Iran is bound to get tough after the nuclear deal comes into force. Its foreign policy will become more strident. Its support for President Assad will deepen. Its anti-Israel rhetoric will sharpen. Its Shiite militias in Iraq will take the attack to ISIS. It will double down on the Houthis. But don’t give up on […]
Saudi Arabia has entered a period of unusual danger from internal as well as external threats. The man apparently in charge of overcoming these threats appears ill equipped to do so. Salman bin Abdul Aziz al Saud became King of Saudi Arabia on January 23, 2015. The 79 year old Monarch is reported to suffer […]
Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Ignatieff suggests that the problem with America is not its policy challenges abroad but its “democratic dysfunction at home.” A major component of that dysfunction is “the gross failure to control the invidious power of money in politics.” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/sep/25/new-world-disorder/) A little noted and relatively minor example […]
Sigmund Freud suggested that psychoanalysis could convert one’s neurotic misery to everyday unhappiness. Leaping to geopolitics from psychoanalysis leads to the question of when the Middle East will be converted from massive chaos to everyday turmoil. Thinking about that reminds me of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. An important executive is sitting at […]
On April 3, President Obama called Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to fill him in on the P5+1 deal with Iran. But the prime minister wasn’t buying. He told the President: “The deal based on this framework would threaten Israel’s survival (and would) legitimize Iran’s nuclear program, bolster Iran’s economy, and increase Iran’s aggression and terror […]
The connection between the ancient Greeks and contemporary Greece is only tenuous. But the Greeks themselves like to claim that there has been a continuous line from those famous ancestors to the present. But accepting that claim leads to some problems. Hugh Bowden is a renowned historian of ancient Greece. He suggests that ancient Greek […]
Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister of Turkey in 2003 and served until being elected president in July, 2014. Over these years, he has become more authoritarian, more aggressive, more paranoid, more conspiratorially minded, and certainly more outspoken on his perception of the many enemies of Islam and its greatness. Here are just a few […]
Two disquieting elections in the news. Two challenging election results. In Moldova, pro-European parties outpolled pro-Russian parties. In Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, the pro-independence candidate beat the pro-China candidate. The Republic of Moldova, formerly the Moldovian Soviet Socialist Republic, declared its independence at the collapse of the USSR. It comprises much of the former Russian and […]
Jihadis believe in the possibility of the attainment of earthly paradise through a return to the literal word of the Quran and living the life in the ways in which the Prophet (peace be upon him) and his family and his first followers lived in the deserts of Mecca in the early 7th century AD. […]
Mission creep usually guarantees mission failure. What follows from changing the original goals of the mission is all too evident in the failed U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the United States has fallen into that trap with the Islamic State. The result will be a long and costly engagement and failure. Afghanistan and […]