Unlike its predecessor, the Obama Administration has understood the limits on Washington’s ability to remake the Middle East to its own specifications. The corollary, of course, is that in a rapidly democratizing region, refusal …
“I fear this looks like a civil war”, one Libyan rebel commander from Misrata told the Associated Press, in the wake of a fierce firefight between rival militia factions using heavy weapons in broad daylight in Tripoli on …
The foreign policy crisis horizon shows little respect for the calendar New Year: The Obama Administration ought to have a pretty good idea of the crises that await it in different global hotspots as it braces for election year, …
The twin suicide bombings that killed at least 30 people in Damascus on Friday are good news for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and bad news for the opposition protest movement. That’s because the regime’s narrative of …
A series of deadly bombings across Baghdad that killed at least 63 people and wounded hundreds on Thursday underscored the political and security peril facing Iraq amid rising sectarian tension. Officials said four car bombs and …
The growing geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China makes prospects for productive partnership in managing North Korea much less likely
It might seem that the dust had hardly settled on the tracks of the last U.S. convoy that rolled out of Iraq on Saturday before Shi’ite and Sunni politicians were at one another’s throats. That would be a misleading impression, …
Despite the upbeat talk of the Obama Administration, the eight-year war that ended this week has done plenty of long-term damage to both Iraq and the United States. And it has bequeathed lessons worth considering ahead of future conflicts
Pity President Barack Obama trying to stay off the slippery slope to war with Iran in an election year, while his challengers perform crowd-pleasing, spoken-word versions of Senator John McCain’s “Bomb Iran” adaptation of the …
“Football is freedom,” Bob Marley once said, and the legendary Jamaican musician — like all of the African Diaspora and the Global South in general — claimed Brazil as his own proxy representative at soccer’s World Cup. No …
Anyone cut off from all news media for the six months before December 2011 could be forgiven for imagining we’re in the opening stages of a war between the West and Iran. Sunday’s headline was Iran’s claim to have captured a …
The Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s political mainstream, and its most significant challengers are the more extreme Islamists of the Salafi movement rather than the secular liberal forces that dominate the Tahrir Square protest movement. That appears to be the not-exactly-surprising verdict of the electorate, according to reports from …
The prospect of Iran and its Western adversaries stumbling into a military confrontation that neither side wants seems worryingly less improbable by the day. And if they do, each side will have plenty of evidence at hand to blame the other for instigating the conflagration. The latest round of brinkmanship, this week, came in the …
