The collapse of security on Iraq’s western and northern fronts portends a number of disturbing outcomes, from partitioning to, in a twist of irony, Iraq inviting Iranian troops to fill the role of the US before its withdrawal. Iraq is collapsing. The Middle Eastern nation, where nearly 4,500 American lives were lost and nearly one […]

Despite the breakdown in peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, both sides must continue to talk. If no Israeli, Palestinian or American alternative is able to break the ice jam of peace negotiations, what can happen? The answer is the least satisfying and most uncertain option: keep talking. But how? Failure by the Israelis and […]

Weakening Ties That Bind Two founding principles have netted together the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) since its founding in 1981: their collective security and the protection and reliability of oil exports. These interests also served as the linchpin of the GCC states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United […]

Among many difficult options, the least satisfactory would be to keep talking. Israelis and Palestinians failed to reach any kind of agreement before the April 30 deadline set by Secretary of State John Kerry. So, what do the parties and the United States do now? Even before negotiations ended, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and President […]

Settlements and recognizing Israel as a Jewish state are symbolic of the distrust between Israelis and Palestinians. The older of these two challenges resurfaced only recently in the now “suspended” negotiations between the two sides but, in fact, has been at the core of Israeli aspirations since the dawn of the Zionist movement in the […]