President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long seemed invincible in Turkey. But his strongman persona masked the growing weaknesses of his rule, many of which were laid bare by the mayoral election in Istanbul. The resounding victory by Ekrem Imamoglu of…
In a move that could significantly shorten its path to a bomb, Iran announced another expansion of its nuclear activities starting Sunday in breach of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). As its foreign minister intimated, this could be part…
Less than 48 hours after three commercial jets hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, I helped the U.S. Air Force open the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as the general in charge of…
American diplomats have been quietly mediating a resolution to the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border dispute, an important step to avoiding another war between these two countries. However, even if American mediators can resolve the dispute, Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon keeps alive the…
Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently released a report accusing both Hamas and the Israeli government of committing war crimes regarding an incident in May 2019. During these hostilities, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) struck 350 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad…
The recent oil tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman reinforce the need to reestablish a highly visible U.S. naval deterrent in the Middle East. For eight months last year, no aircraft carrier strike group plied the region, the longest…
The March 31 local election in Turkey was a bombshell: Contrary to expectations, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost not only the capital Ankara, but the country’s biggest metropolis, Istanbul, where Erdoğan himself rose to prominence…
Lebanon is a complicated country historically riven by sectarian strife, serial economic mismanagement, and now a political system increasingly dictated by Hezbollah, Iran’s premier terrorist proxy. Yet American policymakers tend to view these as separate problems, which complicates efforts to…
The use of subterranean networks by militant groups and hybrid forces is a growing feature of modern warfare. In no country is the tactical and strategic development of tunnels more evident than in Israel, which is in an underground arms…
As tensions rise in the Black Sea to its north and Persian Gulf to the southeast, the Eastern Mediterranean is often an afterthought for American defense planning, despite its geostrategic importance as a crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. For the…