“We would be talking in a different tone if it had happened 20 minutes later and her kids were in the car,” a senior Israeli intelligence official told TIME on Monday, Feb. 13, commenting on the bomb attack in New Delhi that …
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Could Arming the Rebels Bring an End to Syria’s Suffering?
All Western interventions in messy civil wars on distant shores seem impossible until they become inevitable. Yet, not even the horrors being visited on an effectively defenseless civilian population by the Syrian regime’s …
Obama Seeks to Cool War Fever While Keeping Up Pressure on Iran
Nobody likely envies the challenge President Barack Obama faces getting his “messaging” right on Iran. He must meet the demands of election-year politics and continue to press Tehran’s back to the wall over its nuclear program, …
Russia and China Challenge the West on Syria: What Implications for Iran?
The breach among the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council in Saturday’s vote on Syria’s increasingly bloody power struggle could have profound implications for Syria’s immediate future. But it may also signal …
How a Regional ‘Great Game’ Reinforces Syria’s Deadlock
Syria itself was the product of a “Great Game” among rival empires. The nation-state we know as Syria today was invented by France and Britain, which carved it out of the old Ottoman province of Syria (which back then included …
To Confront Iran, Will the U.S. Risk Relations with India?
If a U.S.-led ban on importing oil from Iran β recently adopted by the European Union β is making officials in Tehran sweat, itβs hard to tell. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed Jan. 26 that the West had more to …
Will Israel Attack Iran? (And If It Does, Can It Really Stop Tehran’s Nuclear Program?)
In the effort to stir global action against the Iranian nuclear program, Israel has played its hand brilliantly. Having twice sent fighter-bombers to erase nuclear reactors in hostile states β to Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 …
What the World Learns from What Obama Didn’t Say
Strategic decision-makers in the Middle East, Europe and Asia who stayed up late to catch President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday may have initially wondered why they had bothered. In sharp contrast to the Bush era when three quarters of a typical SOTU address covered matters of national security and the projection …
French Draft Law On Armenian Genocide Rocks Franco-Turkish Relations
Anyone who hoped that calm and harmony might somehow prevail after the passage of a French bill criminalizing denial of the 1915 genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was mightily disappointed Monday night. Adoption of that …
Amid New Sanctions, Obama Confronts the Challenges of Diplomacy with Iran
Despite the deafening racket of the mass-media drums of war, neither President Obama nor the Pentagon has an appetite for a confrontation with Iran that could unleash havoc across the Middle East and would at best simply delay …
Why the World Should Ignore the Presidential Campaign Foreign Policy Debates
As Republican presidential contenders prepare for yet another televised primary debate in South Carolina on Thursday, much of the world may be wondering who’ll be the next victim of some ignorant insult. Already, the GOP primary …
War with Iran: A Conflict Obama Hopes to Avoid May Be Imposed on Him
It’s unlikely that President Barack Obama intends to go to the polls in November with the United States engaged in a hot war with Iran, but there is a growing danger that events could conspire to make the decision for him. The …
The Fate of Bashar Assad: Will He Be the Next Gaddafi or the Next Milosevic?
The fighting words from Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who vowed Tuesday to hold on to power and crush his opponents with “an iron fist”, were optimistically interpreted by some as the bluster of a doomed man. To be sure, the …