The US Viewed From Abroad
As America’s 2020 Independence Day fades from memory, many things are clearer. Americans love to go to beaches and bars as their petri dishes of choice, masks are a better idea than they were before Independence Day, there will never be a national pandemic response as long as Trump is president,...
The Obama administration has concluded deals with Iran and Cuba. Will North Korea round out the trifecta? During the George W. Bush years, pundits and journalists were constantly speculating over whether North Korea would be next in line for regime change. After all, President Bush had included...
Who will benefit from investments in Africa's underused arable land resources? Experts agree that Africa has the capacity to feed itself and become a major global exporter of food, on the basis of coherent and integrated policies that incorporate impacts of the food-water-energy...
An alignment of the US and the Assad regime would play into the hands of Islamist extremists. Last December, Ryan Crocker, the distinguished American diplomat with exceptional experience and expertise in the Middle East, issued an opinion in The New York Times. Given what he characterized as...
Blind international activism in Libya only risks making matters worse. Western governments have watched with increasing perplexity as, over the course of the past year, militias stopped the bulk of Libya’s oil production, several regions were engulfed in bitter conflicts, and the political...
Assad and Iran might turn out to be the biggest winners of the Ukraine crisis. The Russian intervention in Crimea is more direct and dramatic than the one in Syria, with actual troops deployed. But there are similarities. One of the little-noted rationales of Russian support for the Ba'ath...
The illusion that AIPAC is invincible has been shattered. The defeat of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) ill-advised push for new sanctions on Iran in the midst of successful negotiations is nothing short of historic. The powerful and hawkish pro-Israeli lobby's...
Negotiating with Iran provides legitimacy to its Lebanese proxy: Hezbollah. Hezbollah can destroy any target within Israel, a senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) recently said, while US officials say Syrian forces have transferred advanced guided...
Incompatible visions for Turkey’s future are behind the recent spat. The de facto dispute between the Gulen Movement (GM), led by Fethullah Gulen, and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has moved into the public sphere since the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) crisis last...
Syria presents Jordan with complex social, political, economic and security challenges. The ongoing conflict in Syria is impacting the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in numerous ways. Jordan tends to present an image of political stability and social cohesiveness in an otherwise turbulent...
US policy on Western Sahara constitutes nothing less than a rejection of international law. In November 2013, President Barack Obama met with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI in Washington for their first face-to-face meeting. The result was a bitter disappointment for supporters of human rights...
No immediate rapprochement is expected between the US and Iran. Hezbollah has been deeply involved in the urban fighting alongside the Syrian regime. As argued by analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hezbollah is suffering human losses which...
No immediate rapprochement is expected between the US and Iran. Few policy makers in the United States conceal the fact that the Obama administration would like to use the intention of Iranian authorities — to normalize their relations with the West — to restore political...
The time is ripe for restructuring American discourse on Iran. The landmark interim accord between the P5+1 and Iran has generated a storm of speculation. Critics have voiced outrage, echoing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s claim that the agreement marks a “historic...
