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| 1 |
ID:
135345
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| Summary/Abstract |
It is widely recognised that the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ fluctuated following the Second World War. A “Persistent rivalry” was especially evident in policy towards the Middle East and its oil. Immediately after the war, the American attitude to Palestine seemed to complicate British policy. Events in Iran also reflected the clash between the British imperative to protect its national and imperial interests in the region on the one hand, and the American preoccupation with the Cold War and containment on the other. The subsequent differences over Egypt/ Nasser are a matter of public record as are the problems which arose over the British withdrawal from “East of Suez”. Perhaps the very closeness of the relationship between the UK and the US served to heighten expectations.
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| 2 |
ID:
134536
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After more than three years of corrosive wars, Syria no longer exists as a nation-state. It has been replaced by disparate entities and precarious arrangements – to the detriment of the Syrian population. The ‘Divided States of Syria’ are in large part the result of the survival strategy of the regime, aided by the futile pursuit of a ‘political solution’ by the international community. As the tragedy deepens, the recovery of Syria becomes more difficult, and the implications for regional stability increase in gravity. The West – the United States in particular – has abstained from forceful engagement. Yet, the price to pay today may in retrospect pale in light of the political, strategic and moral catastrophes that the current reserved approach is enabling.
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| 3 |
ID:
134234
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On a single day in July, when ambient tensions escalated, Palestinian militants fired more than 180 rockets into Israel, and the Israelis launched airstrikes against towns throughout the Gaza Strip. Dozens of Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. The order of daily urban life was disrupted, yet again, by warfare.
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| 4 |
ID:
134582
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The drift and incoherence of U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration has not gone unnoticed in the Arab world and the Middle East, especially among America's Arab Gulf allies. Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman could have been channeling Gulf elites when he said: “Americans no longer command the ability to shape trends in the Middle East. Almost no one expects us to do so.”1 The United States and its strategic allies in the Gulf have increasingly divergent visions of how regional politics should operate. The “marriage” between Washington and the Gulf has been long and beneficial to both sides, though not without its ups and downs. Neither side really wants a divorce, but Gulf elites increasingly worry that this episode of tensions is qualitatively different from those that came before. They fear that, this time, Washington not only disagrees with their view of the region, it does not care about their opinions, because America's strategic commitment to the Gulf, and the Middle East more generally, is no longer solid. For them, the “pivot to Asia” looks increasingly like a retreat from the Middle East. The renewed talk in American policy circles about “energy independence,” this time with more credible evidence to back it up, just adds to Gulf worries that Washington has downgraded the Gulf region and that the pivot is really a retreat.
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| 5 |
ID:
134586
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 2002 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a major intelligence failure, distorted by a pervasive policy climate that assumed that Iraq did indeed have active WMD programs, including nuclear weapons. What has remained unknown, however, is that intelligence assessments on Iran's nuclear program displayed the same systemic distortions that led to the Iraq WMD fiasco. As was the case in the errant Iraq estimate of 2003, two NIEs — in 2001 and 2005 — effectively reversed the burden of proof and reached the conclusion that Iran had been carrying out a covert nuclear weapons program in the absence of hard, verifiable evidence.
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| 6 |
ID:
134580
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Dr. Chomsky is [emeritus] Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983). The following interview was conducted by Anne Joyce, editor of Middle East Policy, on October 18, 1984 (when the title of this publication was American-Arab Affairs).
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| 7 |
ID:
134273
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Does the Arab Spring provide a new opening for Western cooperation with the Middle East? The Arab Spring involved a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests in the Arab world, starting on 18 December 2010, which forced rulers, at least partially, from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Egypt, however, has since seen a reactionary movement re-establishing military power to the pre-revolutionary state. Additional uprisings occurred also in Bahrain and Syria, the latter escalating into full-scale civil war. A number of other countries have also seen serious protests, ranging from Algeria, Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait to Morocco. It is particularly noteworthy that the fallout from the war in Libya has had side effects for a simmering rebellion in Mali, where it appears that al-Qaeda is establishing itself in the north of the country. The European Union (EU) has been concerned about such an eventuality in the Sahel for some time. While some observers have drawn comparisons between the Arab Spring and the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the precise endpoint and the direction of the Arab Spring revolutions remain to be identified. In short, the Arab world currently faces a period of social protest and change, which challenges our understanding of politics in the region and established assumptions about Western foreign policy towards this region.
