President Trump claims the United States is “locked and loaded” after Saturday’s serious Iranian attack on one of the world’s most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. That has essentially been the president’s posture for four months, which has only…
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent pledge to annex parts of the Jordan Valley saw the speaker of Jordan’s House of Representatives declare that this “would place the [25-year-old] peace treaty at stake.” While Amman and Jerusalem still have unprecedented stable military…
A character in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” describes how he went bankrupt: gradually, and then suddenly. After the latest news out of Tehran, the same can be said for Iran’s continued progress toward a nuclear weapon. Last weekend…
Tensions between Israel and Hamas reignited this spring in the worst fighting since their 2014 war, sparking fears that another full-scale conflict could break out this summer. Certainly the incentives for escalation continue. There have been Gazan injuries during the…
On July 25, The Jerusalem Post reported that former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert suddenly decided to cancel a scheduled visit to Switzerland. The reason for this decision was not a scheduling conflict, or a health emergency, or any of the…
American policymakers might be forgiven for losing focus on one of the world’s vital strategic crossroads. For much of the past three decades, the Eastern Mediterranean has effectively been a backwater for U.S. national security. But profound geopolitical transformations once…
U.S. special operations forces are adored by politicians and the public, their reputations burnished by feats like the raid on Osama bin Laden, the sea rescue of the Maersk Alabama’s captain and countless other daring operations against high-value targets around the…
Some Washington Mid-East experts have criticized the Trump administration’s recent Bahrain economic workshop for Middle East peace. Critics have accused the White House of engineering a Marshall Plan instead of forging a political peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian…
The major powers have a strong interest in preventing a return to fighting and further instability in the region. They should cooperate. The Syrian war was largely over by the end of 2018, but the country remains a bleeding hotspot…
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…