Here – Foreign […]
With Prince Mohammed ensconced with his US and Israeli allies, the three belligerent powers in the region are squaring up for a battle to rid Israel and Saudi Arabia of any challenge to their dominance. Read Here – The Wire Also Read: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Game of Thobes’
The role of a dominant actor in an informal security alliance is to offer leadership and security aid to junior parties. To fulfill its role, Saudi Arabia needs financial resources and a committed group of leaders at home who are willing to build the alliance’s security architecture and provide additional benefits—including aid and military hardware—to […]
Iranians live in a troubled and unstable region. We cannot change geography, but our neighborhood was not always so stormy. Without delving too far back into history—although as an ancient peoples our memories are measured in millennia, not decades or even centuries—it’s safe to say that our region began to experience insecurity and instability when […]
The most immediate example is the series of efforts by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to isolate, embargo, and boycott Qatar. Some 100 days have passed since they issued some 13 broad, categorical, and poorly defined demands that Qatar change its behaviour. These demands may or may not have been reduced to six […]
Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this city was pious and sedate… Qom became the bedrock of Iran’s theocracy and remains one of the country’s holiest places — home to 200,000 religious scholars, a destination for Shiite Muslim pilgrims and a center of Islamic thought in a country whose political system is controlled by the clerical establishment. […]
The Gulf and the Horn are intricately intertwined regions that face common threats and vulnerabilities: armed conflict, transnational jihadism and organised crime, including piracy, human trafficking and money laundering. The current crisis comes at a difficult moment for the historically conflict-prone Horn, much of which is either politically unstable, mired in internal armed conflict or […]
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) policies toward Yemen, Syria, Qatar, and Iran are failing. But the policy toward Iran shows the kingdom’s desperate attempt to lessen the Islamic republic’s growing power. The KSA is trying to choke Iran’s economy by steeply cutting its own oil output, hoping to halt Iran’s overtures to international businesses. […]
looking beyond borders 