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| 8 |
ID:
134533
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The nuclear negotiations between Iran and EU3+3 have provided the grounds for establishing direct talks between Iran and the United States, subsequently creating a positive prospect for solving the Iranian nuclear standoff after a decade of negotiations. The effect of economic sanctions and political change in Iran have made it possible to bring an important foreign policy issue into domestic politics discourses. The fact that the nuclear negotiations put Iran in a position comparable to the other world powers strengthened a sense of movement towards a win-win situation among Iranian political forces. All of this created a relative political consensus among Iran’s ruling elites regarding the need to initiate direct talks with the United States in order to solve the Iranian nuclear standoff. The nuclear programme is also linked with the regional equation, the result of which has been the emergence of a new kind pragmatism in the conduct of Iranian regional policy in hope of revising Iran’s place in US Middle East policy.
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| 9 |
ID:
134754
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There are many who doubt that the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will lead to a solution, in spite of US secretary of state John Kerry’s efforts and the presumed commitment to peace of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. What has characterized the intractability of the conflict in the past, including the future of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, Israel’s national security concerns, and, in particular, the psychological dimension behind these conflicting issues, still remain in play. That intractability has been further aggravated by a faulty framework for the 2014 negotiations, the absence of leadership, the continued public recrimination of each side toward the other, mutual distrust, and the lack of commitment to reach an agreement that of necessity requires mutually painful concessions. This essay proposes a number of mechanisms and corrective measures that could appreciably enhance the prospect of reaching a peace agreement. Undergirding these proposals is the need for the United States to put its foot down and warn both the Israelis and Palestinians that, unless they negotiate in earnest based on Kerry’s proposed framework, there will be serious consequences resulting from a reassessment of its bilateral relations with both parties.
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| 10 |
ID:
136630
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In developing U.S. intervention policy in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, and most recently Syria, the 1992 to 1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina1 has repeatedly been used as an analogy. For example, John Shattuck, a member of the negotiating team at the Dayton peace talks that ended the war, wrote in September 2013 that for Syria “the best analogy is Bosnia…Dayton was a major achievement of diplomacy backed by force…A negotiated solution to the Syria crisis is possible, but only if diplomacy is backed by force.”2 Many other analysts and policymakers with experience in the Bosnian conflict—such as Nicholas Burns, the State Department spokesman at the time; Christopher Hill, a member of Richard Holbrooke's negotiating team; and Samantha Power, who began her career as a journalist in Bosnia—also invoked the Bosnian war to urge greater U.S. involvement in Syria.3 Although the rise of ISIS has significantly altered the conflict over the last year, echoes of the Bosnian conflict remain in Syria: the conflict is a multiparty ethnic civil war, fueled by outside powers, in a region of critical interest to the United States.
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| 11 |
ID:
134231
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| Summary/Abstract |
A top diplomat from one of America's most dependable Middle Eastern allies said to me in July of this year, "but you no longer know how to act like one."
He was reflecting on America's position in the world almost halfway into President Barack Obama's second term. Fresh in his mind was the extraordinary string of errors (schizophrenic Egypt policy, bipolar Syria policy), missteps (zero Libya post-intervention strategy, alienation of allies in the Middle East and elsewhere), scandals (spying on Americans, spying on friends), halfway measures (pinprick sanctions against Russia, lecture series to Central Americans on the border crisis), unfulfilled promises (Cairo speech, pivot to Asia), and outright policy failures (the double-down then get-out approach in Afghanistan, the shortsighted Iraq exit strategy).
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| 12 |
ID:
134903
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article challenges the standard narrative of interwar U.S. involvement in the Middle East by arguing that the United States did have both interests in and a policy concerning Iraq during that time. Despite being non-belligerents with the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and non-members of the League of Nations thereafter, the U.S. government consistently advanced the claim that the American contribution to the Allied victory entitled it to equal political and economic opportunities in the Middle East and to a voice in postwar Middle Eastern affairs. U.S. officials vigilantly intervened in the region throughout the period to ensure not only American access to petroleum resources, but also, as is shown in Iraq, to insist on political relations unmediated by Great Britain. British acceptance of this implies that the foundations had thereby been laid for an independent American role in the Middle East, preceding the later thresholds usually cited by historians. The open door policy the U.S. government set out in the correspondence with Britain in 1920–21 represents a full and cogent policy on Iraq that was advanced throughout the interwar period to protect American interests and standing in that country.
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